Boris Pistorius’ appointment to the German Ministry of Defense contravenes Chancellor Scholz’s pledge for a gender-equal cabinet…
With Boris Pistorius set to be sworn in as Germany’s latest defense minister on Thursday, several politicians, including some within Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s own party, expressed their fury that the federal government will once again be a majority-male cabinet.
With Pistorius set to replace the outgoing Christine Lambrecht, whose reign at the German Ministry of Defense was littered with PR disasters and incompetence, the make-up of the federal government will be male-orientated — 9 males to 7 females.
The move temporarily contravenes a pledge made by then-Vice Chancellor Scholz in 2020, who tweeted:
“I am making the promise here today: At least half of the cabinet that I lead as Federal Chancellor is made up of women!”
Common sense suggests that competence should take precedence over gender quotas, particularly at a time of crisis, and Scholz believes his new man for defense has the “experience, competence, and assertiveness” needed to be “the right person for the Bundeswehr at this pivotal time.”
Other politicians, however, disagree, saying Scholz’s decision to appoint a man to the job is a dereliction of his electoral pledge for gender equality.
Maria Noichl, the chair of the Working Group of Social Democratic Women (ASF) and a member of Scholz’ SPD, demanded:
“Fifty-fifty must continue to apply. That is what the SPD stands for.”
Left-wing MP Emilia Fester, of the German Greens, tweeted on Tuesday:
“Is the Chancellor afraid of more competent women at his cabinet table? Pity!”
Transgender Greens MP Nyke Slawik blasted the fact that “several extremely qualified women were interviewed” for the role, but Scholz opted for Pistorius, adding:
“It’s a shame that the chancellor and the SPD gave up the goal they had set for themselves: parity in the cabinet.”
Sven-Christian Kindler, also of the Greens, quipped that “parity in management positions is not a ‘nice thing to have.’ It should be a matter of course in 2023.” Meanwhile, his party’s co-leader, Omid Nouripour, added, “We Greens will always make our contribution to parity — also in the cabinet.”
On Wednesday, government spokesperson Wolfgang Büchner was cited in the German tabloid Bild, insisting a “good and effective” personnel decision had been made. But he also alluded to the idea that gender parity in the cabinet may have to be restored.
The German tabloid highlighted, however, that not a single male minister in the cabinet had wanted to go on record to reveal they would be willing to make their position available to an equally qualified woman.
Pistorius will soon have the unenviable task of attempting to repair his country’s image among its Western allies as he takes charge of an ailing Bundeswehr. His challenges include overhauling the country’s security policy, but he must also face international calls to approve the sending of heavy-armored battle tanks to Kyiv, a move the Chancellor has so far refrained from making.
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.
Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.
As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:
A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.
Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.
Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.
As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.
What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.
It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.
Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.
The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.
The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.
The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.
Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.
Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”
In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.
We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.
Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.
Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.
As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.
As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.
On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.
The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.
After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.
Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.
Long Chinese Stocks Seen Among Most-Crowded Trades
By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets live reporter and analyst
What a difference two months can make. In November, selling short Chinese stocks was considered by fund managers in a Bank of America survey as one of the most crowded trades. Now, bullish bets on Chinese equities made the list. It underscores the tremendous volatility Chinese assets have endured in recent months.
The BofA survey published this week showed that 12% of investors believed going long Chinese equities was one of the most-popular positions in global markets. It trailed only long-dollar and long-ESG positions, which garnered 32% and 17% of the votes, respectively. Two months ago, fund managers considered betting against Chinese stocks to be the second-most crowded trade after long-dollar positions.
The 180-degree shift in sentiment is hardly a surprise. Until late October, investors had been dumping Chinese assets as Covid restrictions sank the economy and President Xi Jinping installed his loyalists to the top leadership at the Party Congress. Over the past two months, China abandoned the Covid Zero policy, propped up the ailing housing market and turned more supportive on tech companies. Since hitting the lowest since 2009 in late October, the Hang Seng Index has jumped 48% in dollar terms as the best performer among the world’s major stock benchmarks.
A crowded position is generally viewed as a negative. When many investors are positioned the same way, there’s no marginal new buyers to push the market higher. And when the fundamental story changes and everyone heads for the exit, it exacerbates the selloff.
So should we be worried about investors being too sanguine? Not necessarily.
On the positioning front, the BofA survey does show fund managers are “unabashedly bullish” on China. A net 91% of fund managers expect a stronger Chinese economy, the highest percentage in 17 years.
