How Can Parents Be Expected To Trust Schools And Teachers When This Could Happen?

I’m not referring to the sexual predator teachers who deflower boys, or the LGBTQ indoctrinaters who see it as their mission to initiate kids into the joys of alternate sexuality, or the social justice warriors who teach kids to hate whites, the Founders, and the United States of America, or even the teachers whose intellectual skills, judgment and knowledge base better qualify them for work at a bait shop than in a Kindergarten-12 school.

No, the topic today is the Miami Springs math teacher employed by The Academy of Innovative Education, a charter school, who showed his fourth grade class of 9-year olds “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” the trailer for which you can see above, if you dare.

You know. Math.

The so far unnamed teacher showed the class about 30 minutes of the horror movie. His defense was that the class chose it, probably misled by its title. I suppose he also would have shown the kids “Piranha 3DD” or “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” if they asked for those films.

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: This Is What BLM And Its Local Chapters Are Posting On Social Media

Brilliant.

Saying you “stand” with someone represented by a figure who isn’t standing. Referring to “Palestine,” when there is no such country to stand “with.”

And, of course, proclaiming solidarity with a terrorist group that just slaughtered innocent people.

Some of us realized that Black Lives Matter is an irresponsible, racist, violent and crooked movement run by despicable people from the very beginning. The latest example is no surprise.

One minor source of satisfaction from BLM’s fatuous “statement of solidarity” with Hamas: my silly neighbor who has inflicted on our neighborhood a large Black Lives Matter display on her front lawn for almost three years quietly took the eyesore down.

When are all the groveling politicians, corporations and organizations who proclaimed their support for these “social justice” scamsters going to take similar action?

I Know “Fact Don’t Matter” To The Woke Anti-Semites, But At Least They Should Know What Facts They’re Ignoring…

In the short (5.5 minutes) video above, an articulate, objective, unpretentious podcaster explains the origins of the possibly endless Israel-Palestinian conflict in terms even “The Squad” should be able to understand (but won’t). He doesn’t even have to go into more recent events, like the Palestinian reliance on terrorism for the last 50 years, or point out that Israel took over Gaza after it successfully defended itself against a coordinated, unprovoked attack, the second, by surrounding Arab nations, or dwell on the fact (there’s that word again) that the group still refuses to accept the legitimacy of the nation of Israel and is pledged to wipe it from the map.

It is a quick, accurate (if simplified) history lesson that should be mandatory viewing for all of the young, unethical (incompetent, unfair, irresponsible…) bigots and fools cheering on Hamas at colleges and universities. As for the alleged American “intellectuals” who are posting pictures of the Hamas paragliders with machine guns as an image of liberation, I’m not sure what can help them re-enter reality…or decency.

More Thoughts On Baseball Play-Off Ethics.

I raised this issue in the last pot-potpourri post, noting that, horrors, I agree with Keith Olbermann: the current system, now combined with the “balanced schedule,” is unethical (Keith didn’t exactly say that, since “ethics” isn’t in his vocabulary), because it is unfair to teams that have achieved the best record over the course of the season. As I explained in a comment thread,

“I detest any system where a team that was decisively clobbered by the team that won the division is ever in the position to eliminate the clearly superior team. That devalues the season. “….As long as the divisions had significantly different schedules, there was an argument that a superior record in one division(or league) didn’t necessarily mean the team finishing second in another division wasn’t as good (or better). The seeding means that the teams that have to play in the first round may actually have an advantage over the better teams that get to sit out the first round [because the extra days off may in fact be a handicap]….With 30 teams, there is no good solution, but it still stinks.”

Forget about your baseball biases: this a basic fairness question.

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Signature Significance: The American Left’s Mass Ethics Whiff On The Israel-Hamas Conflict [Expanded]

This isn’t a disagreement or a dispute over values. The response of progressives, academia, the mainstream media, Democrats and others in the now fully-dysfunctional American Left is a symptom of underlying ethics rot, the product of too many factors accumulating over decades. At what point will U.S. voters and reasonable citizens finally conclude, after so much evidence before this: “Run away!”? Well, we shall see.

Rather than recap how progressives got here, it is more useful—and easier—to show where they are. As Robert Spenser wrote this morning, “What kind of sickness overtakes people that they can see what the “Palestinian” jihadis did to innocent people on Saturday and think, “I’ve got to speak out in support of the attackers,” or even worse, ‘I’ve got to give those people some money’? It’s a rhetorical question. The sickness is Marxist, leftist cant and indoctrination, and it is as obvious on progressives and Democrats—and the news media, of course—as the buboes on a plague victim.

