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ARCHIVE.VN -- William Clark, a high school senior of mixed race, is suing a taxpayer-funded charter school in Nevada over the "coercive, ideological indoctrination" arising from a new, so-called, civics curriculum which "inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of 'Intersectionality' and 'Critical Race Theory.' ... They require pupils to 'unlearn' and 'fight back' against 'oppressive' structures allegedly implicit in their family arrangements, religious beliefs and practices [all of which are] subject to non-private interrogation." Clark was directed "in class to 'unlearn' the basic Judeo-Christian principles [his mother] imparted to him." The school repeatedly threatened him "with material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements." The school principal told Mrs. Clark "that the theoretical basis of the revamped course is known as 'intersectionality,' ...

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REASON.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2006: "Governments alone cannot meet the educational challenges of the 21st century. Nor can private institutions ... The answer lies in the expanding role of voluntary institutions ... dedicated to community values and the public good."] ARTICLE: 18.DEC.2020 -- Insisting that "the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny," the Chicago Teachers Union is fighting plans to return children to the city's public school classrooms. With similar battles playing out around the country, many families are heading for the exits. Public school enrollment is down in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Mississippi, and elsewhere. Homeschooling, however, is booming. In 2016 3.3% of children were homeschooled. That share roughly tripled this year to 9%. Gallup agrees. Families are leaving politicized lessons behind and the world they're creating is more diverse in terms of its ideas and better suited to the needs of parents and children. That shift is likely to permanently transform American education ...

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WASHINGTONPOST.COM -- 2.DEC.2020 -- Whenever someone expressed concerns about the quality of remote education back in the early days of COVID-19, they were all but shamed into silence. Well here's how remote education has worked out since then: In Houston, the number of students with failing grades is exploding. In St. Paul, almost 50% of high school students will fail a class. In Fairfax County -- one of the wealthiest counties in the United States -- 10% failed at least two classes, and almost 20% of children with disabilities. All children need to get back to school but here the news is not good. In New York some elementary-school children are back, but the doors remain firmly shut to sixth graders and higher. Other major urban districts such as ...

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BREITBART.COM -- Queen Elizabeth II has hailed the "quiet, indomitable spirit" of her people through the coronavirus pandemic and described the importance of her Christian faith in her annual Christmas message to the British Commonwealth. "For Christians, Jesus is the light of the world, but we can't celebrate his birth today in quite the usual way," said the 94-year-old monarch, a devout Protestant. She lamented that people have been unable to come together as normal for many religious festivals, including "Passover, Easter, and Eid and Vaisakhi." "We continue to be inspired by the kindness of strangers and draw comfort that - even on the darkest nights - there is hope in the new dawn," she continued. "Jesus touched on this with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The man ...

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BREITBART.COM -- Numerous Kentucky families will not have to worry about putting food on their tables for quite a while thanks to an anonymous person's generous gift. "Santa Clause is known for delivering toys to children but in Daviess County he just dropped off 246,300 pounds (123 tons) of food for families struggling this holiday season," the Kentucky State Police wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday. The anonymous benefactor reached out to Trooper Corey King, asking for help in finding somewhere to donate the non-perishable items. "This anonymous contribution to our community was a blessing by all means," said David Mudd, president of God's Outreach will help distribute the food. "This is usually the time of year when our troopers ...

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BREITBART.COM -- A retired couple in Desert Hot Springs, California, is busy making toys for local children to enjoy this Christmas. "Mike Sullivan and his wife Judy spend their retirement making homemade wooden toys for children. They have been doing this since 2013," KESQ reported. Every Christmas, they donate their toys to needy children in the Coachella Valley. This year, they made 1,500. "Most times we don't even get to see the kids get them but they're going out" said Mike, who is an Army veteran. Despite the shrapnel left in his body from his time in the service, Mike said, "You have to adapt and overcome." The couple spends just about every day ...

