Monthly Archives: February 2021
today the toddlers begin to protect each other
To most this will be just a reminder post that many will greet with an expressive “Duh”, but it still needs some repetition to once again get the information to those in the back. Perhaps this time they will pay attention.
So, at the risk of being redundant, allow me to repeat myself again.
Hillary Clinton ended her role as Secretary of State in 2013, living the next two years as a private citizen in a post-public office role and then, as a private citizen, running for president.
During the year before she left public service, members of Ansar al-Sharia attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi in Libya resulting in the deaths of the ambassador and the U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer.
They then began a mortar attack against a CIA annex killing two CIA contractors and wounding ten others.
Then, in the aftermath, the United States increased security at all diplomatic and military facilities and began investigating the attack which produced 33 hearings over 853 days (3.33 years) with Hillary Clinton sitting for an eleven-hour session of questioning by the House which, at the end, concluded that she had not acted improperly.
Six of the investigating committees that found that she nor any other high-ranking Obama administration officials had acted improperly were run by Republicans.
Their conclusions, therefore, were obviously not petty partisanship.
Clinton testified before two congressional foreign affairs committees defending herself while accepting responsibility for her actions (“The Buck Stops Here”) in response to the incident. She also made it clear, and the reports accepted it, that she had had no direct role in specific discussions before the attack regarding existing consulate security, the budget for which the very Republicans questioning what they considered weak security had been the ones who had reduced it.
She also uttered the famous quote which her opposition mis-used, morphing it into what supported their predetermined judgment, purposely and selectively applying parts or all of it to things to which it really do not apply as if it were a Bible verse, and to paint Hillary as some heartless harridan so they could avoid dealing with those pesky facts.
She was stating the obvious and showing the proceeding to be the sham it was, when Congressional Republicans questioned her about whether or not the administration had issued inaccurate “talking points” after the attack, Clinton, in making it clear that why the attack happened, something that was clear from the identity of those who engaged in it was less important than what should be done about it, had responded,
“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.”
In November 2014, the House Intelligence Committee issued a report that concluded there had been no wrongdoing in the administration’s response to the attack.
However, each such finding of no impropriety would just signal the formation of yet another “investigation”.
This House Select Committee on Benghazi was created in May 2014, two years after the attack and one after Clinton had become a private citizen, and it conducted a two-year investigation related to the 2012 attack. Her eleven hour long hearing session was in 2015, three years after Benghazi and two years after Hillary had become a private citizen, no longer holding her former or any government position.
Again, nothing was found against her as the final report that came out in 2016, four years after the attack and three after she had become a private citizen, and, although to validate all the wasted time and money the Republican may have offered some new details about Inhibition tadalafil 100mg of PDE-5 in different parts of the world up to this time. Kamagra is used for the treatment of any kind of sexual problem. deeprootsmag.org order generic cialis has greatly benefited millions of people travel miles to come here in Miami to enjoy fish Miami Beach. Jaclyn Cole Adkins, His Excellency Cyrille Oguin, Ambassador to cialis tablets uk the United States from the Republic of Benin; and Ms. That is why; the medicine of lower cost has come to us that is buy cialis deeprootsmag.org. the attack, it, once again, found no new evidence of culpability on the part of Hillary Clinton.
When she threw her hat into the presidential candidate ring, three years after becoming a private citizen and two years after the final report on Benghazi that came out and, as with the previous ones, exonerated her, the Republican Party began to bring up Benghazi as if the multiple hearings and reports had concluded she had been guilty of something when they had not.
The chant, often encouraged by her 2016 opponent at rallies, often in toning it or joining in himself, was the now famous “Lock Her Up” for non-existent crimes not committed before or after she became a private citizen.
Apparently in this case, Republicans see no statute of limitations to going after the opposition even if she has been found innocent of any charge multiple times and has not held public ffice in years.
When it comes to the attack on the Capitol Building, which happened while Trump was still in office, unlike their need to have multiple hearings on Hillary, House Republicans have been opposing a second impeachment hearing from the moment the idea was expressed, and did so within a week of the event.
In the Republican concept of time, the four years between Benghazi and the final Republican investigation is a much shorter period time than the Republicans’ seven days.
Cramming the process to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg into a week was deemed best for the country, but having Trump answer for his part in the January 6 insurrection and the deaths and injuries is just too quick and divisive,
Of course, now that a few weeks have passed, it has been too long between the event and dealing with it, so just let it slide for the sake of unity.
The GOP standard school shooting procedure
The major motivation for opposing an impeachment trial is that Democrats should have just let Trump leave office on Jan. 20 quietly, ignoring that he bears some responsibility for what happened at the exciting DC rally to which he called his supporters.
“Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”,
and then directed them to take their anger out on the Representatives and Senators accepting the electoral college vote in the Capitol.
Unlike with Hillary, the GOP claims that impeaching Trump is only for political purposes. After all, Trump should have been allowed to peacefully transfer power after the insurrection as impeachment was not necessary and any resulting divisiveness and would tear the country apart.
The many Benghazi hearings began when Hillary Clinton expressed a desire to run for president in 2016, and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican majority leader in the House at the time, made it clear why these pristinely motivated hearings were important for the American people stating,
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee, what are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping, why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened.”
But just as with deficits where the Republican defend theirs as necessary for betterment of the people, the fictitious profligacy of the Democrats is unacceptable.
And now the impeachment begins.
Will legal standards apply to all?
If the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes he committed before he was caught for committing them, can’t any perpetrator use the President Precedent and get off simply by stating he was not apprehended until after he had committed a crime , perhaps in some other place, so it should just be forgiven?
been here for both
question
At the beginning of my high school English classes I would project a quote from some author on my board, and, while the students copied it down, would explain the quote, its source, and, where it seemed obvious, ask the class questions about certain quotes and authors that acted like a mini-review of information they had received in previous years, but needed to remember long past then, things like author, era, some philosophical idea, and applicable literary terms.
This allowed for a constant painless almost covert review, not just some last minute, cram sessions before major tests.
I worked in a school district that really got into the testing frenzy back in the George W. Bush days. Not only did students take the state’s annual standardized tests, a process that consumed a week of class time that could have been used for learning, and a series of practice tests, but three times a year they took up a similar amount of time for a district test called “Benchmark Tests” whose purpose was to measure the growth in student achievement.
The expected result was that students would genuinely not do well on the first benchmark test of the year – how could they do well when being tested on information they had yet to learn or have the occasion to review – showing learning needed to take place, with the last test showing they had learned.
It made whatever methodology those outside the classroom with no teaching experience, or very little in years long past, demanded be followed because it sounded good to them.
As a fledgling altar boy in the old days, I memorized the complete Latin script for the Catholic Mass, the prayers, the statement and response moments between priest and altar boy which meant I had to learn the priest’s lines to respond on cue, the things only the altar boy said, and those said by both. I could recite it in my sleep. When I went into the sacristy for my formal interview with the priest in charge of the altar boys expecting we would just run the script so he would know that part was taken care of and all that was left was learning the liturgical choreography, he began at the “Suscipiat” somewhere in the middle and I was lost and thought my chances over.
He laughed and said he did it to see how I would react, he joked a lot, and assured me that if I knew the mass as we ran through it, we would eventually get to that point, and he would listen.
Apparently, there was more to that little joke as it counted for some prospective altar boys who stumbled as I did and who, because of that, didn’t make the cut. In his defense, although not objective, it did turn away some real jerks, and he knew who the jerks were because the parish had an elementary schools.
It was the same test, but applied differently. I was shown to be unflappable as I sat quietly hoping the priest would continue, apparently assumed to be stoically waiting for his next move, while for those others it was used as a sign of their unworthiness.
After administering the “BenchmarkTest”for a couple of years, I noticed that the questions were design to follow the curriculum backward. The first test was on things the students would not get to until the second half of the second semester, so obviously they would not do well, but as the tests moved on, they slowly became more in line with the target dates by which students were to learn certain things, so student achievement could be shown to have taken place and the methodology effective.
In the early frenzied days of testing, a whole industry grew based on methodologies and test preparation. It produced “consultants” on every possible topic who had the antidote to every problem, but came at a huge price, and totally, by coincidence, curriculum, projected learning dates, and classroom approaches and expectations slowly began to align to the test and not the test to the curriculum.
One method that too obviously showed the test makers controlled what kids would learn was the scripted curriculum approach where all the teachers teaching the same subject in any school in a particular district had a script to follow where anything they were to deal with in that class was spelled out along with how the teachers were to present the information with no room for spontaneity, or even dealing with something the kids got interested in or needed help with the kids were interested in or needed more help with. This way when the test arrived at the end of the year everyone had covered what would be on it, and nothing beyond that. It was all subject to the script, with the idea seeming to be that if you can read a script, you can teach.
With curriculum based on what testing companies claimed it should be, districts began to align more to the tests and found ways to manipulate results for appearance.
Along with the scheduled goals and objectives I was to have covered during the first quarter of one school year prior to the first benchmark test, I used my daily quote to review information the kids should already have had and made sure that my daily quotes were arranged so we covered some authors they would not cover in detail until late in second semester. When we ran into them later, they would be familiar to my students, but as for now, “always leave them wanting more”.