The ugly tell in this instance is the proclamation of a false equivalency between Hamas and Israel after Hamas launched a full-scale terrorist attack against civilians three days ago. The partner to that intellectually and ethically untenable delusion is that a ceasefire should immediately follow: Hamas attacks, slaughters, kidnaps, and Israel is asked to show “restraint.” To the contrary, Israel has promised to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth. Bingo. That is the ethical response, completely and unequivocally. Israel has shown restraint, and this was its reward. (I’m waiting for Sonny Hostin or some other idiot to explain that Israel ‘turning the other cheek’ is the Christian thing to do.)

Let’s see:

1. 31 Harvard student organizations collectively published a letter entitled, “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” including Harvard’s affiliate of Amnesty International. The unforgivable letter starts, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” it continues. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.”

As they should. Who is responsible when a population elects a terrorist organization as its lawful government? Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers wrote that he was “sickened” by the failure of Harvard’s leadership to condemn the statement. “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” tweeted Summers. That’s right, but Summers was also complicit in turning Harvard into the one-view ideological indoctrination factory that it has become.

2. Hilariously, Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, desperately hustling to stem the bleeding after a vicious attack by Iran-sponsored Hamas quickly followed on the heels of his addled boss unfreezing $6 billion for Iran, tweeted a call for a cease-fire, then pulled the tweet after a backlash that any fool could have predicted, and had his own Department disavow his tweet as “unauthorized.” So now it’s up to the media propaganda hacks to cover for Biden and Blinken. On “Meet the Press,” new host Kristen Welker parroted Blinken’s statement that the $6 billion was not a factor in the attacks. Luckily, Nikki Haley was on hand to debunk that talking point, saying, “When I was at the United Nations…when those planes full of cash [were] sent by Obama to Iran,…What happened was those funds were sent to Hezbollah and Lebanon. They were sent to Hamas and Gaza. They were sent to the Houthis in Yemen. They go and spread terrorism every time they get a dollar.”

And Biden released the billions anyway.

3. CNN featured a guest who claimed, without contradiction, that Hamas had really only targeted “military installations” and that most hostages were soldiers. Appearing on Fareed Zarakia GPS, Mustafa Marghouti also insisted the attacks were the fault of Israel because of “the longest occupation in modern history” and “[a] much worse apartheid” than the one “in South Africa.” Showing that American journalism could get even worse, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation instructed its reporters not to refer to the Hamas terrorists who attacked innocent civilians, kidnapped those they did not kill and are threatening to murder them on live TV as “terrorists.” The CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards, George Achi, stated, “Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists. The notion of terrorism remains highly politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as ‘terrorists,’ we should add context to ensure the audience understands this opinion, not fact.” The New York Times isn’t calling them terrorists either: its euphemism of choice at the moment is “militants.”

See Rationalization #64, “It isn’t what it is.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 3: Illiterate People

An infuriating story yesterday reminded me of a long standing bias, which is in truth not my greatest problem with the tragedy that occurred in Oregon, Ohio.

Police responded to a call about a 4-year-old boy outside, apparently alone except for a dog. When they they found the child and returned him and the dog back to their home, the police learned that the mother had been asleep. They reminded her of “safety measures that need to be taken to ensure the well-being of her children,” the news accounts say.

Somehow, I don’t think this is sufficient when a mother allows a toddler to wander out of the house unmonitored. Good dog, though…

For some reason, the mother never mentioned to the officers that her younger son, 2-year-old Marcus Hall, had also apparently wandered off. Why wouldn’t she do that? Was she afraid of getting in trouble, as she should have? Did she forget she had two boys? Was she stoned?

About 45 minutes later, sleepy mom called 911 to report that Marcus was missing. Again officers arrived, began a search, and found the little boy dead—drowned— in a neighbor’s above-ground pool directly behind the Hall family’s property. The pool was not fully enclosed. “Police noted that Marcus’ unidentified 4-year-old brother was unharmed in the incident,” the news story says.

That’s nice. I wonder for how long he’ll remain unharmed.

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Flat Ethics Learning Curve Of The Last Two Decades: Progressives And Democrats Calling For A “Cease-Fire” Before Israel Can Respond Appropriately To The Hamas Terror Attack.

This tweet was taken down, though only after 12 hours had passed. Watch: the Biden Administration will now soon claim it was posted by a rogue intern. [ UPDATE: I was close!] The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem also tweeted for “all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks” on the very day of Hamas’s invasion of Israel. That post also was deleted.

