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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- As a public school teacher for nearly 10 years, I'd known about homeschooling families, but I had negatively stereotyped them. I assumed homeschooling to be fairly ridiculous until my son came home crying nearly every day of second grade begging me to homeschool him. That was 9 years ago and I've never regretted my choice. One year after starting, I pulled out his two elementary-aged siblings, and I've witnessed them do, learn, and be things I never thought possible at their ages thanks to the opportunities afforded them outside a traditional school setting. We've had time to discuss current events, politics, interpersonal relationships, morals, values, and dreams. People are often shocked to learn that ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Outstanding, must read article.] ARTICLE: John Rieley, a former Sysco food company sales rep explains that "Prior to [coronavirus], the majority of Americans would eat at least half of their meals away from home. So production was geared toward [bulk] food service. You can change over a plant, but all the machinery has got to be retooled. On the other hand, the demand for home meals has skyrocketed, creating imbalances in the supply chain." Milk that doesn't get to a processing plant has to be destroyed. Dairyman Rance Miles: "We're putting 700,000 gallons of milk on the ground today. It breaks our hearts. We're trying to donate milk and working with processors so we can, but what are you going to do, pull up to a food bank with a tanker of milk?" While dumping milk is grim, poultry and other livestock are even tougher. At week six, when a 50,000-chicken population is ready to process ...

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ZEROHEDGE.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Even if Muslims don't eat pork, bacon and related meat products, a shortage means consumers will turn to other meats, which already face shortages.] ARTICLE: In the starkest warning yet that high food prices could last for a long time, Tyson Foods warned in a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday that the "food supply chain is breaking." "As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain," the Tyson Chairman wrote. "The food supply chain is breaking." The distress has not been limited to just livestock. Dairy and produce farmers have had to dump or throw out spoiled products due to a collapse in demand for bulk products, mostly because of shifting supply chains with the closure of restaurants, cruise ships, hotels, resorts, education systems, and ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- Enforced orthodoxy, often described as "scientific consensus," is an impediment to science. For example, a recent article in The Skeptical Inquirer treats the tendency for Nobel Prize-winning scientists to explore unconventional theories, outside the "scientific consensus," as a disease. However, scientists who reject consensus and think for themselves are often the ones best prepared to make major discoveries. The top rank of scientists is full of mavericks -- Galileo, Newton, Semmelweis, Einstein, and Watson and Crick, to name just a few -- who made outstanding contributions not despite their unorthodoxy but because of it. They were all willing to think outside the box. Richard Feynman -- another unconventional fellow who did Nobel-Prize winning science -- insisted that "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." A scientific culture that welcomes unorthodox ...

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EDWARDFESER.BLOGSPOT.COM -- COVID-19 is not just an epidemiological or medical question. For example, how much economic damage is likely to be done by a lockdown? How does that damage weigh against the damage the virus is likely to do? At what point might a lockdown result in more sickness and death from neglect of other ailments? What sort of social instability is it likely to produce over time? Epidemiologists and doctors can't answer such questions. Weighing and balancing all of these requires statesmanship, and phronesis -- practical wisdom or prudence -- which doesn't come in a book or from a degree. In fact scientism -- the view that science alone gives us knowledge -- is one of the great enemies of phronesis. What all of this entails is that ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2016: "The public is very, very wise. Public wisdom is not dependent on education."] ARTICLE: Consider Joe Blow. A truck driver who works a couple of jobs to support his family, pays his taxes and goes to church. He is anything but a scientific expert, but he's also no fool. Joe has heard a lot about the replication crisis in science -- he doesn't understand it all but knows it means a whole lot of science is basically just made up. He remembers the 1960s warning that overpopulation would kill billions and he's still waiting for the apocalyptic global cooling he was told about in the 1970s. He remembers DDT was going to kill all birds so it was banned and then lots of people started dying (again) of malaria. Joe remembers being told AIDS was going to kill millions of Americans. He also remembers scientists insisted humanity was degenerating from poor breeding so the U.S. government sterilized tens of thousands of people, against their will. In a democracy, Joe says, the ultimate expert ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- In 2012, Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel with Oxford Unversity Press published the book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false." Now Nagel is still an atheist, but after examining the evidence he derides Darwinism as "a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense," concluding the Darwinian worldview is ripe for displacement. But why do Darwin and Evolution matter? This is not a philosophical thing because Darwin's ideas have had significant consequences for our culture and your life, even if you don't know it. His ideas have impacted our understanding of the human person in at least three key ways. First, in the erosion of the sanctity and value of human life. Second, in the area of morality. Third, the erosion of the idea that humans have a spiritual purpose. Even those who don't lose their faith in God because of Darwin's theory, may ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Throughout the Silver Jubilee, in 1982/83, Hazar Imam emphasised, repeatedly, that Allah "creates" and "removes" what He wishes, "*when He wishes*," "how He wishes", "where He wishes."] ARTICLE: The question is could God have designed everything at the beginning, in such a way, that everything happened naturally. Absolutely, that's what God could have done. But there's a problem. Those laws would be so complex and intractable that science would be impossible. To do science you need a set of simple laws, but simple laws do not create complex, molecular machines found in living cells. So what you see, throughout life, is evidence of a Designer infusing information into the system. The evidence is so clear and unambiguous that life is not the product of simple chemistry and physics but the product of dramatic intervention in Nature. A lot of people have the have a problem with the term "intervention," but they have to get over it because that's reality. So let's talk about the science. When you talk about the origin of life the question is ...