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QUILLETTE.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2007: "The demands of dogma came to replace the disciplines of reason -- and education too often turned into indoctrination.... What the modern world requires, however, is an approach which is the polar opposite of indoctrination."] ARTICLE: In the liberal arts programs in particular, the question for many students has become not "What do I think?" but "What do they want me to write?" Of course, this ought to be a false dilemma, but that it exists at all raises troubling questions. Something has gone fundamentally awry. Students holding views that differ fundamentally from those taught must evaluate the risk that they will be penalized for their opinions, particularly when writing about politically contentious topics. This is not to say that every professor will mark heterodoxy more harshly than orthodoxy, but students hesitate to cite the work or the names of thinkers deemed 'controversial' or beyond the pale by whoever is responsible for grading their work. This has implications for the meaning and value of ...

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OFF-GUARDIAN.ORG -- The World Health Organization released a memo on December 14th, warning that high cycle thresholds used on COVID-19 PCR tests will result in false positives. Of course, none of this is news to anyone who has been paying attention. It's been commonly available knowledge, for months now. Many articles have been written about it, by many experts in the field, medical journalists and other researchers. Dr Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR process, was clear that it wasn't meant as a diagnostic tool, saying: "with PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody." Even Dr Anthony Fauci has publicly admitted that a cycle threshold over 35 is going to be detecting "dead nucleotides", not a living virus. So why has the WHO finally decided to say this is wrong? What reason could ...

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RT.COM -- A peer review by 22 international experts of the paper on which most COVID testing is based has comprehensively debunked the science behind it. They conclude the PCR test is utterly unsuitable as a means for diagnosis -- and the fall-out is immense. The original study, the Corman-Drosten paper, described a protocol for applying the PCR technique to detecting COVID, now used in around 70% of COVID kits worldwide. It was published by Eurosurveillance on January, 23, 2020, just one day after being submitted, which would make any peer review process that took place possibly the shortest in history. The PCR test is cheap, fast -- and absolutely useless. At least four authors of the original paper themselves have severe conflicts of interest. Two are members of the editorial board of Eurosurveillance! And at least three are on the payroll of the first companies to perform PCR testing! But wait -- it gets worse. As has been noted previously ...

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OFF-GUARDIAN.ORG -- Imagine going to a doctor suspecting you have a serious illness and being told that there are 2 tests available. If you test positive with the first test they don't know whether or not you have the disease. And the second test, they know for certain is of no value in detecting the disease. Would you find that satisfactory? Obviously not. Yet that is exactly what the Australian government is admitting is the situation with its coronavirus testing. On their web site for health professionals they state that "the extent to which a positive PCR result correlates with the infectious state of an individual is still being determined" and that "there is limited evidence available to assess the accuracy and clinical utility of available COVID-19 tests." In other words, the health authorities do not know whether, if a person tests positive, they are infected or not. Yet testing positive is ...

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THEBLAZE.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: We are reposting this article (originally posted on 31 August 2020) due to new information, from WHO and others, re-confirming the PCR test used for COVID-19 diagnosis is virtually useless.] ARTICLE: In a bombshell weekend report, The New York Times reveals that most of the COVID-19 PCR tests are likely creating thousands upon thousands of false positives or flagging people with tiny quantities of virus who are not contagious. According to the Times, up to 90% of those who test positive in state labs would test negative under more prudent lab protocols. This is not new. The New York Times wrote about this exact flaw in PCR tests in 2007 when, in New Hampshire, the tests had a 100% false positive rate and fuelled the perception of a whooping cough epidemic that never existed. But the false positive rate might be even worse. One study published by Oxford University Press found absolutely no viral growth from samples with a CT above ...

