Wednesday, June 03, 2020


Univ. of Alabama Prof Coaches Rioters on How to Destroy Birmingham Monument  

University of Alabama professor Sarah Parcak took to Twitter on Sunday night with a “professional hot take” on exactly how a mob could pull down an Egyptian-style obelisk that “might be masquerading as a racist monument,” such as the Confederate war dead memorial in Birmingham, Alabama.

Parcak, the author of Archeology from Space, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a public speaker, explained to her fifty-three thousand followers and the rest of Twitter how a semi-organized crew, armed with little more than rope, chain, and bad intentions, should let “gravity work 4 you” when toppling obelisks “just like this in downtown Birmingham!”

Whatever the case, Parcak clearly knows what she’s talking about, which makes me think she might be talking herself into some legal trouble. A quick look at her 15-post Twitter thread gives explicit instructions on exactly how to destroy an obelisk and makes clear her intent that the George Floyd-inspired rioters should succeed where they had previously failed.

Earlier on Sunday, rioters took to Birmingham’s Linn Park, determined to tear down the Confederate war dead memorial, which just happens (cough, cough) to be an obelisk.

Kyle Whitmire was a witness and describes what happened in an otherwise unreadable Alabama.com editorial:

"When I got there, a couple hundred protesters had gathered and a handful were already chipping with sledgehammers at the base of the century-old statue.

As the sun set, more people trickled into the park. A few folks wrapped bungee lines around the monument and rope line pulled in vain against the 50 ft. tower of solid granite. Johnson and other leaders of the group admonished the crowd against damaging any other property.

The amount of thought that went into this enterprise could be measured in feet — roughly 30 ft of rope to pull down a 50 ft. monument. The protesters looped one end of the rope about a third of the way up the obelisk and hitched the other end to the back of a red GMC pickup truck. Had they been successful, the monument would have crushed the truck and likely killed or injured bystanders. Instead, their two attempts ended with two broken ropes.

Never fear, destructive rioters — Professor Parcak is here to teach your young minds the proper way to destroy public property.

Parcak reminded the, ah, peaceful protestors that the “chances are good the obelisk extends into the ground a bit,” so they should use chains instead of a rope. The chains should be “extended tightly around the top (below pointy bit) and 1/3 down forming circles.”

“For every 10 ft of monument, you’ll need 40+ people. So, say, a 20 ft tall monument, probably 60 people,” Parcak helpfully suggested. With “safety first” in mind, she said that rioters will “want strong rope attached to the chain—rope easier to hold onto versus chain.”

You probably want 150+ ft of rope x 2…you’ll want to be standing 30 feet away from obelisk so it won’t topple on you (your safety! first!). This gives enough slack for everyone to hold on to rope, alternating left right left right. Here’s the hard part…pulling in unison

You have two groups, one on one side, one opposite, for the rope beneath the pointy bit and the rope 1/3 down. You will need to PULL TOGETHER BACK AND FORTH. You want to create a rocking motion back and forth to ease the obelisk from its back.

I recommend a rhythmic song. YOU WILL NEED SOMEONE WITH A LOUDSPEAKER DIRECTING. There can be only one person yelling. Everyone will be alternating on rope left right left right not everyone on the same side. No one else near the obelisk! Safety first!

Start by a few practice pulls to get into it. Think of it like a paused tug of war, pull, wait 2, 3, 4, 5 PULL wait 2, 3 4,5. PULL AS ONE, PAUSE 5 SECONDS, you’ll notice some loosening, keep up the pattern…you may need more people, get everyone to pull!

Just keep pulling till there’s good rocking, there will be more and more and more tilting, you have to wait more for the obelisk to rock back and time it to pull when it’s coming to you. Don’t worry you’re close!

In her final message in this thread, Parcak also asked rioters, “Please do not pull down Washington Monument,” but at this point, that sounds more like thinly-disguised irony than an actual plea not to do anything destructive.

Besides, one monument to “racism and white nationalism” looks just like another, AMIRITE?

While I don’t think anyone would be stupid enough to try to topple the 555-foot Washington Monument, the 52-foot tall obelisk in Birmingham seems a likely target for rioters — encouraged and instructed by a member of the academy.

Parcak ought to face charges

SOURCE 






Trump, HBCUs, and Progress

As both of us can attest, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) provide a vital path for young African Americans to reach the true heights of their potential.

Mr. Cain grew up poor in segregated Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a chauffeur and a domestic worker. In 1963, he had the opportunity to attend Atlanta’s Morehouse College, an HBCU that imparted not only an education but a religious and cultural foundation that would later lead to a Master’s degree and a successful business career serving as the CEO of both a major restaurant chain and the National Restaurant Association.

Mr. Blackwell has seen the importance of HBCUs from a slightly different perspective. After serving as mayor of Cincinnati and Ohio’s treasurer of state, he had the opportunity to join the board of trustees of Ohio’s Wilberforce University, which in the 1860s became America’s very first black-owned institution of higher learning. That role gave him firsthand insights into the impact that HBCUs such as Wilberforce continue to make in the lives of young black Americans.