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LOCKDOWNSCEPTICS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Although everyone can understand the implications of the severe problems highlighted, software engineers in our community will be shocked by this article. The projected COVID-19 deaths, used to justify the lockdown, came from Prof Neil Ferguson's, of Imperial College, model.] ARTICLE: Imperial finally released a derivative of Ferguson's code. I reviewed it here are some of the things I noticed. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results with identical inputs. Imperial routinely act as if this is unimportant. However, this makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, which insists on replicable results. The damage from over a decade of amateur hobby programming is so extensive that even Microsoft were unable to fix it. All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial's modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn't under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one. Despite being aware of the severe problems in they "haven't had time" to fix, the Imperial team continue to ...

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THEINDEPENDENTWHIG.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Jonathan Haidt, a secular, liberal atheist, was named a top 100 and top 30 global thinker by Foreign Policy and British Prospect Magazine, respectively. He is professor of social psychology and studies morality and religion.] ARTICLE: In 2010, the cultural psychologists Joe Henrich, Steve Heine, and Ara Norenzayan published a profoundly important article titled "The Weirdest People in the World?" WEIRD as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. They showed WEIRD people are weird, statistical outliers and Americans more so than Europeans. And the American educated, upper middle class the most unusual of all. Most people think holistically (seeing contexts and relationships), but WEIRD people think more analytically (detaching the focal object from its context). If WEIRD and non-WEIRD people think differently and see the world differently, they'll have different moral concerns. If you see a world of individuals, you'll want a morality protecting individuals and individual rights. But non-WEIRD societies see a world of relationships and not so focused on protecting individuals. Non-WEIRD societies need additional virtues to bind people together. The differences run deep; even visual ...

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THEINDEPENDENTWHIG.COM -- Many rationalists assert good reasoning about ethical issues results in good behaviour. They believe that reasoning is the royal road to moral truth, and that people who reason well are more likely to act morally. However, as an intuitionist, I say worship of reason is one of the longest-lived Western delusions: the rationalist delusion. Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. French scientists concluded that most of the bizarre research findings make perfect sense once you see *reasoning does not help us find truth but, rather, argue and persuade other people.* "Skilled arguers... are not after the truth but arguments supporting their views." Individuals are really good at finding evidence to support their existing, usually intuitive, positions. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth or to produce good public policy. And if our goal is to produce good behaviour, not just good thinking, then it's even more important to reject rationalism and embrace intuitionism. I'm not saying ...

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SPECTATOR.CO.UK -- After a career as a scientist and clinical academic, I have been struck by how often they (we!) have get things quite wrong. Consider models. Models are only as good as their assumptions and input data. If the assumptions wrong, or data faulty, the model will differ from reality, perhaps wildly.  Today, COVID-19 decisions in the UK are based on Imperial College's model. However, we know for sure the input data, in the run-up to lockdown, was extremely poor. More surprisingly, they say if virus transmission slows, it is "assumed" that this is due to the lockdown and not (for example) that it might have slowed any way. But surely this is a key point? If you are presenting a paper trying to ascertain if lockdowns work, isn't it a bit of a push to assume lockdowns work? And what about the fact that ...