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OFF-GUARDIAN.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: We are reposting this article (originally posted on 31 August 2020) due to new information, from WHO and others, re-confirming the PCR test used for COVID-19 diagnosis is virtually useless.] ARTICLE: Though the whole world relies on RT-PCR to "diagnose" Sars-Cov-2 infection, the science is clear: they are not fit for purpose. Although Kary Mullis, who invented PCR technology, that also earned him the 1993 Nobel prize in chemistry, passed last year, there is no doubt that he regarded the PCR as inappropriate viral infection test because PCR is a manufacturing technique, not a diagnostic tool to detect viruses. COVID-19 PCR tests do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with, as Jessica C. Watson confirmed in her British Medical Journal paper "Interpreting a COVID-19 test result." For that, we need to know the PCR tests were calibrated particle purified RNA. We asked several study authors "Do your electron micrographs show the purified virus?" But not a single team could answer that question with "yes." Nobody said purification ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- WMBRIGGS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2008: "Freedom doesn't mean that if you want to abuse that freedom, whatever it is, you legitimise or impose that on others." "We do not ask [others] to share all our ethics, nor should they ask us to share all theirs."] ARTICLE: "The Separation," at the American Mind, suggests the people of the gods go one way, and the people of God go another. However, the people of the gods will never allow it, for they see themselves progressing toward some Great Future in which there is perfect diversity and equality -- by which they mean utter conformity, where disbelief and apostasy is forbidden by law. They say morality is changeable and, paradoxically, individual interpretation. What they say comes into existence, not in reality, but just that they insist everyone admit it is real. The people of God are the opposite. They see morality as fixed, suffering is accepted as part of life, and not always some other person's fault. They say what is spoken by God comes into existence, and into Reality, that life is best when Reality is admitted, and ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- 2020 as the Year of the Expert? Not exactly. In fact, a motif for the year has been the failure of experts. The flip-side of this has been that thoughtful people, who aren't scientists, decided to think skeptically and independently for themselves. And to help them, World Magazine's Book of the Year award for science, for the lay reader, went to "The Mystery of Life's Origin: The Continuing Controversy," an updated edition of the 1984 classic with contributions by scientists like James Tour, Stephen Meyer, Brian Miller, Guillermo Gonzalez, Jonathan Wells. Rice chemistry professor James Tour's essay has the apt title, "We're Still Clueless About the Origin of Life." Tour appropriately ridicules reporters who fall for media hype about purported progress. He quotes ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- CSLEWISDOODLE -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazrat Ali: "A good man revolts against violence, but shows himself mild and reasonable if well treated."] ARTICLE: The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things -- from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry, we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights. "Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest", says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. What, you may ask, is the relevance of this idea to the modern world? It is terribly relevant. It may or may not be ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- DISCOVERY SCIENCE -- Information drives the development of life. But what is the source of that information? Could it have been produced by an unguided Darwinian process? Or did it require intelligent design? The Information Enigma is a fascinating 21-minute documentary that probes the mystery of biological information, the challenge it poses to orthodox Darwinian theory, and the reason it points to intelligent design. The video features Dr. Stephen Meyer, and molecular biologist Douglas Axe, founder of the Biologic Institute. ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- PRAGERU -- The Pilgrims didn't cross the ocean to flee persecution -- or even England. They'd been living for over a decade in Holland, Europe's most tolerant nation, and a haven for religious dissenters. Free from interference by the Church of England, they feared seduction -- not persecution, worrying that their children would be corrupted by the materialistic Dutch culture. That's why they risked their dangerous 1620 voyage to a wilderness continent. The turbulent sea then deposited them safely -- miraculously -- on a little island within sight of the ideal location for their settlement. It was a deserted Indian village. No, these supposedly cruel conquerors never actually invaded that village. Instead, they expressed a fervent desire to pay the natives for ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- PRAGERU -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2006: "*If freedom of religion deteriorates into freedom from religion*, then societies will find themselves lost in a bleak and unpromising landscape with no compass, no roadmap and no sense of ultimate direction."] ARTICLE: British historian Paul Johnson draws a stark and telling contrast between the two great revolutions of the 18th century. "The essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event." That's why the first freedom listed in the American Bill of Rights and first amendment to the Constitution is about religious liberty. Now, two centuries after the Bill of Rights, one of the main goals of the American Revolution, *freedom of religion, has morphed into freedom from religion*, one of the main goals of the French Revolution. This is why the Founders insisted religious liberty be in the Constitution because freedom of liberty was tantamount to freedom of thought. If you aren't free to think ...

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CATHOLICNEWSAGENCY.COM -- Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito warned that religious liberty was under threat in the United States and emerging as a "disfavored", "second tier" right. Alito also raised concerns the pandemic has sparked a move to "executive fiat" in terms of lawmaking and "highlighted the movement toward rule by experts." He was critical of states that have restricted access to worship services under the guise of coronavirus safety protocols, but had allowed other larger gatherings to continue without issue. "Take a quick look at the Constitution. You will see the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which protects religious liberty. You will not find a craps clause or a blackjack clause or a slot machine clause." Alito raised concerns that freedom of speech was also on its way to ...

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