In a separate survey of Asian managers, 42% said they are overweight China, up from 14% in October. In addition, 90% of them think Chinese stocks can deliver positive returns this year, even if US equities fall.
Still, it’s debatable whether the perception of China being crowded is accurate. While Asian investors are more bullish, US investors haven’t been fully on board with the “everything is great” narrative. A recent Morgan Stanley analysis showed that American fund managers have actually kept their underweight positions on China unchanged in recent months.
Secondly, there’s no clear catalyst to threaten the China recovery narrative when people are just returning to their work and when the policy objective is to get the economy going again. Until the recovery is well underway, it’s hard to prove the markets’ expectations on growth are unreasonable.
But leaving aside the question of whether the China trade is crowded or not, the volatility that the Chinese markets has shown over the past year clearly reduces the attractiveness for long-term investors.
After Teacher Shot By 6-Year-Old, Staff And Parents Blame Tolerance Of Violent Kids
Shock over the shooting of a teacher by a 6-year-old in Newport News, Virginia has turned into anger, as both parents and staff say district officials tolerate violent students to bolster school ratings.
On Jan. 6, a first-grader fired a single pistol shot at his 24-year-old teacher, Abby Zwermer. A bullet passed through her hand and into her chest, sending her to a hospital with a life-threatening wound. Last week, school officials say a staff member searched the shooter’s backback earlier that morning — after someone tipped them to the possibility he was armed — but didn’t find the weapon.
Tuesday brought the first board meeting of Newport News Public Schools since the incident — and a stream of angry teachers and parents took to the podium to condemn a culture in which the pursuit of favorable district statistics means fostering an increasingly dangerous environment.
Former school psychologist Amber Thomas left the district after a 10-year career. “A school counselor and I were often called to intervene with explosive behaviors, and the administrator would see what was going on and turn around and walk the other way,” Thomas told the board.
“We see students being assaulted (and) we see teachers being assaulted…daily,” said elementary teacher Djifa Lee. “[Disciplinary] referrals are so closely tied to accreditation, and this puts educators and office staff or administrators in a tough position.”
A former employee told WAVY that, on multiple occasions, she initiated disciplinary referrals, but administrators failed to schedule follow-up meetings with parents and teachers. She says peers had similar experiences.
“Every day in every one of our schools, teachers, students and other staff members are being hurt,”said high school librarian Nicole Cooke. “Every day, they’re hit. They’re bitten. They’re beaten. And [violent children] are allowed to stay so that our numbers look good.”
In a November board meeting, the district touted a 40% decline in disciplinary incidents and a 19% decrease in students being removed from instruction.
“Ask any teacher in this school division why discipline incidents decline, and I have a feeling the response will be the same: Infraction numbers are down because incidents are not always officially reported,” said Cindy Connell, a middle school teacher in the district.
Wary of officials’ focus on making the district’s statistics look better, Sarah Marchese, president of a high school Parent Teacher Student Association, asked for an external investigation of the disciplinary policies to be reviewed by an outside, impartial party.
“Our administrators are under an intense pressure to make everything appear better than it is in reality,” Connell told AP.
The incident was the third shooting in the district since September 2021. “Enough is enough. What will it take? I pray it is not a fourth shooting, because that blood will be on your hands,” said parent John Krikorian.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) didn’t include serious adverse events like heart inflammation on post-vaccination surveys even though the agency knew the issues could be linked to COVID-19 vaccines, documents show.
Even before the surveys were rolled out in December 2020 after the first vaccines were authorized, the CDC knew that myocarditis—a form of heart inflammation since confirmed as being caused by the Pfizer and Moderna shots—and other serious adverse events were of “special interest” when it came to the vaccines, according to a newly disclosed version of the protocol for the survey system.
The Nov. 19, 2020, protocol (pdf) for V-safe, the survey system, lists myocarditis, stroke, death, and a dozen “prespecified medical conditions.” The protocol was obtained by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), a nonprofit that seeks transparency around health information. All of the conditions can cause severe symptoms.
V-safe is a system of surveys that was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor vaccine safety. It was developed and is managed by the CDC.
Updated versions of the protocol list the same 15 adverse events.
None of the conditions were included in the actual surveys.
Respondents could check boxes if they experienced certain symptoms, but only 10 lower-level problems such as fever and nausea were listed as options.
