RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Sept. 15 to Sept. 21, 2019
Featured Investigation:
Woke History Is Making Big Inroads
in America's High Schools
Under the banner of “ethnic studies,” growing numbers of high school students across the country are being schooled and prepped for college with lessons that race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege, meant to uphold a system based on “whiteness.”
John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations that the decades-old campus ethnic studies movement is making big inroads in K-12 education – despite stiff resistance in some cases:
- Advocates now believe they are within striking distance of making ethnic studies a graduation prerequisite in high schools across the country.
- Three states – California, Oregon and Vermont – are moving to create statewide templates to make it easier for schools to adopt ethnic studies.
- The trend is alarming and frightening many who find the field one-sided, ideological, and a devaluation of the Western tradition.
- One ethnic studies scholar told Murawski: “We actually prepare our teachers to know that on the first day of class, or in the first week, you may have students who are sobbing.”
- “It’s not ethnic studies if it doesn’t challenge whiteness.”
- Many decry California’s proposed curriculum as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.
- But advocates say the shift to ethnic studies looks inevitable because of the nation’s changing demographics.
A critic retorts that the trend recalls "re-education camps in Vietnam or China. It is indoctrination rather than education.”
The Trump Investigations: Top Articles
Trump Repeatedly Urged Ukraine to Probe Biden's Son, Wall Street Journal
Furor Then: Trump-Russia. Furor Now: Trump-Ukraine, Daily Beast
Russia Penetrated FBI Spying Throughout Obama Years, Yahoo News
New York Prosecutors Subpoena Trump's Taxes, Associated Press
New Support for Yalie's Old Charge vs. Kavanaugh, New York Times
Dems Want Kavanaugh Impeachment After New Charge, Washington Post
NYT Editor's Note Walks Back Report on Kavanaugh Charge, Fox News
NY Times’ Handling of Kavanaugh Story Draws Wide Criticism, Politico
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Qatar-Funded Group Influences K-12 Schools With Big Donations
Daily Caller
A U.S.-based organization funded by Qatar and tasked with furthering the allegedly terror-linked country’s national vision is openly influencing K-12 public school curriculums across America. The Washington-based Qatar Foundation International has disbursed more than $30 million to U.S. public schools to fund Arabic language programs. Schools that accept the grants are required to give access to students, documents show. A legal loophole allows it to avoid registering as a foreign agent, but experts say the group has gone over the line by pushing overt propaganda.
6 Men Tell of Being Sexually Assaulted in the U.S. Military
New York Times
On average, about 10,000 men are sexually assaulted by men in the American military each year, according to Pentagon statistics. Overwhelmingly, the victims are young and low-ranking. Many struggle afterward, are kicked out of the military and have trouble finding their footing in civilian life. For decades, the problem has been marked by silence: the silence of victims too humiliated to report the crime; the silence of authorities unequipped to pursue it; the silence of commanders who believed no problem existed; and the silence of families too ashamed to protest. This article relates the experiences of six whom the Department of Veteran’s Affairs has formally recognized as victims of service-connected sexual assault.
Deadly Fungus, Bacteria Thrive in Nursing Homes
New York Times
Public health authorities fear that nursing homes are becoming breeding grounds for C. auris, a germ so virulent and hard to eradicate that some facilities will not accept patients with it. In New York City, for example, 396 people are known to be infected and another 496 are carrying the germ without showing symptoms. In Chicago, half of patients living on dedicated ventilator floors in the city’s skilled nursing homes are infected with or harboring C. auris on their bodies. These patients often cycle back and forth between nursing homes and public hospitals, which can spread the problem. Public health experts say that nursing homes and long-term hospitals are a dangerously weak link in the health care system. They are often understaffed and ill-equipped to enforce rigorous infection control yet continually cycle afflicted patients into hospitals and back again.
Millions of X-Rays, Med Data Viewable Online
ProPublica/Bayerischer Rundfunk
Medical images and health data belonging to millions of Americans, including X-rays, MRIs and CT scans, are sitting unprotected on the internet and available to anyone with basic computer expertise. The records cover more than 5 million patients in the U.S. and millions more around the world. In some cases, a snoop could use free software programs, or just a typical web browser, to view the images and private data. This article says reporters “identified 187 servers — computers that are used to store and retrieve medical data — in the U.S. that were unprotected by passwords or basic security precautions. The computer systems, from Florida to California, are used in doctors’ offices, medical-imaging centers and mobile X-ray services.”
Is Ocean Cleanup Botching the Science of Plastic Pollution?
Wired
Concerns that the plastic bag you use today be choking fish in the middle of the ocean next year appear to be misplaced. A new study – although probably not the final word on the subject – reports that plastics ejected at the coast tend to stick to the coast. This suggests that cleanup efforts should focus on those areas. After all, biodiversity is especially high around the coasts: Think of bustling reefs. The findings raise doubts about the massive efforts of an outfit called Ocean Cleanup, which is focusing its efforts on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the middle of the ocean.
Repo Men Have Built a Private Surveillance System
Vice News
The Repo Man is turning into Big Brother thanks to a new tool, the Digital Recognition Network. It’s a private surveillance system crowdsourced by hundreds of repo men. They've installed cameras that passively scan, capture, and upload to the network's database the license plates of every car they drive by. The coast-to-coast network is available to people and companies focused on tracking and locating people or vehicles. Highly sensitive information about car owners can be made available to anyone who has access to the tool.
War on Vaping Will Lead More People to Cigarettes
City Journal
The war on nicotine vaping seems to spew ever more smoke than fire. The latest example: public health officials, politicians, and media reacting to a recent outbreak of respiratory illness among vapers of marijuana by failing to warn the public in a clear manner. Instead of explaining the specific danger from vaping a certain kind of THC-infused oil, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told the public to stop using any kind of electronic cigarette. In City Journal, science writer John Tierney says that's like responding to an outbreak of food poisoning by telling people to stop eating.
An Eagle Scout's Deadly Fentanyl Empire
Associated Press
Aaron Shamo was a clean-cut Eagle Scout from Salt Lake City who dropped out of college but became a millionaire before his 30th birthday. The internet helped drive his success, but he was no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Instead, he made his money deepening the country’s opioid crisis by selling the cheap and dangerous drug fentanyl as oxycodone. At his recent trial resulting in his conviction, prosecutors detailed how white powder up to 100 times stronger than morphine was ordered online from China; shaped into perfect-looking replicas of oxycodone tablets in a press that thumped in Shamo’s basement; and resold online to opioid abusers who paid with their lives.
How NASA Missed Asteroid Headed for Earth
BuzzFeed
That was close! In late July an asteroid hurtled just 40,400 miles over Earth – five times closer than the moon – became the largest space rock to come so close in a century. But perhaps more alarming than the flyby itself is how much it caught NASA by surprise. The asteroid was the size of a football field, but still our genius scientists and their fancy toys didn’t spot it until about 24 hours before its relatively narrow miss of everyone’s favorite planet. If it had entered and disrupted in Earth’s atmosphere over land, the blast wave could have created localized devastation to an area roughly 50 miles across. This may energize Congress to spend $40 million to design a dedicated surveillance satellite equipped with an infrared telescope to spot incoming asteroids without facing the hassles of weather, the moon, or peering through the obscuring atmosphere like telescopes on the ground.
