Another milestone on the road to complete ideological capture of our scientific institutions.
When my son prepared college applications, the only standardized test he wanted to use was ACT. It covered four academic skill areas: English, mathematics, reading, and scientific reasoning.
As many of you know, my physics-oriented son figured he would do well on the scientific reasoning portion. He did well enough to be a US Air Force Academy graduate working as a physicist.
Scientific reasoning is important, as it helps discern truth from fiction and allows sensible policies based on facts and reason to be formed.
Unfortunately, the ACT organization that administers the test has figured that American students are not getting enough science in their academic experience, so the test is now optional.
In fact, the whole test has been dumbed down.
The science portion of the ACT is no longer required. When registering for the test, students will have the option to take the science section, like the writing section.
The composite score will now be the average of the English, Reading, and Math sections.
One part of the decision was that ACT wanted to align more with other standardized tests. For example, the SAT does not have a science section. Another factor in the decision-making process was student opinions.
“They got lots of feedback from students, the test takers, about what are some things that you struggle with, with the ACT, and not needing that science component was something that those students spoke to,” said Laura Clark, Rankin County School District Assessment Coordinator.
Clark served on a district advisory committee for the ACT.
Also, the entire test will be shorter. ACT cut questions from each of the required sections, cutting a total of 44 questions.
Passages in the Reading and English sections have been shortened to give students more time to focus on the question.
The step is just another milestone on the road to the complete ideological capture of our scientific institutions. Some recent Legal Insurrection articles that highlight the unintended and potentially destructive consequences of this ideological capture include:
- Study Concludes Nature’s 2020 Endorsement of Biden Hurt Trust in Science
- Former Reuters Science Writer Slams Climate Hysteria Promoted by Today’s Media
- Proof that Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Kills Innovation
- The Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Accelerates
- UN Official Says Quiet Part Out Loud: ‘We Own the Science and We Think That the World Should Know It’
The trend is continuing. In City Journal, contributing editor John Tierney reviews how the preference for DEI dogma over scientific inquiry on campuses has become increasingly prevalent. His many examples are disturbing, especially as they push clear-thinking men out of science.
Other psychologists, frustrated at the growing reluctance of journals to publish anything that offends progressives, have been quietly advising their best students to avoid this politicized discipline altogether, particularly the male students hoping to become professors.
… As today’s younger professors gain seniority and hire colleagues who share their politics and fit their preferred identity groups, fewer talented scientists will remain to tackle the difficult questions—and more scientists will be determined to stop anyone from trying.
I am glad my son can do the science that he loves. I want others who follow him to be able to do the same. I hope this trend away from scientific rigor in favor of social justice metrics can be reversed.
The Legal Insurrection team has been doing good work, but there is still much more.
Advocates of Intersectionality are at least as anti science as Young Earth Creationists. Everything must be subordinated to advocate for their deeply held belief system, and teaching the Catechism of that system is to be the sole goal of education.
I had to google “Intersectionality”. I guess that proves I’m not progressive enough to know the word. 🙂
A real troglodyte. Get with it, man!
That’s what happens to a person after you spend 50 years deep in the forest. 🙂
I lived in San Antonio Texas for 4 months. There was an intersection where (I think it was) 5 main roads came together. Was that “Intersectionality”?
(Or just a bunch of fender benders waiting to happen? 😎
Back in the ’80s, I debated with a friend of mine who became “born again” and a Creationist. Then one day he said a geologist was going to give a talk at his church so I went to it. The “geologist” explained how all the layers in the Grand Canyon formed as the Great Flood retreated. I was going to challenge the dude but I then thought – it’s their church and they can believe what they want, I guess.
Young Earth Creationists are only slightly more in tune with science than Flat Earthers.
Thank you for your ignorant hate-filled bigotry of people who you have already dismissed as not worthy to be allowed to be called “scientists’.
There have been many prominent “real” scientists throughout history and even today who were/are Creationists.
Just because you reject them because they think differently from you is no need to smear billions of people.
It is interesting to note that it is almost exclusively the Billions Of Years crowd that are unable/unwilling to support their ideas in the face of a competent Creationist and always resort to playground insults, smears , distortions and lies.
OTOH, most Creationist Scientists are educated on the plethora of Materialists arguments and know their weaknesses and outright faults.
