RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
June 9 to June 15, 2024 The "No Excuses" approach to education – which sees discipline as a key to learning – has produced strong academic results at charter schools across the country, especially in high-poverty, majority-minority schools. But, Vince Bielski reports for RealClearInvestigations, the approach has been castigated by progressive educators who claim it singles out children of color for stern discipline. The term “No Excuses” was coined in the 1990s as a plea for educators to stop using excuses such as poverty and broken homes for the turmoil in urban schools that made learning impossible. There are now an estimated 1,000 high-performing urban charters that run on the No Excuses model. At the Ohio charter Bielski visited – Columbus Collegiate Academy Main – the first three days of school are devoted to “culture camp,” during which students learn the rules of behavior, such as keeping their eyes on the teacher and a pencil at the ready, and why those rules are key to meeting the high academic standards. Lessons are tightly scripted to the clock to squeeze in as much learning as possible. Teachers, rather than students, move through the shiny, clean hallways from classroom to classroom during the day because it takes less time and creates less commotion. Columbus Main and its two sister schools outperformed the public schools in their neighborhood on state tests by at least 20 percentage points, an enormous gap. The slogan No Excuses has become so controversial that many charters avoid it, even while continuing its practices. Other charter networks, like Achievement First, have completely abandoned the No Excuses practices and joined the "anti-racism" crusade, only to see their performance plummet. After Julie Kelly revealed last month that that the FBI was authorized to use deadly force while searching for classified documents at Donald Trump's Florida estate in August, 2022 top Department of Justice officials said they were simply following standard procedure. But, Kelly reports for RealClearInvestigations, the search and many other aspects of documents case against Trump has brought law enforcement into uncharted legal waters. Trump is the first former president, and first full-time protectee of the Secret Service, whose home was raided by law enforcement. Trump, who has asserted that his presential authority empowered him to retain and declassify documents, got a surprise nine-hour raid in August, 2022, a few months before announcing his plans to run for re-election. President Biden, who never had authority to declassify or take home classified records as a senator or vice president, received the courtesy of at least two consensual FBI searches as officials searched his properties for classified documents. An IRS whistleblower has testified that Hunter Biden’s lawyers were tipped off that investigators had probable cause to search his Northern Virginia storage unit. A recently discovered Department of Defense memo suggest that the federal government may well have had copies of the documents in Trump’s possession, raising questions about the pressing need for an aggressive raid. Trump’s lawyers argue that the FBI exceeded the scope of the warrant by searching the private suite of former First Lady Melania Trump and the couple’s son, Barron, who was 16 at the time. The Special Counsel has informed the court that files from the search were mishandled. Many critics see the Mar-A-Lago raid as part of a broader effort by the Department of Justice to intimidate its political enemies. They say it is part of a larger pattern that includes the armed morning raid on the home of Trump associate Roger Stone in 2019, the arrest of anti-abortion activist Mark Houck by dozens of armed agents in 2022 a year after he was accused of pushing someone outside a Philadelphia clinic and the DOJ’s aggressive efforts to find and charge to date more than 1,400 people connected to the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Diversity, Equity and Profusion at UNC, RCI
Court Stifles Jeers for Vegas Stadium, RCI
ICE's Vice Is Blowing the Budget, RCI
Opera House Gets Pricey Facelift, RCI
'State of Palestine's' Gifts to Ivy League, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway President Biden's Son Hunter Guilty of 3 Federal Gun Felonies, AP
Reaction: 'True Crimes of Biden Crime Family Untouched', Signal
Biden's Inner Circle Intertwined With His Family's Business, Politico
Fact-Checking Some of Biden's Tall Tales, New York Times
FBI Inquiry Tried to Unmask Employee’s Trump Support, Just the News
DC: No Arrests After Pro-Hamas Protesters Clash With Cops, Free Beacon
Members of Congress Take Lucrative Lobbyist Jobs, Substack
Biden's 'Equity' Rules Snagging His Climate Plans, Washington Free Beacon Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Among the Venezuelans crossing the southern border are members of the transnational criminal gang Tren de Aragua, this article reports. The gang has been tied to many incidents, including: An alleged multistate human trafficking ring forcing immigrant women into prostitution; the mysterious killing of a former police officer in South Florida. Attacks against police officers in New York. The arrest of a drug dealer in Chicago. … The scale of its operations is unknown, but crimes attributed to alleged members of the gang have worried elected officials and some Republican members of Congress have asked the Biden administration “to formally designate the vicious Tren de Aragua as a Transnational Criminal Organization.” This article reports that the criminal group has long terrorized South American countries, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile and Peru. Retired general Óscar Naranjo, a former vice president of Colombia and chief of the Colombian National Police, told CNN that Tren de Aragua is “the most disruptive criminal organization operating nowadays in Latin America, a true challenge for the region.” Every state has some version of the “theory of accountability” which allows a person to be charged for a crime another person committed, if that individual assisted. These kinds of laws, this article reports, can make victims of intimate partner violence particularly vulnerable to prosecution: The Marshall Project and Mother Jones identified nearly 100 people across the country, nearly all of them women, who were convicted of assisting, supporting or failing to stop a crime by their alleged abuser. Some of the women showed clear signs of abuse at the time they were arrested. One had been shot by her abuser weeks before; another