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GLOBALRESEARCH.CA -- As Europe's and North America's economic and social decline continues from 'lockdown' policies, Sweden, Iceland, Belarus, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan decided against lockdowns. And their results have been as good or better than the lockdown countries, but without having to endure the socio-economic chaos. For this reason alone, Sweden and others like them, have already won the policy debate, as well as the scientific one too. Even the UN, is acknowleded Sweden's comparable success, lauding it as a "model." Dr. Micheal Ryan, WHO head of emergency management said, "I think if we are to reach a new normal, Sweden represents a model if we wish to get back to a society in which we don't have lockdowns." So according to WHO, Sweden represents what should be the new normal - and not reactionary, medieval quarantine policies. Sweden followed real epidemiological science and pursued a common sense strategy of herd immunity, it ...

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AREOMAGAZINE.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1983, Canada: "I want to emphasize that ["areas in which there are too many qualified people for too few jobs"] I think you should frankly set aside, unless you are willing to seek excellence. I am thinking of areas in commerce ... perhaps even areas such as social sciences." Hazar Imam, 1983, UK: "I have been very happy to see that now, for the first time that I can recollect, there is a heavy majority of students who are following scientific subjects."] ARTICLE: In 2018, Mitchell Langbert compared voter registrations of faculty at top liberal arts colleges and found 90% (10 to 1) were Democrats. The results varied considerably by field. In engineering, only 66% (1.6 to 1) were Democrats, but in sociology almost 98% (44 to 1) were. But does it matter? New evidence hints that students' educations may be harmed. The results are quite startling. If students value their career prospects, students should be wary of severely politically imbalanced fields. I compared the ratio of Democrat to Republican professors with the share of students graduating from a program that passed the Obama administration's "Gainful Employment Equivalent" test, which ...

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FORBES.COM -- Over the weekend, my twitter feed exploded with derision at "The Risks of Homeschooling" published recently in Harvard Magazine. Have any of these people actually talked to a homeschooler? The article is like a royal flush of innuendo and lazy stereotypes easily disproven by a cursory look at the data. The National Center for Education Statistics 2019 survey of homeschoolers found the number one reason for homeschooling was not "a desire to provide religious instruction" (that came in third) nor even "a desire to provide moral instruction" (that came in seventh), but rather "a concern about school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure." Number two was "dissatisfaction with the academic instruction at other schools." Totally absent from Harvard's lazy stereotypes are two of the fastest-growing homeschooling groups: families with special needs children and ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- DISCOVERY SCIENCE -- In "Icons of Evolution," biologist Jonathan Wells compared what scientists present as the best evidence for evolution -- such as homology in vertebrate limbs -- with the published, peer-reviewed scientific literature and revealed that much of what we teach about evolution is wrong noting that scientists are well aware of this discrepancy between their published papers and what is taught. Published in 2000, the book raised troubling questions about the status of Darwinian evolution that are still plaguing scientists today. ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- One of the main arguments for evolution is homology -- odd similarities between very different animals. Why would they be so similar unless they were related by a common ancestor? But are these similarities really evidence of evolution? Well the definition of Homology is *circular* and so can't be used as evidence for evolution because it assumes the very thing it's trying to prove. The standard definition of homology says these similarities are *due to evolution*. In other words, homology says the similarities come from evolution, then says the similarities prove evolution. "Long Story Short," is a new video series that compresses key points in the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design into a very welcome format: concise, accessible, and funny. As the narrator explains ...

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NYTIMES.COM -- More than 80,000 Americans died of the flu in the winter of 2017-2018, the highest number in over a decade, federal health officials said. 90% of those deaths were people over age 65. The high mortality rate was unusual because it was caused by a "normal" -- albeit severe -- flu season. It is impossible to know yet how effective this year's vaccine will be. Last season's flu vaccine was only about 40% effective at preventing infection -- approximately the same as the previous season's, according to the C.D.C. Vaccine effectiveness varies quite a bit each year, from a high of 60% in 2010-11 to a low of 19% in 2014-2015. In the 2009-2010 swine flu epidemic, 59 million Americans are thought to have caught the novel strain ...

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TIME.COM -- "We are pretty much at capacity, and the volume is certainly different from previous flu seasons," says Dr. Alfred Tallia, at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center. "I've been in practice for 30 years, and it's been a good 15 or 20 years since I've seen a flu-related illness scenario like we've had this year." The story is similar in Alabama, which declared a state of emergency. Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases says "We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn't, like in recovery rooms." In California, several hospitals have set up large "surge tents" to accommodate and treat flu patients. Even then, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways. The 2017-2018 influenza epidemic is ...