Some of the accusations that Materialists make are simply projections of their own inability; distant star light is one example where Materialists have just a difficult time as they alleged Creationists have.
Materialists have their own Articles of Faith in terms of things like abiogenesis, ex nihilo, and the Unknown First Cause. They are many contradictory “theories” w/r/t evolution: Catastrophism, Punctuated Equilibrium, Classical vs Neo Darwinism, etc. Materialists are always coming back later changing yet another significant element of the Theory Of The Day because it contradicts something else.
Materialists often outright make rejections of the most obvious explanations simply because these rational explanations come from Creationists. One example is the mere existence of fossils. We are supposed to believe that when a critter died , all of its buddies dug a half-mile deep pit to respectfully bury their kins-critter. What is worse is that we are supposed to believe that a critter died, no scavengers came and did what all scavengers do, rather the bones laid out in the weather and waiting millions of years to be buried fully intact and proximate to its original position when the critter was 3D.
Creationists simply crack open Genesis, read about millions of dead things buried in mud layers rapidly laid down by water all over the Earth, and when we look at the physical evidence we see millions of dead things buried in mud layers rapidly laid down by water all over the Earth.
Thanks for the reminder that there are people who desire to remain willfully ignorant.
Other than needing to rewrite biology, physics (especially nuclear physics), and geology, no problems?
Really, the solution was proposed by Phillip Gosse in1857 (pre Darwin) in “Omphalos”, that the universe was created already old, showing all the signs of a history that never existed. Very few people embraced this “solution”, especially creationists.
The text in Genesis 1:2, the 1st word “was” should be translated “became”. (The 2nd “was” is not in the text.) A change happened. (The next place that form of that root word is used is in Genesis 2:7 “… and man became a living soul.”
There was a first, created “heaven and earth” as Genesis 1:1 says.
After God restored light (energy?) He separated the “waters”.
Anyway, I don’t know what kind of life existed on the 1st Earth or how long ago that happened. The Bible doesn’t say. But water was involved in it’s destruction. There may be remnants of whatever lived on that 1st Earth along with geological effects of that pre-Noah world wide flood.
(I usually try to let these topics pass here on WUWT. The Bible’s main points deal with God’s relationship with Man. It tells of the separation (and the causeer, and what God did to repair/restore it via Jesus Christ. Each person has a choice.)
False equivalence. “Creationist” != “Young Earth Creationist”. Although the latter is a subset of the former, most Creationists (as those you make note of), are not YCEs.
That’s obviously hyperbole, but IMO young-Earth creationism (belief in a 6000-year-old cosmos) is heresy: not for its error about the age of the universe, but for its error about God.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2,500,000 light years away, yet visible to the naked eye! When we look at it, we are seeing photons which traveled at the speed of light for 2.5 million years.
Even the core of our own Milky Way galaxy is about 26,000 light years away. If the light from distant stars and galaxies had really only been traveling for 6000 years, it would mean that the heavens were faked, like a painted movie set backdrop. It would mean that God created the photons en route to Earth, arranged to create the illusion of those distant stars and galaxies. It would mean God is a grand deceiver.
But Scripture tells us that the Deceiver is Satan, not God! Scripture doesn’t specify the age of the universe, but it does tell us about God’s character, and such deception would be wildly out of character for Him.
Young Earth Creationism accuses God of that grand deception, which is why it is heresy.
God gave the Hebrews a pretty good account of the ordering of creation, if you don’t get tripped up on 24-hour-day literalism.
Abrahamic religions have always told of a “moment of creation” (and secular cosmologists didn’t accept it until the 20th century): God spoke the universe into existence (at the moment of Creation). He made the heavens, then He made the Earth, then He cleared the sky to reveal the heavens. He made plants before animals, and fish before land animals, and animals before mankind.
Except for God speaking it into existence, that’s a fair fit to what modern secular science has concluded. If not by divine inspiration, how could ancient Hebrews have guessed such things? For example, why would they suppose plants or fish predated land animals?
Perhaps the reason the Genesis accounts don’t give the age of Creation is just that those revelations predated the invention of place value numbering, so there was no way to express, understand, or record such large numbers.
“God gave the Hebrews a pretty good account of the ordering of creation, if you don’t get tripped up on 24-hour-day literalism.”
What other kind of day would it be?
A better question is this: How could the ancient Hebrews express “4.5 billion years” in any of the languages of the day?
