On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.
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Only Nine?
In this increasingly complex technological world, what can our school systems do to help students excel in advanced math?
Well, here’s a novel approach: “Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school,” The Boston Globe reports.
Hmmm. Rather counterintuitive: Take access away from students.
Silly me, helping students master advanced mathematics isn’t even on the list of concerns for this Massachusetts city’s “education” officialdom. “The district’s aim,” explains The Globe, “was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers.”
By reducing the learning opportunities for all.
“School districts throughout the country are moving to axe certain academic standards such as advanced courses, grades and homework in the name of equity,” The Daily Caller informs, “in California, a high school recently stopped offering honors courses because the courses were failing to enroll enough black and Latino students.”
The impetus behind these moves is racist and wrong. Moreover, the results are both predictable and pernicious: “limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons.”
“They’re shortchanging a significant number of students,” one parent complains, “overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.” This is the case because many of the more affluent parents can afford to bypass the antagonistic public schools and get their kids the education they need to succeed.
Public schools are increasingly throwing in the towel on teaching low-income and many black and brown kids, deciding that racial “equity” can most easily be achieved by taking away educational opportunities from white and Asian students.
Is this where the logic of public education leads — race as an excuse to play Procrustes, sawing off the tops of our heads to make us “equal”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Adams
The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
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Monkeys & the Moon
On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.
Interesting fact rarely noted: Scopes was teaching a heavily “eugenics” view, which would hardly be considered scientific by most modern standards.
Pictured above, publicity for Inherit the Wind, a 1960 movie about the trial, but with the names changed, fictionalized. The movie starred Spencer Tracy in the Clarence Darrow (lawyer for the defense) role; Frederic March in the prosecutorial part, “Matthew Harrison Brady,” the pseudonymous name for politician William Jennings Bryan; Dick York as the defendant, Mr. Scopes; and Gene Kelly as the Baltimore journalist, a stand-in for H. L. Mencken, whose infamous coverage of the story shocked the nation almost as much as the trial itself. It was Mencken who dubbed the affair “The Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial.”
At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) the famous prosecutor dies in the courtroom. In the historical case, Bryan died five days after the verdict. The movie was based on the 1955 play of the same name, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, directed by Stanley Kramer. The script was adapted by Nedrick Young (originally as Nathan E. Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith.
Today is the 53rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s perambulation upon the Moon, on July 21, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked upon the surface of Mare Tranquillitatis for about two hours and 15 minutes. They spent over 21 hours on the surface, total, most of it inside the Lunar Module, at the site they called Tranquillity Base, before launching to rejoin astronaut Michael Collins in lunar orbit, and returning to Earth on July 24.
Cisco is in trouble, again, for a reason that many American technology firms should be: for aiding and abetting the tyranny of the Chinese government.
Cisco may have thought it was out of the woods after a lawsuit against it, originally filed in 2011, was wrongly dismissed in 2014. The litigation has just been revived by an appellate court.
The suit pertains to the company’s sale of software called Golden Shield to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Golden Shield is used to track down members of the popular and peaceful Falun Gong spiritual movement so that the CCP can persecute them as subversives (as proved by being part of Falun Gong). For the Chinese regime, all dissent and all activity it disapproves of are threats to national security.
Arrestees are tortured, imprisoned, even murdered, and the lawsuit contends that Cisco knew the ultimate goals that the software would serve. (The culpability of Cisco, Thermo Fisher, Microsoft, and other firms that abet CCP oppression is discussed with sarcastic brio by the YouTube channel China Uncensored.)
Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon states that the allegations are “sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the [persecution] of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.”
The revival of this lawsuit and its ultimate resolution will deter, I hope, all U.S. firms from helping the Chinazis to systematically destroy innocent people.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Dorothy Parker
There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorothy Parker, interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
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The Count Tracy
Born on July 20, 1754, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, French philosopher and economist. Perhaps best remembered for coining the term “ideology,” he didn’t mean by that term what scornful Napoleon and communist Karl Marx later turned it into — for Destutt de Tracy ideology meant “the science of ideas,” a unified approach to all knowledge, from epistemology to social theory.
Though his family had been enobled twice, he renounced the title and entered the 1789 Estates General conference as a member of the Third Estate. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned, and would have been executed had not Robespierre been pushed to the scaffold ahead of him.
Two of his books became popular in early 19th century America, his commentaries on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and his Traité de la volonté, which Thomas Jefferson, the editor of the American edition, retitled A Treatise on Political Economy. Tracy’s economics was of a deductivist stripe, familiar to readers of later economists such as Nassau Senior and Ludwig von Mises.
Destutt de Tracy’s political philosophy was republican, and his preferred economic policy was laissez-faire.
NASA’s Apollo 11 landed two humans on the Moon — Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin — on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC.
“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” M.L.R. Smith tells Epoch Times.
According to Smith and David Jones, authors of The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), the conduct of the America’s radical Left resembles that of the Red Guards and others during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in China.
The authors got the idea for their study from the riots that swept the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd. These rage-filled protests-turned-riots made them think of Maoism:
- Defacing and toppling of monuments, reminders of the pesky past.
- Shouting down and “cancelling” speakers. (Sometimes physically as well as verbally assaulting them.)
- Abject kneeling and self-criticism in response to alleged wrongdoing, including “‘white guilt’ genuflection.”
The parallels are real, even though the scale of the humiliations and destruction that we have seen is nowhere near that of the Cultural Revolution, when millions were tortured and murdered.
Jones says Maoism was bred in China and hothoused in Paris but “achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States,” where it is manifest in thinking about race and gender.
The authors explore the nature of rage as a motivating force and strategy, “an energy to be harnessed as a mode of power.” This is the fuel of many a revolution, where mob action serves as a kind of open terrorism. Histories and treatises are filled with it.
America’s Founding Fathers feared such rage, hence in their revolution they stated principles in elegant but clear sentences. They expected argument and readily engaged.
But now?You can’t reason with rage.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture (1970).
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Seneca Falls
On July 19, 1848, a two-day Women’s Rights Convention opened in Seneca Falls, New York.