We can both further state that there has never been a president in the White House who has been more supportive of HBCUs and their mission than President Trump. Through both legislation he has championed and executive action he has taken independently, the president has shown time and again that his administration is committed to promoting the survival and relevance of distinctively African American institutions of higher education in this country.

Just after taking office, one of Donald Trump’s very first executive orders established both a White House initiative and a board of advisors on HBCUs, placing them at the very center of this administration’s education policy. He subsequently relaunched the HBCU Capital Finance Board, which has distributed over $500 million in student loans.

Cabinet-level federal agencies have also gotten in the game. Attorney General Bill Barr’s Justice Department, for example, issued an opinion that will allow faith-based HBCUs, such as Morehouse and Wilberforce, to enjoy the same access to federal support for capital improvement projects as secular institutions.

President Trump is also providing more funding for HBCUs than any other president in history. The Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act (FUTURE Act) that he signed into law last year included $255 million in permanent, mandatory funding for HBCUs, and the 2019 Farm Bill included an additional $100 million for HBCU scholarships, research, and centers of excellence.

The scale and duration of President Trump’s commitment to HBCUs is a story often ignored in the popular press, but it fits neatly within the framework of his governing philosophy. This administration has the interests of all citizens at heart and is always trying to fund and support solutions that truly empower black Americans. It is no coincidence that African American unemployment and poverty rates both reached all-time lows under President Trump before the coronavirus pandemic struck.

As the country prepares to restart and rebuild from the pandemic, the Trump administration’s commitment to HBCUs takes on added importance. President Trump knows that HBCUs will have a role to play in the coming challenge, which is why he included $1 billion in relief to HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions as part of federal pandemic relief efforts.

As the entire country strives to return to a new normal over the coming months, HBCUs and the wider African American community can take comfort in the knowledge that they have an unwavering ally in the White House.

SOURCE 





Parents Who Home-School Are a Danger to Their Kids? That’s What These Academics Think

The greatest threat to the well-being of children isn’t a virus: It’s their parents, according to some academics.

Harvard University law professor Elizabeth Bartholet has ignited a firestorm of controversy by arguing for a presumptive government ban on home schooling in a recent law journal article. Her claims are largely relics of a bygone era dominated by progressive education theorists who believed that government bureaucrats know better about educating children than parents.

Bartholet explains in the current issue of Harvard Magazine that because home schooling is not regulated enough by government, children could be at the mercy of parents who are “essentially” illiterate, or worse, neglectful or abusive. Absent government intervention, parents control their children’s education and upbringing—something Bartholet deems “authoritarian” and “dangerous.” Her solution is compulsory government schooling to ensure “that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.”

Adding fuel to the fire, Bartholet has convened a “private and by invitation-only” Harvard summit in June to focus on “problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling.”

No doubt participants will be channeling the likes of Horace Mann, considered the father of American public education, and John Dewey, who wanted a Prussian-style system of uniform, compulsory schooling for the United States. According to these and other leading 19th- and 20th-century education theorists, such a system would improve our “democratic” institutions through the distinctly undemocratic means of forcing parents—especially poor and immigrant parents—to send their children to government-run schools that would instill the proper “social and political consciousness.”

Proponents believed this democratic end justified such undemocratic means because ultimately, as the Wisconsin Teachers Association put it in 1865, “children are property of the state.”

Of course, that view is wholly at odds with the Constitution, which neither mentions the word “education,” nor gives the federal government any enumerated power over it. That’s a real problem for “progressives,” including Dewey, who dismissed the notion of individual rights as “idolatry to the Constitution,” as well as Bartholet, who says the Constitution is “outdated and inadequate.”

The data, however, show that home-schooling parents are getting results that make government schools seem inadequate.

The scholarly research shows more than a 100-fold increase in the numbers of home-schooled students since the early 1970s, from 13,000 to more than 2.4 million. The latest EdChoice Schooling in America Survey also finds that the proportion of parents whose top educational option would be home schooling reached an all-time high of 15% in 2019, a threefold increase since 2012.

These trends correspond with the federal government’s dramatically increased involvement in K-12 education, starting with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 and the establishment of the Department of Education in 1979. If parents, many of whom probably attended public schools themselves, were satisfied with “public” education, homeschooling would have died off – not exploded.

Given such growth, it stretches credulity to suggest, as Bartholet does, that homeschooling parents are some kind of nefarious lunatic fringe. It also ignores scholarly evidence.

For example, research for the Department of Education finds that home-schooling parents come from all walks of life and are socioeconomically diverse. It also shows that by a margin of more than two to one, parents say their most important reason for home-schooling their children is concern about school environments, such as safety, drugs or negative peer pressure, not religious instruction.

The majority of peer-reviewed studies also shows that compared to their conventionally educated peers, home-schooled students have higher K-12 academic achievement, more positive social development, better college performance and more positive longer-term life outcomes, including greater life satisfaction, political toleration and civic engagement.

Ultimately, most home-schooling parents are successfully educating their children. Rather than learn from their success, “progressive” academics like Bartholet apparently want to eliminate the competition—an impulse that hardly seems democratic or tolerant.

SOURCE 




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