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Ann Marie Corgill was told by the Alabama Department of Education that her qualifications were not up to scratch, despite being 2015 National Teacher of the Year and 2014-2015 Alabama Teacher of the Year finalist. She is also the author of teaching book called “Of Primary Importance”.

Ms Corgill said she was tired of having to prove herself and did not want to pay more fees, and sent Birmingham City Schools a letter of resignation.

In the letter, first obtained by Al.com, she wrote: “After 21 years of teaching in grades 1-6, I have no answers as to why this is a problem now, so instead of paying more fees, taking more tests and proving once again that I am qualified to teach, I am resigning.”

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool;
That’s the way things are today:
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Alliance for the Separation of School and State here.

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A new poll shows that a majority of leftist college students oppose censorship in theory – but also support censorship in practice when it boosts their “politically correct” progressive ideology.

First, the platitudes. Ninety-seven percent of leftist students claimed free speech was important and 74 percent claimed that preserving free speech is more important than assuring no-one gets offended, according to the poll, which was commissioned by Young America’s Foundation (YAF).

But next the reality: Fifty-four percent of student leftists believe that the Confederate flag should be banned.

Among all students surveyed, 77 percent favored their schools flying the gay pride flag, but only 41 percent say schools could fly the Confederate flag.

The Left is, at its core, totalitarian. Always has been, always will be. Animal Farm and 1984 were not written about conservatives.

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They like diversity in appearance but not in substance.

Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance. Meanwhile, excessive homogeneity can lead to stagnation and poor problem-solving.

Unfortunately, new research also shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity — the diversity of ideas — and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.

Clip-On Cap Light. For those normal people who still wear their cap with the bill in front.

Groundfridge.

Ember magic mug.

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There has never been a better time to be in the people-smuggling business in Turkey. It’s a bull market — lots of demand, and now lots of supply, with 25,000 smugglers providing services to customers, according to the following Czech news report. Business is booming, and the price of a passage to Europe keeps dropping,

Read it. And watch the video.

This is not so much evidence of Obama lying his ass off — although he does do that — as of Obama not knowing what the hell he is doing.

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And why not? It’s a great gig.

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The Social Security Administration requires that beneficiaries promptly report their work activity, including starting a new job or a change in wages.

But according to a GAO report issued on Thursday, the SSA staff has frequently bypassed established tracking procedures or provides limited oversight that have led to billions of dollars of unwarranted “overpayments” to beneficiaries.

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An interesting perspective.

Well, I am voting for Donald Trump. Oh, not by choice, and not in the primaries if there’s any option other than the likes of Jeb Bush or John Kasich or Lindsey Graham, the sailor-suited Little Lord Fauntleroy of the GOP. None of them are conservatives, but Trump does not even pretend to be one so he won’t take conservatism’s reputation down with him. Bottom Line: If Donald Trump is the GOP nominee and running against that withered fascist Hillary Clinton, I’m all in for The Donald.

Now, please kill me.

…

Yes, we are at the point where a presidential candidate’s position of not being actively opposed to the Bill of Rights is a key selling point.

It might be different if we had a Republican Senate instead of one controlled by fussy submissives. If you were going to write about the shameful festival of capitulation presided over by Mitch McConnell, you should title it Fifty Shades of Reid.

…

What a pathetic state of affairs. The GOP is so full of losers that Donald Trump is a better choice than about half the GOP candidates. And the Democrats are worse – they have come out as actively anti-American adherents of an ideology that murdered 100 million people. I’m sure Hillary’s gulags would be “yuge,” but they would be neither “fabulous” nor “classy.”

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These states fully allow what’s known as “civil forfeiture”: Police officers can seize someone’s property without proving the person was guilty of a crime; they just need probable cause to believe the assets are being used as part of criminal activity, typically drug trafficking. Police can then absorb the value of this property — be it cash, cars, guns, or something else — as profit, either through state programs or under a federal program known as Equitable Sharing that lets local and state police get up to 80 percent of the value of what they seize as money for their departments.

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Justice will out – in Texas, of course. You won’t read about such a thing in New York or California.

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Loud noise, trauma, infections, plain old aging—many things can destroy hair cells, the delicate sensors of balance and sound within the inner ear. And once these sensors are gone, that’s it; the delicate hair cells don’t grow back in humans, leading to hearing loss and problems with balance.

But scientists hope to find a way to regenerate these cells by examining how they develop in the first place. New research at Rockefeller University, in A. James Hudspeth’s Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience, has identified two genes pivotal to the production of hair cells in young mice, who, just like human babies, lose the ability to generate these sensors shortly after birth. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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An international student from China who was dismissed from a doctoral program in psychology after clinical supervisors judged his English-language communication skills as inadequate for engaging in patient care has sued his university.

