Twisting ‘Transparency,’ Cali Weapons of Math Destruction and other commentary
From the left: Twisting ‘Transparency’
Racket News’ Matt Taibbi bewails “the shameful, dystopian corruption of the noble word transparency.” For decades it meant “giving ordinary citizens the power to see how their government operates, how taxes are spent, and whether or not public officials are complying with laws,” but: “When elite politicians and media figures speak of ‘transparency’ now, they mean giving government power to obtain ‘transparency’ into the activities of private citizens,” particularly when it comes to meddling with social media.
That yields an “unavoidable system of total non-privacy,” with justifications like “if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid.”
True transparency tools like the Freedom of Information Acts are “available to every citizen,” so: “The chief way you know the new version of transparency is a fraud is that it’s limited to ‘qualified’ researchers. We’re even seeing lately news stories sourced to some of these same ‘researchers’ complaining about having to comply with FOIA requests.”
Education beat: Cali Weapons of Math Destruction
“California’s new approach to math,” fumes The Wall Street Journal’s Faith Bottum “is as unfair as it is unserious.” New state “guidelines demand that teachers be ‘committed to social justice’ to ‘equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics’ — not with the ability to do math.
Far more important is teaching students that ‘mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist.’” It also pushed the lie “that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society.” Better to help all students succeed. “California should stop trying to turn math into a social-science course.”
From the right: The Apologies Joe Owes
President Biden recently “dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked,” notes Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. How about: “the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975,” i.e. his Afghan bugout. Or “Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a ‘minor’ invasion of Ukraine,” which led to in “more than 500,000 dead and wounded” in Putin’s subsequent war.
Biden erased “the southern border” and keeps “mum about the 100,000 fentanyl deaths from cartel-imported and Chinese-supplied drugs across his open border.” And he “continues with impunity because the media feels that a mentally challenged fabulist is preferrable to Donald Trump.”
Conservative: Biden’s Telling Pseudonyms
“The House Oversight Committee asked the National Archives for unredacted communications involving three pseudonyms Joe Biden apparently used during his vice presidency,” reports The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson. One is an email sent to a Biden pseudonym about a “phone call between then-Vice President Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in May 2016.”
Hunter Biden was copied on the email, despite the alleged “wall” between “Hunter’s foreign business schemes and his father’s duties as vice president.” Why? Because “the Bidens are corrupt.” Joe used power “to do things for wealthy foreign oligarchs who made him and his family rich.” Indeed, “Hunter’s entire business consisted in providing access to his father, who influenced policy in exchange for gobs of money.”
Libertarian: FTC Boosts Bureaucracy
The new guidelines for mergers and acquisitions proposed by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission “would ignore decades of counterintuitive academic findings about how firm concentration can have a positive impact on consumers’ welfare,” and “preemptively block private sector corporate transactions with little regard for the actual impact on consumers,” warns Vernique de Rugy at Reason.
Lowering the threshold that “requires notifying the FTC and Justice Department of a deal — to $144 million,” would see “the number of corporate mergers under serious government and political examination” to “skyrocket.” For all the ” handwringing over corporate mergers and acquisitions, they should be subject to free market forces.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