BTW, that question is also an example, in answer to your question.
Now, add in language translation issues, and a few thousand years of language evolution. Additionally, in the case of the Pentateuch, it is thought that most of the text was preserved orally, for centuries, before being written down.
Do you begin to see why strict literalism is not necessarily correct?
Even when Scripture cites explicit numbers, sometimes they represent idioms that are unfamiliar, now. For example, consider Proverbs 6:16:
16 There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
17 haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
18 a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that make haste to run to evil,
19 a false witness who breathes out lies,
and one who sows discord among brothers.
So, you might wonder, which is it? Six or seven? If you count the sins in the next three verses, you’ll find seven mentioned. But then why does verse 16 say “six?”
I think humility is a requirement for best hermeneutics, and if strong evidence shows that your interpretation of something is contrafactual, then you should probably reevaluate your interpretation.
Absolutely!
It’s not what we think but what God meant that matters.
In this instance, there is the figure of speech, Epitomising, involved.
The 6 or 7 doesn’t imply a definite list but a part of a list that could go on.
If God were travelling close to the speed of light, one of God’s days would be billions of years without relativistic time dilation.
The creation story was phrase so all could understand. One interpretation of day could also have been era, but day did not require an intense conversation.
What is interesting is Job, where God elevated Satan to his equal and allowed the all-powerful, all-knowing, everything according to his plan to be challenged and tested rather than appropriately telling Satin to go to Hell.
Creationists get tremendous flak for their belief in creationism being anti – science.
Creationism pre existed the bible and the torah and was hijacked by religious zealots. Creationism was in effect one of the best original theories on how the earth was created and was very advanced level of scientific theory of its time. during pre-historic times,what couldnt be explained by the science of the time, then one of the gods enabled it, (god of harvest , god of sun, god of fertility, etc)
The genesis story of the bible – God created the earth, then he created light (the sun) That is the big bang theory. Then god created the small animals, then god created bigger animals then on the six day god created man. – that is the theory of evolution. When you think about it, that was a very good scientific theory on the creation of the universe and evolution based on the scientific knowledge that existed 5-6k years ago,
Unfortunately, religious zealots adopted the literal 6 day creation as gospel. However, most every christian and Jewish individual consider genesis to be very compatable with the current understanding of evolution
I wonder who that geologist was. I’m aware of Dr. Steve Austin, of the “Creation Institute”. I worked with his brother back in the 80’s. Since I was a “fellow geologist” Steve sent me a copy of his book “Catastrophes in Earth History”, basically his PhD dissertation in book form. Steve is, outwardly, crazy as a loon. However, my limited communication with him was polite and reasonable. I can only think that deep down he knows he is running a con. That book, BTW, is well worth a read. It has almost no axe grinding, but is a broad compilation of papers about volcanic events, asteroid/comet events etc. Sobering stuff.
Joe, it’s best you didn’t challenge him – once in a college class I formally debated these types. I held my own – the prof called it a draw – but it was a very unpleasant experience. They think about this crap all day every day.
The story of creationism pre dated the bible/torah. It was a reasonable / very good scientific theory from 5k-6k years ago. Actually a very good theory considering the very limited scientific knowledge of the time. Also worth noting that most every early society had a theory on the creation of the earth.
The rabid creationists hijacked the theory and spun it into a “god’s word as the only truth” .
Young-Earth creationism is based on confusion. Christianity is not anti-science — but intersectionality is.
Science is not fundamentally either Left or Right. But, periodically, the Left goes to war against science. In the mid-20th century Trofim Lysenko was the communist point man in the Left’s war against science:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/548786/
Thankfully, in the 1960s the pendulum swung away from Lysenkoism. Unfortunately, it has now swung back. With the rise of intersectionality, the Left is again at war against real science.
The fake climate crisis and crazy gender politics are symptoms.
It’s the widespread antipathy toward science, itself, which is one of the main causes of the illness.
And math! Even teaching mathematics is under attack by the Left.
It is disheartening that even the U.S. National Academy of Science is piling on, in the Left’s war against science. They now actively oppose teaching the Scientific Method in K-12 (though they’re apparently not yet against teaching math). Here’s what they tell educators to teach K-12 students about the foundation of science, the Scientific Method:
That’s just wrong. The Scientific Method is the one thing which distinguishes science from other scholarship. Without the Scientific Method, there is no science. (Maybe that’s the point of opposing it.)