Satire though it is, the Babylon Bee’s reaction is spot on:

“It seems that US Secretary of State Blinken deleted yesterday’s tweet where he ‘encouraged’ Hamas-supporting Turkey arranging a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. Are there any actual adults in charge in Foggy Bottom?” tweeted retired US diplomat Alberto Miguel Fernandez. Who is surprised? Many on the Left opposed any military action against Afghanistan after the 9-11 bombings. Meanwhile, as the whiff of moral equivalency wafts through the wokified air, Hamas has threatened to execute civilian hostages on live TV, stating, “From this moment on, we announced that any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met, regretfully to say, by executing one of the hostages in our custody and we will be forced to broadcast this execution.” The ethical distinction should be clear, but to frighteningly many, it is not:

Maybe Biden will make more billions of dollars available to Iran if it can get Hamas to stop…

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Pointer and Source for the cartoon above: Instapundit.

Ethics Hero: ADL CEO Jonathan Goldblatt

I have some reservations about designating anyone an ethics hero when they declare that they “love” MSNBC. Loving MSNBC is a mark of partisan bias and corruption, as well as making someone who regularly appears on the network’s propaganda-spewing shows complicit in the damage being done to civic discourse and democracy by this truly unethical, racist, divisive and destructive network.

But…

After MSNBC’s hosts and guests had been, predictably, mouthing the Palestinian, Democratic Socialist (including “The Squad”) cant about how the massive terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas was somehow justified, and periodically calling for “context,” which is like the Left’s “root causes” narrative after the attacks of 9/11, reliable knee-jerk progressive (he was one of Obama’s aides) and ADL head Goldblatt directly and unequivocally condemned the MSNBC coverage, looking straight into the camera to do it.

MSNBC deserves some praise too: it allowed Goldblatt to finish his long and very articulate spontaneous speech without any attempt to interrupt or cut away. Such instances where the news media is confronted honestly about its disgusting conduct are too rare, and we should pat our respects when they do occur.

Mid-Day Ethics Cargo, 10/9/23, Or “Columbus Sailed All That Way For THIS?”

Almost every item in the collection that follows is annoying….

1. In St. Louis, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier of Tower Grove East, and Aldermanic President Megan Green proposed legislation to “expand the rights of homeless people” at the expense of turning the city into a toilet. Among other things, the proposed law would exempt the homeless from the city’s laws against urinating and taking a dump in public. “After every sporting event, after Mardi Gras, we see (other) people engaging in public urination,” Green said at a news conference after the board meeting. “But … enforcing those laws against that segment of the population is not the same as the enforcement we see against our unhoused population.” So, obviously, rather than enforce the law uniformly, her solution, as woke as woke can be, is to allow some people to drop feces wherever they please. “What are we doing?” Alderwoman Pam Boyd responded, “This is not a third world country. This is St. Louis, Missouri. That’s so disrespectful to us as a community. That’s unhealthy.” Ya think? “Does society have any rules any more?” asked Alderman Tom Oldenburg, of St. Louis Hills. “Give me a break. Homeless people who need to relieve themselves should go to a shelter. That’s where bathrooms exist.”

There go those crazy conservatives again!

2. Larry Tribe strikes again! Showing that not only Democratic Presidents can leak IQ points, once-admired Harvard Law law professor (now Emeritus), made an ass of himself on Twitter/X, and not for the first time. Leaping to “X” to take a cheap shot, Tribes’ reaction to Israel declaring war on Hamas for a brutal surprise attack that killed Americans as well as Israelis was: “Is Netanyahu wagging the dog of war to take attention away from his own war on the independent judiciary? Can anyone put that past him?” This time, Tribe got so much flack that he backed down from his cretinism, which he hasn’t usually done since his brain turned to cream cheese. He wrote to Fox News: “I sent the tweet in response to Netanyahu’s reported comments before I saw the news of what Hamas had actually done, at which point I immediately deleted the tweet as a clearly premature, ill-informed and inappropriate response to incomplete information. I obviously condemn Hamas’s terrorist attacks and unthinkable atrocities against the Israeli people, including the murder and abduction of civilians, in the strongest possible terms and fully support Israel’s right of self-defense, notwithstanding my long-standing condemnation of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and its activities in the West Bank.” 

Imagine, this jerk was once promoted by progressives to be an Supreme Court Justice. If he had been black and female, he might be.

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“Curmie’s Conjectures”: The Revenge of the Wackadoodles

by Curmie

One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.”  That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”. 

This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here.  The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University.  His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.

You may recall the incident.  Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here.  Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad.  Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.

Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood.  So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing.  Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration.  The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence.  (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)

Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater  had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”  To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history.  Everett was just getting warmed up.  He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”  Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t.  Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).

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