Jun Yu, who was dismissed from the clinical psychology Ph.D. program at Idaho State University in May 2013, is alleging discrimination based on national origin and denial of due process. In addition to compensatory damages and legal fees, Yu is seeking readmission to the Ph.D. program and the right to complete a remaining practicum requirement in China, where he now resides.

I guess there weren’t any doctoral programs in China. Or Singapore. Or Hong Kong. Or Taiwan. You know how  the Chines don’t value education.

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In particular, the EPA is by far the most expensive and active federal agency. The EPA leads the pack in both the number and costs of new regulations. From 2004 – 2014, the EPA passed 32 major rules, costing more than $45 billion annually. The EPA is responsible for more than a third of all regulations and almost half the costs of all the regulations included in the OMB report.

The costs of the EPA from this report should not be taken at face value. The OMB’s report is somewhat deceiving because it only reports a sliver of all federal regulations. The agency effectively picks and chooses which regulations to review because the law only requires the OMB to report on “major rules”. For example, this report only included 13 rules published in 2014, out of the total 3,581 that year.

The costs of these unreported rules add up to billions. In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that the OMB has left out more than $35 billion of annual costs since 2002 from other important and expensive, yet not “major” regulations. Thus, the true cost of the EPA’s endless regulation is much, much greater than the government reports.

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Yup.

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Some Americans may remember Chateauroux as the locale of a U.S. army base in the 1950s and early 60s. Until recently, it could be described as quintessentially “deep France”: a sleepy local capital, surrounded by dark woods and rivers. Things are changing, however, as Angot realized with a start on her filmed visit there. Muslim immigrants are taking over many parts of the town, including her former neighborhood of public housing, and turning them into semi-independent enclaves, what the French police refer to as “no-go zones.”

No-go except for Muslims, that is.

When we arrived—all of us, the TV crew complete with their cameras and sound booms, and the writer who grew up there—we had to account for ourselves, to show our identity cards, to prove who we were, to state exactly where I had lived. . . . And then, the director’s first name—David, his full name being David Teboul—supplied material for unsavory jokes…. Some of the locals tried to intimidate us, saying that television was a cartel of the Jews… All this was uttered in a very menacing tone…. We shot a few scenes under a running fire of jibes and jeering, and as we left we were told to pay our compliments to the Talmud…. I swear we felt most uncomfortable.

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This is a great decision but it’s just a step on the road to a more important one, if we can get it: The right for farmers to hack the software in their farm equipment.

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Hey, we’ve all been there.

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The Lynx UK Trust is seeking to release the animals in two locations, examining spots in Argyll and Bute, Northumberland, Cumbria, Norfolk and Aberdeenshire, over a five year period from next year.

If the charity gains approval for a licence, the consultation period of which starts from Wednesday, they intend to release approximately six big cats into each area and then monitor the effects on local agriculture, forestry and deer numbers.

What they really need to do is capture a breeding population of Skraelings and release them into the wild in Siberia. Redress that 10,000 year old wrong!

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Except for the smells, of course.

Durham University and Durham Cathedral have teamed to digitally recreate a medieval monastic library. The Durham Priory Library Recreated project, which was officially launched today, will make available over 350 volumes of texts that once belonged to the priory in northern England.

The manuscripts and early printed texts, which date back to the sixth century, originally belonged to the Benedictine monks of Durham Priory until the dissolution of monasteries by Henry VIII from 1536-41. Fortunately, much of this collection remained at the Cathedral, and over the next five years they will be digitized and made freely available online.

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Remember that guy in Kentucky who was arrested in July for shooting down a neighbor’s drone that was allegedly hovering over his property? He was charged with wanton endangerment and criminal mischief.

A judge has tossed out the charges.

You fly a drone over my property, that is trespass, pure and simple, and you will get what trespassers get in Texas: a bullet. Or maybe two.

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And the Muslim tide keeps rising higher….

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Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced a resolution yesterday to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, stating that “Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust. He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled.”

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) released a report on May 15, 2013 that found the IRS unfairly targeted conservative taxpayers. Commissioner Koskinen was issued a subpoena for “[a]ll communications sent or received by Lois Lerner, from January 1, 2009, to August 2, 2013” in an effort to investigate the “targeting of Americans based on their political affiliation.” The IRS destroyed the backup tapes that the communications were stored on instead of complying with the law.

Commissioner Koskinen has repeatedly given misleading statements regarding the status of Lerner’s emails and failed to examine and produce available sources of communication to congress. The TIGTA was able to investigate Lerner’s “blackberry, email server, loaner laptop, the IRS’s own backup tapes, and Lerner’s hard drive” in only 15 days.