“It’s deeply troubling that the CDC would construct V-safe in a manner that does not permit it to be able to easily assess the rate of harm from adverse events the CDC had already identified as potentially being caused by these products,” Aaron Siri, a lawyer representing ICAN, told The Epoch Times. “This calls into question what the CDC was really trying to accomplish with V-safe. Was it trying to assess the actual safety of these products? Or was it trying to design a system that would be more likely to affirm its previous public pronouncements regarding the safety of these products?”
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
V-Safe Data Finally Made Public
The CDC rolled V-safe out in December 2020. Americans were told to use the surveys, which are only available through smartphones, to report how they felt after vaccination.
“Through V-safe, you can quickly tell CDC if you have any side effects after getting the COVID-19 vaccine,” one poster promoting the tool stated.
Users were asked how they felt, whether they had a fever, their temperature, and common symptoms. They were also asked whether they were unable to work or go about their daily activities, and whether they needed medical care.
About 10 million people signed up through July 31, 2022.
The CDC has described the results of V-safe inmultiplestudies, but refused to release the raw data until ICAN brought litigation against it. Data released to ICAN in October 2022 showed that more than 3.2 million people sought medical attention or missed school, work, or other normal activities following vaccination.
The CDC posted some of the v-safe data on Dec. 1, 2022, several months after a self-imposed deadline passed.
Hiding Free-Text Entries
V-safe users could report the serious adverse events, but only if they wrote them out in a free-text field.
The prompt was, “Any other symptoms or health conditions you want to report.”
The CDC has resisted releasing the results from the field, insisting that it would be too onerous to review the 6.8 million entries for personally identifiable information (PII), according to a joint status report made to the court in November 2022.
The agency declined a request from ICAN to provide a random sample of a few hundred entries, which plaintiffs say would back their argument that the entries likely hold little or no PII such as names and addresses.
The entries are important because they would show how many respondents reported experiencing the prespecified adverse events like heart inflammation.
The CDC instead offered to review all the entries and convert them into medical codes, according to the filing.
“It was apparently willing to do this because, even though it would have been more time consuming and complex then simply reviewing for PII, this approach would permit the CDC to hide from the public most of what is actually written in the free-text fields,” ICAN said in the document.
US Finalizing Next Ukraine Military Aid Package At $2.6 Billion
The US is in the final stages of preparing a massive new military aid package to Ukraine which will total as much as $2.6 billion, the Associated Press previewed Wednesday night, and its to include nearly 100 Stryker combat vehicles – marking the first time the Stryker will be introduced to the Ukrainian battlefield – and at least 50 Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
It could be announced by the end of the week, and is expected to rank among the biggest single packages unveiled since the start of the war. When pressed for further details, State Department spokesman Ned Price simply said, “Two words: stay tuned.”
Similar to Bradley vehicles, the Stryker moves infantry across the battlefield, but are lighter and faster than the Bradley. “What we’re trying to look at is the mix of armored and mechanized forces that make sense,” undersecretary of defense for policy Colin Kahl said separately on Wednesday.
“The Russians are really digging in. They’re digging in. They’re digging trenches, they’re putting in these dragon’s teeth, laying mines. They’re really trying to fortify that that FLOT, that forward line of troops,” Kahl continued.
“To enable the Ukrainians to break through given Russian defenses, the emphasis has been shifted to enabling them to combine fire and maneuver in a way that will prove to be more effective.”
But the real question is whether Washington will sign off on going past the ‘light tanks’ or mere troop carriers that it has currently limited itself to providing. The Scholz government of Germany surprised allies this week in saying it’s ready to approve sending German-manufactured Leopard tanks to Ukraine only if Washington leads the way in approving its own heavy tanks.
“Germany won’t allow allies to ship German-made tanks to Ukraine to help its defense against Russia nor send its own systems unless the U.S. agrees to send American-made battle tanks, senior German officials said on Wednesday,” according to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
But given Berlin knew that the Biden administration has shut the door on approving American M1 Abrams (at least for now), this could have been a ploy to effectively end the debate and take the pressure off the Scholz government.
Auto Crisis Worsens As Rate Of Severely Delinquent Loans Hits 2009 Levels
An alarming number of Americans with auto loans are struggling to make monthly payments. Auto loan performance saw further deterioration in December, and loan delinquencies jumped. Of all loans, severely delinquent ones have reached the highest rate since the financial crisis about 15 years ago.
New bone-chilling data via Cox Automotive sheds light on the rapidly deteriorating auto loan market. The report said loans delinquent by more than two months increased by 5.3% and jumped 26.7% from a year ago.