One such example would be the quote from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that allowed us to review certain poetic terms the students should have learned, and we would be referring to often, whetting their whistles for when we got to him later.
Since teachers do not get to see the questions in the test booklet, the only opportunity to see any questions at all was when we made the occasional obligatory walk up and down the aisles while proctoring an exam and glanced over the shoulders of students as we silently passed by their desks. So, I was surprised to see a question or two based on Whitman on that year’s first Benchmark Test especially as the curriculum I followed and the goals, objectives, and projected learn-by dates had long been established by the district, and it was the district that designed the Benchmark Test.
The school district was including questions they knew the students could not answer with anything beyond luck and a wild guess.
When the test scores came in, my students’ results skewed what was expected, perhaps hoped for. While others in their grade level throughout the district had done as expected, satisfactory recall of previous knowledge with none of what they had yet to cover, couched as below expectations, my students not only did well in the former area, but also in the latter where they were supposed to have looked bad. They showed they knew stuff and then some. As a result, they did not contribute statistically to the achievement growth chart as the necessary percentage increases of the other students needed a huge and easy rise to get to where my students began and from where they continued to move on.
The other classes had done as expected, and their initial scores compared to the final ones would show how much they had learned, so that whatever the preferred, mandatory methodology was, it was the best one.
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I continued to use my exercise which was based mainly on review of past knowledge onto which new information can be added.
Obviously, there was curriculum manipulation that was of no real benefit to the students unless student achievement was based on how well they followed the limits of test preparation.
For this reason, I have a problem with everyone with an opinion and an outlet to voice it, not teachers in the classroom, but the “experts”, the politicians, the talking heads of theory, who advocates for opening schools no matter what because students are falling behind.
Behind what?
When schools finally do open safely, the curriculum will morph either to become more inclusive, like bringing back Civics, reflecting new realities, or, ignoring the passage of time and the growth of the students, holds everyone to a binding curriculum at the point where things stopped.
In college we had a series of anti-war bomb threats called into the college and we would evacuate. After a while, the administration instituted the policy that when such a threat was called in, time would freeze so that we would return to the class we had been in at the time with the rest of the day’s schedule continuing on from the new start point.
After a while, and a very short one at that, the bomb threats ended. Apparently the “bomber” had a job he needed to get into after class.
No one “fell behind” as we simply continued on. Some end of the day professors, I had one, would modify what they had intended to cover on a bomb threat day so those who had them could get to their jobs, and they would modify their material for the next day to include what was omitted the day before.
There was an information delivery system adjustment as needed without any loss.
These kids now might be as bored as I am in this pandemic and miss their social contacts and interactions as much as I, but as far as falling behind, with every kid in the same position, who are they all falling behind?
Where is it part of the highly touted natural law that kids are supposed to learn the intricacies of math beyond Algebra II at a certain age in relation to other types of math, so each high school year gets one type year after year. or they have to learn addition and subtraction in one grade and multiplication and division in another. Certainly, there are creative ways to get all this information into kids’ heads so they aren’t behind the all-powerful Whatever it is they are behind.
I had been assigned a middle school Special Education class, and math was among the subjects I taught which, according to the curriculum, meant constantly repeating the four basic functions a million different ways. It became clear almost immediately that the students knew them pretty well already, so to avoid just boring them with useless repetition, I introduced Algebra as a math game that actually used those four functions to accomplish something, and on a dare my class eventually took on the school math club and won.
Were my students in my anecdotes ahead or behind, and if either, ahead or behind what. If the answer is it depends on curriculum, then my Special Education kids would have been held back by following the curriculum as established.
My theory?
For one whole year, students have not had to take standardized tests based on very often arbitrarily established curriculum and benchmarks established by the testing companies who make their money off testing but have not been doing so.
If their progress has not been measurable because such tests cannot be administered during the pandemic, what is the benchmark being applied to determine that the students are falling behind?
Making a prediction here.
When schools reopen there will be a test to measure how far behind students fell. The testing companies will determine what each child should have learned at each grade level and will test it in standardized form designed by them, paid for, of course, by school districts.
This will result in a manufactured panic, as no one really knows how to do these measurements as even within one year, things have changed and that means adapting education to the post pandemic world, and in attempting not to look bad, and ignoring that no one living today has had to deal with these conditions so no one realistically expects omniscience on the part of anyone, for the sake of a good image school boards will hand it all over to self-proclaimed experts who, having success in one area assume it guarantees success in all and to the testing companies who will find more tests will be needed to measure the progress being made and the closing of the gap between two unknowns. The districts will ignore any beneficial input from teachers about this past year’s school experience in favor of the newly designed methodologies from the minds of those with as much experience with pandemics and their effects on people as the rest of us, but who somehow know more about how it affects students and learning than the teachers and on campus administrators who dealt with the kids physically and remotely throughout it.