It won’t go anywhere–the Crust takes care of its own–but it’s a nice thought.

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Most kids learn the grade school civics lesson about how a bill becomes a law. What those lessons usually neglect to show is how legislation today is often birthed on a lobbyist’s desk.

But even for expert researchers, journalists, and government transparency groups, tracing a bill’s lineage isn’t easy—especially at the state level. Last year alone, there were 70,000 state bills introduced in 50 states. It would take one person five weeks to even read them all. Groups that do track state legislation usually focus narrowly on a single topic, such as abortion, or perhaps a single lobby groups.

Computers can do much better. A prototype tool, presented in September at Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange 2015 conference, mines the Sunlight Foundation’s database of more than 500,000 bills and 200,000 resolutions for the 50 states from 2007 to 2015. It also compares them to 1,500 pieces of “model legislation” written by a few lobbying groups that made their work available, such as the conservative group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and the liberal group the State Innovation Exchange (formerly called ALICE).

As Pooh would say, a useful pot to put things in.

Steve Sailer insists on doing That Science Thing.

Here are the brand new 2015 federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests scores sorted in order of the size of the White-Black Gap on 8th grade math. The color reflects whether the state went for Obama (blue) or Romney (red) in 2012.

Looking up the lineup of income inequality among states is left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: Blue states predominate there, too.

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It is as though the neighborhood were divided by an invisible wall.

On one side, children attend a public elementary school where test scores are high, the students are mostly white and well off, and the parent-teacher organization can raise $800,000 a year to pay for things like a resident chef.

On the other side, children attend a public elementary school where 87 percent of the students are black or Hispanic and 84 percent receive some form of public assistance. Just over a tenth pass the state reading and math tests. There is no library or art teacher.

Guess what the fight is over. Just guess.

Guess who these people voted for in the last two Presidential elections. Just guess.

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Who knew?

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expanding a program that awards businesses bonuses when they hire alien college graduates over native-born graduates, according to an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies.

The optional practical training program (OPT) awards alien college graduates a work permit to stay in the United States for 12 months. If these graduates have majored in science, technology, engineering, or math, also known as STEM fields, the graduates get an additional 17 months of work. This means alien college graduates who graduated in STEM fields would be able to stay in the United States for a total of 29 months.

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Cool. It’ll be back to the way it was when Vikings roamed the earth.

Wouldn’t that make a great T-shirt? “MAKE GREENLAND GREEN AGAIN. SUPPORT GLOBAL WARMING.”

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Sportsmen have been praising God and crediting him for their achievements since before the days of the Gipper. But now, such praise has been deemed unsportsmanlike conduct by a high school referee.

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roduced by the hundreds of millions every day, the modern can—robust enough to support the weight of an average adult—is a tribute to precision design and engineering

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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I am not making this up.

Much like other job aggregation sites such as Indeed and Simply Hired, CareerLabs gathers job listings from around the web. What makes the company different is the ability to filter those job listings based on data that CareerLabs has collected about the employers that posted those jobs. For example, you can filter out companies with low work-life balance scores, or search only for jobs at companies that are growing rapidly. Founder and CEO Anthony Van Horne says the most popular tool during beta testing was employee morale, which is based in part by scraping social networks like Twitter to get a sense of how happy a given company’s workers are. And, yes, thanks to the wonders of public data, CareerLabs will tell you about the political leanings of a company’s management. CareerLabs also is working on a filter for the number of gender or racial discrimination suits filed against companies so job seekers can screen out companies that might be unwelcoming of women or minorities.

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One in the eye for the gender-is-a-social-construct dimwits.

Steve Sailer asks the obvious question.

For years, Audacious Epigone and myself have been pointing out that Texas public school kids do surprisingly well on the federal NAEP exam within each ethnic group. Now, the NYT finally figures that out, too:

Well, for one thing, they live in Texas rather that California. That argues for a certain degree of smarter.

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Attending the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is the ultimate dream for Harry Potter superfans. Now, that dream is going to come true for some lucky Muggles, too.

Royal Cannaught Park, one of the Harry Potter series’ filming locations, is undergoing renovations to become a luxury apartment complex. On one level, this is a bit of a bummer — sleek condos aren’t quite as magical as stone walls hiding secrets and grand moving staircases. But, an opportunity to live ven slightly adjacent to the fictional wizarding world is still pretty cool.

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Last Saturday a culture-enriching “Dane” discharged a firearm during a Shia Ashura event in Copenhagen. When he was picked up by the police, a crowd of Muslims attacked the police car, trying to get at him, and had to be beaten back by the police.