AWG above in this thread is definitely anti science, but conflating Creationism with Christianity is more of a theme for Creationists. Zealots of whatever flavor dislike science if it does not support their system.
I think you’re confusing “creationism” with young-Earth creationism. It’s a subset relation: we Christians are all creationists, but most scientists, regardless of whether or not they are Christians, are not young-earthers.
For a mainstream Christian perspective on climate-related issues, I commend to you The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. It is an organization of Christian scholars, many of whom are scientists:
https://cornwallalliance.org/
Read the whole thread. I mean Young Earth Creationists. I still sorta agree with the Catholic/Episcopal/etc mainstream Christian version that does not tell God what to do, or limit how He did it.
Dave, it was AWG who conflated the two. Tom was very specific to specify “young earth”.
It is hard to believe that the “dumbing down” of society is NOT intentional.
More depressing news.
I think the reasoning goes as follows. Since all science is apparently now “settled”, this means that no new science can ever be discovered. Therefore, there is no point in anybody doing science in the future. Therefore, there is no longer a need for science tests. This appears to be how the vast majority of British politicians think, since virtually none of them have any scientific knowledge at all.
“no point in anybody doing science in the future”
Supposedly in the mid 19th century, whoever was in charge of the Patent Office suggested it could be closed because everything was already invented.
It is a sad state of affairs. I’m afraid that we are witnessing the end of the Republic. It is only a matter of time.
I am now in my 80s so my only concern is for my kids and grand kids. Mostly, they don’t see it coming.
Another business trying to increase their revenue. Easier tests, more take it, more money. Any other possible real reason?
Yeah. There is another reason that you aren’t allowed to say out loud. Blacks don’t do well in anything hard like science. So the test is dumbed down.
It’s not just Blacks. At least from my experience, having been raised in the South and worked throughout most of the U.S., it’s children from families that don’t have magazines or books lying around the house and watch nothing but garbage on the TV that don’t do well in any of the hard sciences. Of course, this all get buried in the old nature vs. nurture debate in psychology that as far as I know, even when you throw in a bit of epigenetics, still remains unsettled.
You’re expressing statistical means as universal facts, which is wrong. I’ve known quite a few very brilliant people, and they come in all skin colors — and the same is true of dullards.
The problem with your statement is that Blacks, statistically, are 1 SD lower than the Whites on the IQ.
That is a fact that is not easily accepted.
They are lower, they have been lower for ages and nothing is changing, except for that gap becoming bigger.
People below 100IQ have problems with learning science. That, I think, at least is an accepted truth.
Of course you know brilliant people of all races. They do exist, just statistically in smaller number.
If we had a majority Black country we would have, by simple numbers, more brilliant Blacks than the Whites.
But then if we had a statistically Black country, we would be Africa-tier in development.
These aren’t some “rayceest” numbers. This is science.
Only your belief in facts being racists keeps you believing otherwise.
Father of genetics was stripped from his rewards, including attempts to take his Nobel prize away, by stating this and the fact thatbwe should rethink how we educade Africans and maybe realize that we are HARMING them.The guy I think knows what he is talking about.
Blacks, Hispanics, Indians(Hindu but also our Indians) etc are simply NOT as good as Whites and Asians at science and math. These are generelaizations based on science, this doesn’t make them racist.
A major factor in the IQ definition is education. If you have not read a specific piece of literature, you can not correctly answer the question and your IQ is lower.
When in conflict or doubt, lower your standards. So ACT follows academia, which follows education, which follows politics, which follows media….
Worked for the Secret Service…
If you don’t know, and are uneducated in the sciences, you have no choice but to “Trust the Scientists” proclamations about anything THEY say is as it is. You don’t know otherwise.
AKA Trust the Science of Global Warming
One must also believe sexual identity is a matter of personal opinion.
I used to like Australia for its openness and simple presentation of the truth. Unfortunately it too has been caught by the lefty woke globalists whose raison d’etre is to conceal the truth at all costs if threatens their ill conceived life style. Australia too is caught up in Agenda 21/2030. Wake up everybody before it is too late.
The push of women into STEM starting in the 90’s has born its fruit I suppose.