People are not paying their car loans.
Auto loans delinquent (overdue) by MORE than 60 days are now up *26.7%* from a year ago.
Not a crisis just yet but watch this trend closely.
Of all loans, 1.84% were severely delinquent, which was an increase from 1.74% in November and the highest rate since February 2009.
In December, 7.11% of subprime loans were severely delinquent, increasing from 6.75% the prior month. The subprime severe delinquency rate was 163 basis points higher than a year ago, and the December rate was the highest in the data series back to 2006.
Cox Automotive said even though an increasing amount of people are missing loan payments — this has yet to manifest into defaults:
Loan defaults declined 13.5% from November but were up 16.9% from a year ago. The annualized auto loan default rate in December was 2.56%, which was lower than the 2.98% rate in December 2019. The default rate in 2022 was 2.28%, up from a low of 1.98% last year but still lower than the 2.90% rate in 2019.
And perhaps the reason why defaults have yet to surge is that lenders don’t consider the borrower to be in default until 90 to 120 days late of insufficient payments. This might suggest that a default wave could be hitting over the next few quarters as consumers are tapped out by 20 months of negative real wave growth, depleted personal savings, and maxed-out credit cards. All those folks who bought cars they didn’t need nor could afford with +$1,000 monthly payments during Covid will be financially ruined when the next recession hits.
Over a million children left public schools in 2020, a migration that came on the heels of school lockdowns and masking requirements, and was hastened by increased parental dissatisfaction with K-12 education.
Enrollment in U.S. public schools declined by 1.4 million students between fall 2019 and fall 2020, dipping to 49.4 million, a loss of nearly 3 percent, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
The decline may be closer to 2 million, according to a report by Education Next showing that traditional public school enrollment as a percentage of all school enrollment declined sharply between 2020 and 2022.
Enrollment in traditional public schools fell from 81 to 76.5 percent of total enrollment during that period, while enrollment in public charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling grew by a combined 4.5 percent.
Those numbers indicate that nearly 2 million students left traditional public schools for other educational options over the previous three years.
In many cases, the disruption in learning due to COVID-19 policies was the catalyst many parents needed to make the jump away from public schools to charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling.
Based on recent enrollment figures and the comfort many parents express with their decision to opt out of public schools, it appears the missing millions will not return.
Dissatisfaction With Learning
Parent satisfaction with K-12 education plunged between 2019 and 2022, according to GALLUP. Prior to the onset of COVID-19, 51 percent of parents said they were either completely or somewhat satisfied with their child’s education. Three years later, that satisfaction level was 42 percent, the lowest in over 20 years.
Nearly a quarter of Americans, 23 percent, said they were completely dissatisfied with their child’s education.
Parent interviews conducted by The Epoch Times revealed that distance learning during school lockdowns provided a glimpse into the classroom that made parents question their school’s ability to educate their children.
“For a while, [our kids] were getting homework assigned to them by their teachers … but there was no teaching going on,” Matt Mohler of Tallahassee, Florida, said. He moved his children from a highly public school to a classical charter school in the fall of 2020.
“Once a week they’d all get together on a classroom call, and that was the extent of what the teachers were doing. We realized that we weren’t getting a lot of effort out of the teachers.”
“The distance learning was eye-opening,” said Maria Nicholas of Whittier, California, who began homeschooling her son in the fall of 2021. She said she would not have considered homeschooling if not for the lockdown, but seeing how her middle-school son thrived while at home rather than in the classroom was a factor in her decision.
Shireen Qudosi of Orange County, California, took her autistic son out of public school in October 2020. “There wasn’t even a functioning curriculum in place, which access into the classroom through remote learning confirmed.”
Mask and Vaccine Requirements
In January 2022, 65 percent of public schools tracked by data site Burbio had student masking requirements. Parent and student protests against mandatory masking erupted that month in New York, California, and Massachusetts.
The combination of public school mask policies and state vaccine mandates drove some parents to seek alternatives.
Longtime home-schooler Christine Hamman saw an influx of parents to her home-school group during the last two years. “COVID added people who are anti-vax and anti-masking,” she said. “Mostly, parents didn’t want their kids masked for six hours a day.”
“When SB 276 was signed, we realized we’d be homeschooling all of our children,” said Sara Cruz, speaking of a California law expanding vaccine requirements for schoolchildren. Cruz began home-schooling during the current school year.
