RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
November 22 to November 28, 2020 Since Black Lives Matter protests erupted this year, K-12 schools nationwide have urgently adopted "anti-racist" teaching explicitly aimed at dismantling white supremacy in American society, John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations. - The trend is coast to coast, in schools both public and private, privileged or not.
- The president of a school board on Philadelphia's affluent Main Line declared to families: "We need to eradicate white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in all of our institutions."
- Educators at the prestigious Brentwood College School in Los Angeles are introducing critical race theory, assigning readings from Ibram X. Kendi, who contends race-neutral policies reinforce the "White ethnostate."
- An associate superintendent in Buffalo, N.Y., advocates an "emancipation pedagogy" that empowers black pupils by "problematizing the Eurocentric perspective."
- The rapid and radical changes have triggered a backlash among parents who find the anti-racist message to be anti-white and anti-American, and those who say it's historically inaccurate, inflammatory and divisive.
- Among the alarmed parents is Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, who on her podcast said she's pulling her three kids from their New York City schools. "It's out of control, on so many levels. They have gone off the deep end."
How about a polling-focused sequel to statistician Nate Silver's 2012 bestseller "The Signal and the Noise" - called "The Noise and Still More Noise"? That title could just about sum up pollsters' Election 2020 debacle, unpacked by Mark Hemingway for RealClearInvestigations. It's a cavalcade of miscalculation filled with enough murky factors for a whodunit - several of whom might have to share the nickname Lefty. And unfortunately for American democracy, there's no tidy answer to the mystery of what's become of the public-opinion business. Hemingway reports: - The polls understated the percentage of the Republican vote in 48 of 50 states, and 15 of the 16 Senate races.
- Surveys had Joe Biden besting President Trump by double digits or more, not the fewer than four percentage points of the final tally.
- This is a continuation of polling errors in the last four election cycles since 2012, which have one thing in common: overstated support for Democratic candidates.
- Most state polls in 2020 were unable to address the problem by weighting respondents by education level, to better represent voters without college degrees.
- Critics flag a bias issue: Pollsters are most often affiliated with either left-leaning media outlets or universities or both.
- One critic, Jim Lee of Susquehanna Polling, says misleading pollsters should be professionally sanctioned.
- The "shy Trump voter" and others elusive to pollsters might have to be fleshed out by other means -- say, via quickie text messages.
- What seems clear is that phone polling is passé. Response rates have declined from 36% in 1997 to just 6% in 2018.
- And bad polling costs both sides a lot of money - spent on races that seem close but aren't really.
Trump-Russia/2020 Election News Trump Pardons Flynn USA Today
Big Donors Spent Heavily on Failed Election Efforts Wall Street Journal
A Dozen Allegations of Irregularities in 2020 Vote Just the News
Whatever Happened to the Deepfake Threat to the Election? Wired Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Secret Amazon Files: Spying on Labor, Green Groups
Vice
A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company's obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon's "peak season" between Black Friday and Christmas. They also indicate, and an Amazon spokesperson confirmed, that Amazon has hired Pinkerton operatives - from the detective agency known for its union-busting activities - to gather intelligence on warehouse workers. This article also reports that some managers receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event, and a description of what happened, such as a "strike" or "the distribution of leaflets." Internal emails and other documents reveal that Amazon intelligence analysts keep close tabs on how many warehouse workers attend union meetings; and specific worker dissatisfactions with warehouse conditions, such as excessive workloads. When Cops and Gun Rights Clash, Cops Win
Reuters
The broad gun ownership Americans enjoy can lead to big problems when they encounter the police. Following up on a previous Reuters article detailing how the concept of "qualified immunity" protects officers accused of using excessive force, this piece reports that hundreds of appellate court cases "show that judges granted immunity to cops more often when they used force against a person with a gun - in 55% of cases, compared to 45% when the person was unarmed." This has led some gun rights groups, which typically support police, to ally themselves with a broad coalition spanning the political spectrum, including gun control advocates, in seeking to rein in some protections now afforded to officers. Untouchables: The Violence of Chicago Cops
Rolling Stone
There are many reasons why Chicago is $36 billion in the red and owes more per citizen, roughly $40,000 apiece, than any metropolis save New York. This article focuses on one of them: the ruinous costs of police misconduct against its people. Chicagoans pay moremper capita to the victims of cop violence - whose suffering is vividly portrayed in this piece - than the residents of any U.S. city. Between 2010 and 2017, the city issued more than $700 million in "police brutality bonds," as civic watchdogs call them. Chicago reportedly leaned on entities like Goldman Sachs to raise the money. But because the city's credit rating is clsoe to junk, it had to agree to punishing terms. Accordingly, the city will shell out $800 million simply to service the debt on that loan. And who gets the tab for the $1.5 billion? The taxpayers - specifically, the poor ones. 'Burn It Down': Deconstructing Justice in Seattle
City Journal
Protests and riots have dominated headlines, but beneath the surface, activists are launching an unprecedented campaign to overthrow the traditional legal system and replace it with a new model based on a radical conception of social justice. This article focuses on Seattle where, it reports, this campaign may be most advanced. Activists there have crafted a narrative about police brutality, mass incarceration, and punitive justice that leads to a natural sequence of solutions: "abolish the police," "divest from prisons," and "defund the courts." Over the past three decades, the city's radical-progressives have seized control of municipal government - with the notable exception of the criminal-justice system, which they see as the final obstacle to total control. If they can dismantle it, activists believe, they can bring about their transformation of society. Publishing Staffers Up in Arms Over New Jordan Peterson Book
Vice
Censorship is on the rise as younger woke employees in the media are demanding their companies refuse to publish views they find distasteful. This article reports on an emotional town hall meeting at which several Penguin Random House Canada employees confronted management about the company's decision to publish a new book by controversial, bestselling Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson; dozens more have filed anonymous complaints. It quotes employees who claim that Peterson - who has risen to fame through videos, speeches and books challenging political correctness while praising the Bible - is "an icon of hate speech and transphobia and … white supremacy." In a separate column for RealClearPolitics, J. Peder Zane reports on similar censorship efforts at the New York Times, Spotify and other companies. Who Really Runs the Drudge Report?
Tablet
Clickbait headlines like the one on this item helped make the Drudge Report one of the most popular sites on the Web and its wizard behind the cyber-curtain, Matt Drudge, a force in American politics and culture. This article quotes a range of people who suspect Drudge no longer runs his site. The evidence: Its politics appear to have shifted from right-leaning to center-left while it has slacked off on the manic-level of posting - it once posted 40 to 50 items in a five-hour period - that addicted millions to the site. Traffic has reportedly lagged as much as 45%. In the glory days even a midpage Drudge link could pull a million views; the number is now down to the high tens of thousands. No one who spoke with Tablet really knows why the once-mighty Drudge Report has changed so much, but almost everyone interviewed speculates that its founder had sold control, perhaps to a liberal billionaire. Sounds like a great story for the old Drudge Report. Coronavirus Investigations The Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine New York Times
The AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine Data Isn't Up to Snuff Wired
mRNA: Once-Dismissed Tech Behind the Vaccines STAT, Globe
Covid's Cassandra: The Complicated Rise of Eric Feigl-Ding Undark
Spain: Mortuary Workers Endure the Daily March of Death AP
Inside the Great NBA Bubble Experiment GQ |