At the time he uploaded a video of the incident, Vlad Tepes speculated that the besieged gun owner in the police car might have been a Sunni Muslim who disrupted the Shi’ites at their festival. Sure enough, according to SHIA Waves TV, it was a Palestinian who was arrested for discharging a firearm.

Coming soon to a border near you.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you suprised? I’m sure surprised.

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As the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) continues planning out community meetings about the massive bullet train system it is allegedly going to build someday, more and more evidence that its economic model is utter nonsense is piling up.

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The Middle East is not actually different from other regions of the world with the exception of Europe. Most transitions do not succeed. Their failures can radicalize politics and, historically, authoritarianism, not democracy, has been the norm across the world. Yet this kind of macro-level comparison only reveals so much. Beyond establishing that the Middle East is not exceptional, it does not tell observers why democratic change was thwarted and violence both within and in some cases between societies has become so widespread. The failures in Iraq—authored by both Iraqis and Americans—have certainly had an impact on the region. Syria’s conflict is a vortex pulling in fighters, proxies, money, and weapons while spinning out violence within and beyond. The emergence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in territory taken from the Syrian and Iraqi governments is destabilizing in a different way. Yet Iraq’s wars, Syria’s destruction, and the “success” of the Islamic State do not explain why Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, or even non-Arab Turkey, look the way they do. The failures of democratic development or, in Turkey’s case, democratic continuity or maturation, are just as much a cause of this ghastly moment in the Middle East as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s barrel bombs.

Most of the people in the world who are not descended from Europeans are still stuck in primitive modes of thought. Giving them modern tech toys doesn’t change that, it merely leverages the amount of disorder they can cause. All of the SWPL hand-wringing in the world isn’t going to change that, any more than Michelle Obama going on Facebook with a hand-printed sign saying “Bring Back Our Girls” is actually going to get the girls back.

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Cue ecoNazi hysteria.

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It happens every year, but this year is shaping up as one of the worst ever. During Indonesia’s dry season, certain people—rarely identified, much less punished—set illegal fires to make land suitable for the palm oil and paper-and-pulp industries. Those fires generate huge amounts of smoke, and the toxic haze often reaches neighboring countries, including Singapore and Malaysia. But this year the El Niño weather phenomenon has created extremely dry conditions, leading to an unusually intense, long-lasting “smoke-out” for the region, affecting everything from travel to sporting events to respiratory health.

So far this year, Indonesia’s fires have produced more pollution than Germany or Japan does in a year. On 26 days from the period of Sept. 1 to Oct. 14, their daily emissions surpassed those of the entire US (the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China), according to researchers led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They calculated that the 100,000-plus fires in Indonesia detected so far this year (as of Oct. 21) have emitted about 1.4 billion metric tons (1.5 billion tons) of carbon dioxide equivalents. That puts the country on track for its worst fire year since 1997. On Oct. 14 alone there were more than 4,700 fire alerts—that’s more than on any single day in the past two years.

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She looks pretty white to me.

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No wonder Trump is doing so well – it’s a Trend.

Hm. Let’s give Louis C.K. a shot at the White House. What’s the worst that could happen?

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A couple of weeks ago we posted about the hellishness of Nickelsdorf, a small Austrian town not far from the Hungarian border. It was crammed with feral “refugees” who had brought their iPhones with them, paid for purchases with €500 notes, and left garbage and excrement in their wake.

Since then Hungary has closed its border with Croatia, and the migration stream has shifted westwards to Slovenia. One of the hardest-hit Austrian towns in the pathway of the relocated immigrant flood is Spielfeld, just across the border from Slovenia in Styria, on the main route from Ljubljana to Graz.

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The concept of identification has been much in the news lately. If I say that I “identify” as a conservative American man, a lawyer, a Lutheran, a resident of Minnesota and a fan of the Minnesota Twins, my announcement will provoke zero interest, because I actually am all of those things. How boring can you get? For one’s “identification” to be newsworthy, and perhaps profitable, one must identify as something that one is not–an African-American, a woman, and so on.

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A flood of Muslims over the borders will do that for you.

The flood of “refugees” into Austria is continuing without interruption. The Hungarian route has become less active, and traffic is now flowing at a rapid rate through Slovenia instead.

According to the following report from Czech Independent TV, Austrians — especially women — are responding to the presence of all these “New Austrians” by purchasing firearms at a record rate.

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Anthropology is one of those fields where politics trumps science more often than not. Not as bad as economics, of course, but then it doesn’t, like economics, purport to be a science.

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Sucks to be a mouse.