A journey of a thousand leagues starts with a single step.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 64, line 12.
When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post.
That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”
A sampling:
- “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
- One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
- The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**
“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”
Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins.
The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.
** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.
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Virginia Woolf
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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Jacob Burckhardt
May 25, 1818, the Swiss historian and academic Jacob Burckhardt was born. Burckhardt’s best-known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), but is remembered here as the author of Reflections on History (1905).
Burckhardt died on August 8, 1897.
“The core of the dispute is this,” declares The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column: “Did the virus emerge from nature — ‘zoonotically’ from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment gone awry?”
Ah, modern journalism: even when dealing with some actual facts, is the real point to maneuver the reader not to consider possibilities?
In “Fact-checking the Paul-Fauci flap over Wuhan lab funding,” the Post’s fact-checkers seem most concerned to tell readers that while it is now OK to question the origin of SARS-CoV-2, still, only within limits: as between normal viral evolution and an accident regarding gain-of-function research into viruses.
Outside this Overton Window, though, readers are still being instructed not to think about sabotage, conspiracy and biochemical warfare.
The upshot of the Post piece?
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) gets “two Pinocchios” for his alleged overstatements about NIH funding of Wuhan gain-of-function research.
After the Post’s listicle treatment of relevant facts, though, if you came to a different distribution of wooden noses — say, giving a few to Dr. Anthony Fauci, instead — you could make a plausible case.
After all, when Fauci himself says that he’s not convinced that the pandemic was not human-created — despite telling Rand Paul that the senator’s facts were “entirely and completely incorrect” — we should take that not merely as a cue to accept the Post’s latest Overton Window placement.
I say, open up that window all the way.
On Medium, science writer Nicholas Wade treated the actual evidence seriously, discovering that “the science” we were fed early on — the “science” that insisted that the gain-of-function story was highly unlikely — was actually orchestrated by the NIH’s subcontractor at Wuhan.
If you smell a rat — or a bat — at this point?
Your schnozz is in working order.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: While trying to put this story to bed, The Wall Street Journal broke news that “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.”
Previous coverage: here.
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John Hancock
On May 24, 1775, John Hancock was elected president of the Second Continental Congress.
Hancock’s involvement with Samuel Adams and his radical group, the Sons of Liberty, won the wealthy merchant the dubious distinction of being one of only two Patriots (the other being Sam Adams) that the Redcoats marching to Lexington in April 1775 to confiscate Patriots’ arms were ordered to arrest. When British General Thomas Gage offered amnesty to the colonists holding Boston under siege, he excluded those same two men from his offer.
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Paul-Emile de Puydt
Does anybody want to carry out a political schism? He should be able to do so but on one condition, namely, that he will do it within his own group, affecting neither the rights nor the creed of others.
Paul-Emile de Puydt, “Panarchy” (1860).
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The Liberator
On May 23, 1788, South Carolina became the 8th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
Other May 23 events include:
* 1813: South American independence leader Simón Bolívar entered Mérida, where he was proclaimed El Libertador (“The Liberator”), leading the invasion of Venezuela.
* 1900: Sergeant William Harvey Carney became the first African American to be awarded the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in a Civil War battle fought 37 years prior, in 1863.
* 1958: Birthday of American comedian and game show host Drew Carey.
Paul Jacob on what most politicians, bureaucrats, and major news “journalists” have in common: they are not on our side.