“I’m on the other end of this spectrum,” Nicholas said.
“I’m for it, and I would like more people to have it,” she said, but seeing the number of people unmasked and unvaccinated at her school caused concern for her son’s health. “I thought they weren’t doing enough to keep the kids safe,” she said, which was a factor in her choice to withdraw.
Other reasons for leaving public schools included concern over appropriate teaching on social issues like sex, gender, and drug abuse, as well as student safety.
Parents don’t want their children exposed to the “radical indoctrination that the public schools are doing,” J. Allen Weston, Executive Director of the American Home School Association, told The Epoch Times.
“The school had a ‘Say No to Drugs’ campaign, but they were going into detail on what drugs were out there,” Mohler said, speaking of his daughter’s second-grade class.
“If they’re going to learn about that, they’re going to learn about that from me.”
Other parents expressed concern over bullying, the stress created by active-shooter drills, and the availability of sexual content on smartphones carried by other students.
Where They Went
Most parents who opted out of public schools over the last few years chose other educational options for their kids. Homeschooling was the choice for many, though the number of children enrolled is difficult to estimate.
“It is impossible to know the exact numbers because more than half of the states do not require parents to register as homeschoolers. Or if they are required, then the state does not keep count,” Weston said. He reported that his organization grew by a factor of 20 over the last three years.
Heather Martinson, the founder of Celebration Education home-school co-op, told The Epoch Times the Facebook group for homeschoolers in her area tripled to 12,000 members since January 2020.
Public charter schools, which had more than doubled to 3.4 million in the preceding decade, enrolled another 270,000 students between 2019 and 2021, according to the National Association of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS).
Private school enrollment grew as well, adding over 500,000 in 2020 reach 11.1 million, according to data site Statista. A study by the CATO Institute shows that more private schools gained enrollment than lost it during 2020-21.
Some students who left public schools in 2020 entered the workforce. About 2 million students dropped out of high school that year, according to NCES.
In 2017, the NCES found that 47 percent of high school dropouts were employed. If the percentage remained similar in 2020, that would mean over 900,000 students left school for work that year.
Other Shifts
Though not reflected in national totals, public school enrollment in large cities has been in decline for up to 20 years in some cases. These losses appear to be driven more by demographic changes than by parents opting out of public schools.
Enrollment in Denver public schools dropped 3 percent from 2019 to 2021, a change driven in part by low birth rates and a shrinking population, according to education news site Chalkbeat.
New York City’s public school enrollment decreased by some 38,000 students in 2020, but 9,376 of them simply crossed the river to New Jersey according to the website Gothamist. More than 5,100 students moved from New York to Pennsylvania that year, and another 5,600 to Florida.
Also, the population of New York state was in decline during that time. The state lost over 350,000 to domestic migration between July 2020 and July 2021.
Enrollment in Los Angeles public schools has dropped 42 percent since the early 2000s, according to the online publication EdSource. LA Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told journalists in July that recent losses are attributable partly to people moving to other states because of political ideology or the desire for lower taxes.
Return Unlikely
Relatively few students who withdrew from public school in 2020 have returned so far. Public school enrollment rebounded just 0.2 percent in 2021, including first-time enrollees, and remains at its lowest level since 2010.
Parents who made the choice to withdraw from public school during the last two years are highly satisfied with their choice, according to a report from NAPCS.
Nearly 90 percent of families who changed school types experienced a positive change as a result of the switch, with 57 percent saying their child was happier, according to NAPCS.
Egg Seizures Skyrocket At US Border As Arbitrageurs Attempt To Capitalize On Poultry Crisis
America’s egg shortage worsens by the week. Supermarkets nationwide are running out of eggs as prices hyperinflate. Egg arbitrage is rising as people attempt to smuggle egg and poultry products across Mexico–US border for resale in the States where they can reap hefty profits.
Eggs in rural Mexico!
100.00 pesos = USD 5.33 for a flat
3.80 pesos for six eggs = .20 cents USD
I think I need to get into the egg smuggling business! pic.twitter.com/6Qk7JEfctS
US Customs and Border Protection reported a 108% increase in egg and poultry seizures at land ports on the border from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31. The uptick in egg smuggling comes as retail prices erupt in the US as the avian flu forced producers to cull tens of millions of birds and egg-laying hens over the last year.
“My advice is, don’t bring them over.