Test results will be used to design curriculum, and the curriculum will be adjusted to align to the ever-changing, goal post moving tests.
Which brings me back to my original concern: what is it that the kids have fallen behind, and who was it who determined that was the benchmark.
Kids are as resilient as we let them be. They will continue to learn when school reopens, and they will re-bond like kids do at summer camp with kids they only see once a year for a week.
Equivalent?
Again
If one detail, no matter how small, is similar to one detail in a complicated, otherwise dissimilar thing, then if we both own a car, with mine being a 2013 Volkswagen Beetle, it should be accepted that, ignoring all else, since we both own a car, a major detail, your car, too, is a 2013 Volkswagen Beetle, and you need to just move on if you want to tell me otherwise
the lesson
lasers are useful
Stevie isn’t happy today
Trump is no longer president and Stephen Miller is not at all happy.
His legacy, after all is being erased.
Muslim Bans, Anti-Trans policies, and anti-immigrant abuse just were not a good fit for the rest of us, well the majority of us anyway.
Stephen Miller is all verklempt that President Joe Biden’s is dismantling parts of former President Donald Trump’s legacy even though the parts he is undoing brings us closer to our humanity and further from the Lizard People.
“President Biden has already issued an astonishing number executive orders and actions in his first period of days, over 40, going around Congress, go around the legislature to unilaterally implement his own policy. Even when that policy is flatly contradicted by duly enacted federal law.”
Not being a fan of minorities and foreigners not from Europe, Miller opposes any action Biden took to undo Trump’s decision that Multi-cultural sensitivity training, so obviously needed now in areas like law enforcement, is not to be held by any department in the federal government because he believes that it is “race-based discrimination that’s flatly illegal.”
“Again and again and again, we’ve seen executive actions that aren’t just bad policy, but aren’t lawful. The fundamental question is this. What’s the point of having a Congress, a House, a Senate, committees going through detailed deliberations to pass federal laws where you debate every sentence, every comma, every paragraph if a president can come in and just wipe it all away and decide for himself what the law is?”
“Once a law is passed, once a law is enacted, a future president can’t come in and delete whole or entire — whole portions or very large portions or any portion of that law! If that was the case then what is the point? What is the point of Having a diminished virility or erectile dysfunction can be easily solved with viagra australia price the use of Kamagra tablets. In order to learn more about the amazing berry and Where To Buy Acai, check outthe Acai Checklist. discount viagra Kamagra – An Affordable Brand for ED Cure Ajanta Pharmacy developed this medication as a generic version of the genuine tadalafil levitra drug as contained of sildenafil citrate. Peruvian cialis price women take Maca, a tuberous plant related to the use of Kamagra safely. spending years debating, deliberating, discussing, trading, reconciling — everything that goes into the legislative process?”
Back in April 2020, Stephen Miller had told White House supporters that the president’s latest executive order that restricted certain categories of immigrants from entering the United States for 60 days, which, although Trump had said that he was going to suspend all immigration during the pandemic, had several exemptions, would usher in the kind of broader long-term changes to American society he had advocated for for years.
Miller’s explanation of why that executive order about immigration would change the United States was as clear as he has always been,
“As a numerical proposition, when you suspend the entry of a new immigrant from abroad, you’re also reducing immigration further because the chains of follow-on migration that are disrupted. So the benefit to American workers compounds with time.”
That was, apparently, a perfect executive order, mainly because it supported his ideology, just as were the ones on family separation, moving money around to pay for the Wall, undoing DACA, and reducing the refugee cap.
After the elections and without all that business where you have “a Congress, a House, a Senate, committees going through detailed deliberations to pass federal laws where you debate every sentence, every comma, every paragraph”, Miller was in on making it easier to deny visas to immigrants, lengthen the citizenship test, and appoint new members to an immigration policy board which would make it harder for President Biden to reverse any of these obviously political actions.
This resulted in the citizenship test increasing from 100 to 128 questions about American history and politics, federal officials being given more discretion in approving an immigration application, and updates to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Policy Manual all between election day and the day that the new president with an obvious difference of opinion on immigration than his was to be sworn in.
Obviously to Mr. Miller this does not qualify as
“going around Congress, go around the legislature to unilaterally implement his own policy.”