But didn’t most go into the Mickey Mouse sciences, rather than the hard STEM sciences.
??? You mean Social Studies, as we called them way back when?
We probably should be realistic in judging whether ACT (or SAT etc.) science exams are important / useful compared to our (at least my own) experience having graduated with undergraduate, MS and PhD degrees in engineering in the ’60s-’70s, Ohio State… and MBA University of Chicago ’85). Nowadays you can get an app for a few bucks that will do all the math and science you need.
That is both very good and very bad
calculators, excel etc have been tremondous help is performing math functions in daily business life.
Yet at the same time, those math skill are important for no other reason than being able to understand the concept. ie we know 2+2 = 4 but knowing why 2+2=4 is vastly more important.
Its the skill set of knowing and understanding the why that is important. Extremely advantagous to understand the whys of science and recognize
In today’s progressive world, 2+2=5 or any other number that seems fair to the oppressed people of the world.
What does 2+2 identify as? What value was it assigned at birth?
New math: 1 + 1 = 2; How do you FEEL about that?
Will those apps produce the wealth we need or fight wars for us? I didn’t think so.
“Nowadays you can get an app for a few bucks that will do all the math and science you need.” Yea, but you still couldn’t make change without a modern cash register, and even then you couldn’t verify the answer. Kind of goes back to the discussion I had with science teacher a few days ago, where I suggested they aught to do away with calculators and smart phones in class and only allow slide rules. The kids would develop a lot more usable knowledge :<)
Danley, are you talking about Wolfram Alpha? If so, I think you overestimate its capabilities.
If not, please share your recommendations for such apps!
I was taught by my parents to do math in my head. Why? So I could make sure my change was correct, so I could assess if I punched in the numbers in my calculator correctly, so I could get an idea if I made a coding error in software.
Independent verification.
FWIW – I run a small CPA firm.
When interviewing new hires, I have found the best indicator of future success is their math ACT score (not the SAT score) and the 8th or 9th grade algebra grades. The ACT score and algebra grades seem to have much better predictor than their college GPA.
In the ’70s, I was teaching at Foothill College (Los Altos Hills, Calf.) 50% of the students received A’s and B’s. It was very rare to flunk anyone, and even D’s were rare. A 5-level ranking system was effectively reduced to 3 levels. It is not surprising that the college GPA has little predictive value because it has so little variance.
fwiw – in my industry ( accounting and taxation), the mathematical skills to solve for the unknown and/or the ability to recognize when you have bad numbers is a very useful skill set. Its those guys and girls that excel – likely very true in other professions that require a lot of math (accounting is mostly arithmetic).
I will also add that the ability to recognize when you have numbers comes in handy in multiple situations. Its one of the reasons I spotted so many flawed masking studies and flawed pro covid vaccination studies.
It’s one of the reasons I spotted so many flawed anti-vax claims. For example:
https://sealevel.info/covid.html#wt01
I find the widespread resistance to Covid vaccines quite odd. Few people are passionately opposed to vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pneumonia, chickenpox/shingles, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, pneumonia, hep-B, or even flu. But they’re very afraid of Covid vaccination, even though Covid vaccination is clearly much more valuable than flu vaccination, for most people. It makes no sense.
The annual Covid infection pattern seems to be settling into a medium spike in summers, followed by a bigger spike around the Christmas holidays. Right now we’re near the peak of the summer spike (probably just past it). This month or next would be a very good time to get a Covid jab, with one of the updated “2024-25” versions, ahead of the probable end-of-year surge in cases.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveillance
There’s good reason to think that heterologous vaccination gives better protection than getting the same vaccine over and over, so my next Covid jab will probably be Novavax. On Friday (Aug 30, 2024) the FDA finally gave EUA authorization for the updated Novavax protein subunit (non-mRNA) Covid vaccine. So it’ll probably be arriving in pharmacies a bit later than the Moderna & Pfizer vaccines, which are just now starting to be available. But all three should be available before the holidays.
(Aside: I’ve been trying to get a Novavax jab for nearly four years! I was in Novavax’s “PREVENT-19” Phase 3 trial in 2020, but it turned out I got the placebo.)
I am not anti covid vax – I definitely think that those who are at risk should have gotten vaxed.