“If you fail to declare them or try to smuggle them, you face civil penalties,” said CBP Supervisory Agriculture Specialist Charles Payne
Egg seizures are so rampant that CBP tweeted that smugglers will be slapped with $10,000 fines.
The San Diego Field Office has recently noticed an increase in the number of eggs intercepted at our ports of entry. As a reminder, uncooked eggs are prohibited entry from Mexico into the U.S. Failure to declare agriculture items can result in penalties of up to $10,000. pic.twitter.com/ukMUvyKDmL
— Director of Field Operations Jennifer De La O (@DFOSanDiegoCA) January 18, 2023
People have realized there are huge profits in buying a 30-count carton of eggs at $3.40 in Juarez, Mexico, and reselling them in the US.
It’s only a matter of time before cartels figure out about this lucrative trade.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) played a direct role in policing permissible speech on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Confidential emails obtained by Reason show that Facebook moderators were in constant contact with the CDC, and routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.
For a broader analysis of the federal government’s pandemic-era efforts to suppress free speech—and whether they violated the First Amendment—see Reason‘s March 2023 cover story on the ramifications of these emails. This article provides screenshots of the emails themselves.
After Elon Musk took control of Twitter, he permitted several independent journalists to peruse the company’s previous communications with the FBI, the CDC, the White House, and government officials elsewhere. These disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, reveal that government bureaucrats put substantial pressure on Twitter to restrict alleged misinformation relating to elections, Hunter Biden, and COVID-19.
The Facebook Files, which were obtained by Reason as a result of the state of Missouri’s lawsuit against the Biden administration, reveal that the CDC had substantial influence over what users were allowed to discuss on Meta’s platforms: Facebook and Instagram.
The messages reveal an environment where the CDC kept tabs on Meta’s moderation practices and regularly told the company what the agency wanted it to do.
For instance, in May 2021, CDC officials began routinely vetting claims about COVID-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook. The platform left it up to the federal government to determine which assertions were accurate.
Facebook’s moderator notes that some of the above claims “would already be violating”—an implicit admission that the CDC’s opinion on the other claims would be a deciding factor in whether the platform would restrict such content. Facebook was clearly a willing participant in this process; moderators repeatedly thanked the CDC for its “help in debunking.”
Claims vetted by the CDC included whether “COVID-19 is man-made.” The CDC told Facebook that it was “theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely.”
For months, it was Meta policy to prohibit users from asserting that the pandemic may have originated from a lab leak. The platform revised this policy around the same time that the above email exchange took place.
By July 2021, the CDC wasn’t just evaluating which claims it thought were false, but whether they could “cause harm.”
Then, in November, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for children to receive Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Meta proudly informed the CDC that it would remove false claims—”i.e. the COVID vaccine is not safe for kids”—from Facebook and Instagram. Meta also provided the CDC with a list of new claims about vaccines and asked whether the government thought they could “contribute to vaccine refusals.”
The CDC determined that this label applied to all such claims.
It’s important to consider the ramifications. Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police COVID-19 misinformation on the platforms; the CDC took the position that essentially any erroneous claim could contribute to vaccine hesitancy and cause social harm. This was a recipe for a vast silencing across Facebook and Instagram, at the federal government’s implicit behest.
Meta frequently gave the CDC lists of pandemic-related topics that had gone viral, seeking guidance on how to handle them. And the CDC informed Meta “to be on the lookout” for misinformation stemming from specific alleged misconceptions.
Meta also kept the CDC apprised of criticism of Anthony Fauci, the White House’s COVID-19 advisor and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). One email warned the CDC that Facebook users were mocking Fauci for changing his mind about masking and double-masking. The CDC replied that this information was “very helpful.”
If the tone of Meta’s communications seems overly friendly, it’s worth noting that staffers viewed government employees at the CDC as their “colleagues.” In one email, Meta discussed providing said colleagues with access to a “reporting channel” for COVID-19 misinformation. The list of individuals with access included CDC staff, as well as employees at Reingold, a communications firm advising government health agencies.
This is just a snapshot of the messages exchanged between the CDC and Meta. They also had regular conference calls. The CDC was not the only arm of the federal government engaged in this work, of course: White House staffers also castigated Meta for not deplatforming alleged misinformation fast enough. President Joe Biden himself accused Facebook of “killing people” in July 2021.
One wonders whether these condemnations, from Biden and others in his administration—which included the specific threat of punitive regulation if demands for greater censorship were not met—influenced Meta’s decision to delegate COVID-19 content moderation to the CDC.