was in a neck brace. In some of the cases we reviewed, evidence of an abusive relationship was excluded at trial. In others, lawyers and judges poorly understood the psychological effects of domestic violence and the real dangers victims face. At one woman’s sentencing in 2000, for example, a Michigan judge justified the defendant’s 10- to 30-year prison sentence for assisting her allegedly abusive boyfriend with a string of robberies by saying she had ample opportunity to leave him. But the risk of ending an abusive relationship is high: According to data from the U.S. Department of Justice, of the nearly 5,000 women murdered across the country in 2021, about one-third died at the hands of an intimate partner. Experts say the end of a relationship is the most dangerous time for an abuse victim. The European Union formally legalized both doctor-administered euthanasia and patient-administered assisted suicide for psychological suffering as well as terminal physical illness in 2002. This article reports that cases where people ended their life because of unbearable depression or other mental disorders were initially controversial and rare. According to official annual reports, only four had been recorded by 2010. But they have been steadily increasing since. And over the past five years, they have risen sharply -- from 68 cases in 2019 to 138 in 2023: Those who support assisted dying for psychiatric conditions argue that mental illness can be just as serious as physical illness and that some people do not respond to treatment. That may be true, but its critics say this is evidence of the “slippery slope” that campaigners often cite, and that euthanasia is being normalised as a ‘treatment’ for mental illness rather than a last resort for people who are terminally ill. … Others argue the law does not go far enough – one Dutch campaign group, Coöperatie Laatste Wil, or Last Wish Cooperative, founded in 2013, is pushing for “last will drugs” or suicide kits to be widely available for people who choose to end their lives rather than continue to suffer. This article’s case histories include a 17-year-old girl diagnosed with borderline personality disorder who was allowed to end her life last year and a 40-year-old mother of two suffering from depression who is awaiting final approval to end hers. The Ford Foundation’s long commitment to advancing health and “human welfare” has morphed into significant support for the social justice and protest movement, this article reports. In recent years it has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups connected with people who have called for the destruction of Israel and left-wing outfits whose members stormed the Capitol in Washington in 2023 and occupied the office of the Speaker of the House. This detailed article traces the Ford Foundation’s history from its creation as a “tax dodge” in 1936 by Henry Ford to its radical reinvention beginning in the 1960s: After 2013, the foundation began funding many of the groups that would coalesce around the label “Black Lives Matter,” as well as the violent “antifascist” (Antifa) radicals who would take to the streets. In 2016, for example, the Ford Foundation gave $200,000 to help start up the Southern Vision Alliance (SVA), a creation of the Workers World Party, a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist group founded in 1959. The SVA and its subsidiary, Charlotte Uprising, then went on to perform one of the first illegal teardowns of a historic monument in the United States – in Durham, North Carolina – and would be instrumental in coordinating similar acts of iconoclasm across the country in the years that followed. Companies are using fake online job openings to project an image of growth, keep existing employees motivated, and cultivate a pool of possible future candidates with no intention of hiring, according to research. The practice, this article reports, is commonly known as “ghost posting” and it accounts for 43 percent of online job openings across multiple industries: The phenomenon has caused universal frustration on both the applicant and hiring side. On average, it can take up to eight weeks for a job seeker to receive an offer after submitting an application online, according to job listing site Indeed. The process often includes resume tailoring, lengthy applications, and multiple rounds of interviews. That means applicants are wasting hours trying to get hired by companies that aren’t actually looking. Consequently, it’s not surprising that 55 percent of Americans say they’re “completely burned out” from job hunting, according to staffing company Insight Global. This article reports that tech companies, recruiters, and staffing agencies are among the biggest ghost posters. “Tech companies are often cited as major users of ghost postings,” said Stephen Greet, the CEO of BeamJobs. “With how fast the industry moves, maintaining a pool of potential candidates ready to go is key. That way if a new project pops up or someone leaves, they’ve already got qualified people to consider.” The use of performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids, testosterone, human growth hormone and insulin remains something of a shadow world—but it may not remain so for long. Now that many scientists are touting the health benefits of cannabis and psychedelics, this article reports, the gap between society’s embrace of once-taboo ideas and its faith in institutional medicine is widening. “For many, medicine is no longer a visit to the physician’s office but a dip into YouTube, a scroll through TikTok, maybe a quick Zoom with a tele-med nurse practitioner, or a visit to the nearest urgent care.” Quote: And in that aperture, the use and abuse of PEDs appears to be flourishing. Potential upsides in some cases: muscle growth, quicker recovery, more energy. Potential downsides in some cases: cardiovascular disease, liver damage, fertility collapse. … But maybe it’s worth it. This is an age, we are told, when anyone can have any body they want. Take a pill, stab a shot, try a “cycle.” It’s the age of Ozempic. The age of ordering a latte with a splash of collagen. Body optimization, body modification, whatever you want to call it, is no longer something that other people are doing, but rather something maybe you should be doing. Have you spent any time on social media lately? Have you felt: I’m getting left behind? This engagingly written article interviews men of all ages who are using various compounds while providing a broad overview of the many products – both legal and illegal – they are taking as well as their benefits and dangers. | 