However , I definitely think those who are not at risk should definitely not get vaxed. Children and healthy adults. At age 65, I chose not to get vaxed, initially because I wanted to see how the new vaxed played out, then in the spring I chose not to get vaxed since the spring and summer were the natural downside of the typical wave. I suspected, but did not know at that time that the vax effective life was short in the April may june time frame of 2021. In july august, it was becoming well known that the effective life of the vax was 6 months. At that point I was also aware that the immunity from natural infection was stronger than the immunity from the vax. I also compared my risk of serious illness from being unvaxed vs the level of illness from catching covid after being vaxed. The difference was too small to justify getting the vax. It turned out correct which in my case, since my fever at 100.5 lasted only 4 hours with an additional 30 hours with a fever between 99.0 to 99.5.
For the current vaccines available in the U.S. (Moderna, Pfizer, Novavax) I don’t think it is correct that, “immunity from natural infection was stronger than the immunity from the vax,” unless your prior infection happened to be a closer match to the currently circulating strains than the vaccination was. Both forms of induced immunity are extremely effective against a matching strain, both are only partially effective against other strains, and both fade in effectiveness somewhere around the six month mark.
In any event, that’s the wrong comparison to make, if you’re trying to decide whether to get vaccinated. Vaccination has two huge advantages over acquiring immunity “the hard way,” and neither of those advantages is strength of immunity.
1. If you acquire immunity by vaccination, you’re not infectious, and the process of acquiring immunity poses no danger to other people.
2. Vaccination is much safer than infection, for you, too. The risks of serious side effects are very low with vaccination, even for people with many risk factors, like old age, obesity, and lung conditions. The risks of serious harm are much higher with infection.
Even if you’re a 20 year old athlete, in perfect health, with no risk factors at all, if you infect your neighbor or grandmother, and she dies or suffers from long covid as a result, that’s a very real cost. Of course vaccination does not eliminate that risk, but it does reduce it. Too many people ignore that risk (or don’t understand it) when evaluating whether or not to get vaccinated against infectious diseases like Covid.
The bottom line is that vaccination reduces overall risks, in most cases.
“1. If you acquire immunity by vaccination, you’re not infectious, and the process of acquiring immunity poses no danger to other people.”
Dave – that is absolutely not true. There is an email string between pfizer’s people and Brix(?) as I recall in the Oct 2020 time frame where they discuss the fact that the vax will not stop infection or transmission.
For the current vaccines available in the U.S. (Moderna, Pfizer, Novavax) I don’t think it is correct that, “immunity from natural infection was stronger than the immunity from the vax,”
Dave – I am fully aware of several studies making that claim. However, those studies are dubious. The studies reports read like advocacy papers, and the raw data doesnt support the claim. One study in particular points out the dubious nature of the study which is the Kentucky health dept study circa summer 2021. Granted it was an early study, but their errors were bad; comparing breakthrough infections for 6 months vs reinvections for a 18 month period, bad denominator in their computation, using a bogus “control group”. The two studies I saw in 2024 making that claim were likewise dubious, they lacked the ability to determine the accuracy of the population with breakthrough or reinfections which make any result conclusion worthless, even if they had good data to work with, the criteria on the severity of the reinfection or breakthrough infection was based on subjective standards and not objection standards. As stated, they were written as advocacy papers.
Dave – Your second point is also quite dubious.
“unless your prior infection happened to be a closer match to the currently circulating strains than the vaccination was. Both forms of induced immunity are extremely effective against a matching strain, both are only partially effective against other strains, and both fade in effectiveness somewhere around the six month mark.”
natural infection almost always provides both stronger and broader immunity against future strains.
“Of course vaccination does not eliminate that risk, but it does reduce it.”
Are you able to characterize the risk reduction in some objective way?
Or are you not able?
Dave – Its astonishing that your statement gets repeated as fact in spite of the overwhelming evidence that its a complete fabrication.
“1. If you acquire immunity by vaccination, you’re not infectious, and the process of acquiring immunity poses no danger to other people.”
A clue to the overwhelming evidence is the number of people with breakthrough infections – 90%+ of vaxed individuals have gotten covid subsequent to being vaxed.
Anecdotal only, but my experience:
My family didn’t get the vax. Since 2020, I have had actual identified Covid once and a total of two colds (counting that), both mild.
All the people I know who did get it have had covid multiple times.
Allowing the immune system to get exercised is healthy.