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FORBES.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2011: "I have seen situations where energy has been produced by windmills, by solar batteries and the damage that they have done to the environment is simply incredible."] ARTICLE: Everyone, including celebrity influencers Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore, have claimed renewables, like solar panels and wind farms, pollute less than fossil fuels. But Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's new documentary, "Planet of the Humans" -- made with Jeff Gibbs and released free on YouTube today, Earth Day's 50th Anniversary -- reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.... When Earth Day Founder Denis Hayes claims the 2015 Earth Day concert was being powered by solar, Gibbs goes behind the stage to find out the truth. "The concert is run by a diesel generation system," the solar vendor said.... Moore's documentary also highlights renewables' massive materials requirements. "You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place," said one expert, "instead of just playing pretend. We're basically just being fed a lie." The film shows ...

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NATURE.COM -- Widespread antibody testing (known as a sero-prevalence surveys) in Santa Clara county, California, by Stanford University researchers revealed that coronavirus infection rates are [50 times] higher than official figures suggest. Jayanta Bhattacharya, a study co-author, says the results probably still undercount the infection rate. The findings also indicate the virus is less deadly than current estimates. The Santa Clara analysis follows preliminary results from a similar study in Germany. Sero-surveys can provide a better estimate of how deadly a virus is, using a measure known as the infection fatality rate (IFR): the proportion of all infection (not just those confirmed through clinical testing), that result in death. The Santa Clara team estimated an IFR for the county of 0.1-0.2%. Although some experts have raised concerns about the reliability of antibody kits, the researchers assessed the tests and state it correctly identified 93% of control positives and 100% of control negatives. Results are expected soon from sero-prevalence surveys from China, Australia, Iceland, Italy, Germany and ...

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RT.COM -- Standford University researchers used 3,300 residents in Santa Clara County to conduct their tests, which found that the coronavirus could have infected far more people than has been reported, "50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases." A Danish study published earlier this week using similar methods arrived at the same conclusion. Michael Mina, an immunologist and assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard, tweeted agreement with the study on Friday. The WHO has previously mentioned a 3% mortality rate for COVID-19. Stanford's study would lower the mortality rate to 0.14% or less, on par with or less than the deadliness of the seasonal flu, which has a yearly mortality rate around 0.1%, according to ...

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THEINDEPENDENTWHIG.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Jonathan Haidt was named a top 100 and top 30 global thinker by Foreign Policy and British Prospect Magazine, respectively. He is professor of social psychology and studies morality and religion. "The Righteous Mind" debuted at number 6 on The New York Times bestseller list.] ARTICLE: In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other and assess how accurate they were [in understanding the other side]. The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as "very liberal." The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals ...

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THEINDEPENDENTWHIG.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1965: Left-wing attitudes tend not only to destroy the Faith of a man towards his religion but also the respect of one individual towards another. When the Faith is broken down everything goes with it: the family, society, the individual, the intelligence.] ARTICLE: As a lifelong liberal, I assumed conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science and, as an atheist and a scientist, I was, therefore, obligated to be a liberal. But Jerry Muller, in "Conservatism", asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating a society that brings the greatest happiness given local circumstances. Was there a kind of conservatism that could compete against liberalism in the court of social science? Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society? He laid out a series of claims about human nature which he said are core beliefs of conservatism. Based on my own research, I had to agree with him. And, as I studied conservative intellectuals, I saw they had crucial insights into morality I had never encountered. They understood the importance of moral capital. (Note I am praising conservative intellectuals, not the Republican Party.) Moral communities are ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: [Do not] think of education only as a trampoline to achieve material good, because that then creates intellectual vanity and material greed.... Don't let these concepts, through modern education, enter into the psyche of the Jamat and end up by misguiding you about the real value and the real meaning of education in Islam.] ARTICLE: As a friend of mine who's no stranger to dealing with wealthy and powerful people put it, "It's not an exaggeration to say [elite colleges are] the central organizing obsession for a large segment of American society," at the expense of understanding what constitutes a good education and what it should accomplish. The end goal for them is passing on elite status to their children. If you really care about your kids' education, focus on cultivating their faith and character and make sure they understand the accumulation of knowledge is ultimately a tool for improving the world around them, and not just about credentials and wealth. Credentialism creates the illusion ...

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