“Science” is optional with some ‘scientists’ as well.
Not really. Science has been redesigned, as in the chart which appears above (on my screen but maybe not on all):
The scientific method and climate science = Observation – Pattern – Tentative Hypothesis – Theory.
Note that testing has been removed from the scientific method. Now science is on steroids, with no obstacles to creation of an enormous range of new theories, all of which can coexist for ever, no matter how incompatible they are. Science teaching has similarly been made much more exciting and productive – teachers can pick from the full range of theories the ones they like, and teach just those.
And if you think I’m joking, please note: it is already happening, but with one important variation – ir’s not the teachers who choose, it’s the person behind the curtain.
IMHO, the real explanation for this change is not given in the above article, but as follows:
ACT, the nonprofit testing company that administers its namesake college admissions exam to hundreds of thousands of high school students every year, was acquired by Nexus Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based private equity investment firm in April 2024, and converted into a for-profit company.
How does one increase the popularity of its product, and thus increase sales? . . . why, make it more “friendly” and appealing and “easier” to use.
In short, as always, follow the money.
Why have science when you can just make shit up that fits your narrative? Much easier and more convenient. Probably gets more grants, too.
Some of you may remember John Tierney from his columns in the science section of the NY Times — he is now at the City Journal. The more intellectually concerned should read his piece DEI v. Science. If you have the time, I recommend The WHO’s Power Grab as well.
Science is hard. Scientific reasoning is harder.
Scientific reasoning is basically Critical Thinking, without which even the highly educated act like Beer-swizling-Joe-and-Jane-Blows — following every popular meme (or opposing every popular meme) without thinking at all.
Sounds like she has a problem with the English portion.
. . . also this needed correction “. . . some things that
youthey struggle with . . .”Likely the main reason she ended up as School District Assessment Coordinator . . . anyone recall the “Peter Principle” that became popular some 40–50 years ago?
“Lots” is a really precise measure.
Who needs science? We have Google search and multiple AI chatbots to give us the answers.
Sure, Google and the chatbots probable have about the same level of correctness too. What’s it, probably something like 80% to 85% incorrect :<)
Rather than fix our broken education system, we dumbed down the requirements. We redefined failure as success. It’s rumored some school systems hold back high achievers to keep the average students from looking too bad.
We must abolish the Department of Education. The teachers’ unions are not interested in educating kids. Schools must once again become education centers, not indoctrination centers. Social engineering, DEI and wokeness must be abolished.
Call to action — End the DOE and provide school choice for all.
“…some school systems hold back high achievers to keep the average students from looking too bad” It’s called ‘teaching to the lowest common denominator’ (aka: dumbing down) and has been pushed on schools by the Department of Education since the ’60s or ’70s :<)
“The step is just another milestone on the road to the complete ideological capture of our scientific institutions. Some recent Legal Insurrection articles that highlight the unintended and potentially destructive consequences of this ideological capture include:
****************
Regarding the political and ideological takeover of science, we have the term Lysenkoism from the days of the old Soviet Union and Stalin:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/kleelerner/publications/lysenkoism-deadly-mix-pseudoscience-and-political-ideology
“The disastrous effects of Lysenkoism — a term used to describe the impact of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko’s influence upon science and agriculture in the Soviet Union during the first half of the 20th century — darkly illustrates the perils of intruding politics and ideology into the affairs of science.”
I can lower my head in despair at the notion that history might be repeating itself here today.
As a six Day Creationist I really don’t mind that y’all think we’re mental. Y’all changed from a position of Gradualism to Punctuated Equilibrium and kept on extending the age of the Cosmos in order to fit your Theories and we didn’t (well I didn’t) anathematize you. Do you put the works of Wilder Smith and Behe into the same junk science Room reserved for us Yokels?
Wilder who? And Behe who?
/sarc
Now, you were saying something about being “mental” . . .
There is one certain way of destroying a civilization. Just see to it that the next generation is not fully educated.
just making kids stupid
“In fact, the whole test has been dumbed down.”
Maybe the woke DEI policies are to blame?
Here is an illuminating article on the subject of dumbing down higher education…
Is it time to abolish college grades entirely? Why American universities are handing out too many A’s. Has grade inflation rendered GPA meaningless in higher education?
https://www.techspot.com/news/104630-time-abolish-college-grades-entirely-why-american-universities.html