Beet L. Jooz

‘I have a lady who threatened me a lot’

A U.S. professor who teaches future public school teachers will “argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge” in a keynote to the Mathematics Education and Society conference this coming January, says her talk description.

“The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has been one steeped too long in domination and destruction,” the talk summary says. “What are appropriate responses to reverse such a relationship?” We can already guess University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Rochelle Gutierrez’s answer, from reviewing her published writings and comments. Her plans for “an insurgency by the people” to subvert public institutions and American self-rule through “ethnomathematics” will knock your eyebrows off your face. Let’s take a look.

Her bio says Gutierrez specializes in teaching future K-12 teachers “forms of creative insubordination” and the importance of infusing math with politics. Because, apparently, American kids are already so good at math they have extra time to spend on indoctrination. Oh, wait.

More Proof Ed Schools Routinely Promote Failed Ideas

Gutierrez is an education professor who also teaches in Urbana-Champaign’s “Latino studies” program, of course. Her CV says she helped write federally funded Common Core math tests and has been on a host of taxpayer-funded committees, including several of the National Science Foundation.

She’s also affiliated with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which wrote notoriously terrible curriculum rules that destroyed math instruction in many states before helping form Common Core. She’s helped decide which education professors to grant tenure at more than a dozen public universities, and been given visiting lecture position at Vanderbilt University, which is reputed to have one of the most pre-eminent teaching degree programs.

The most recent “academic” publication listed on Gutierrez’s CV is paywalled, but the second most recent listed is a December 2017 article in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, a publication of Georgia State University. Yes, taxpayer-funded institutions are fomenting “research” published under titles like “Separate and Unequal: Students with HIV/AIDS and Mathematics Education,” “Beyond White Privilege: Toward White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism in Mathematics Education,” “Absence of Diversity in Collegiate Upper-Level Mathematics Classrooms: Perpetuating the “White Male Math Myth,” and “Striving Toward Transformational Resistance: Youth Participatory Action Research in the Mathematics Classroom.”

One suspects this may be a collection of people who can’t do math, so they teach people how to make sure nobody else learns how to do math either. I’m not just saying that to be mean. The United States has plenty of experience with attempts to social justice up the math classroom, and it always results in more mathematically inept kids.

If we don’t preference competence over political correctness, kids lose big. An understanding of basic mathematics is crucial to competence in many lucrative jobs, plus an introduction to one of the great mysteries of the universe, as well as centuries of human inquiry. These are kids’ lives and minds we’re talking about here, which don’t deserve to be pawns in somebody’s ideological war for social engineering. But far too often, that’s what they are, and it’s American education’s many interlocking monopolies and cartels that are chiefly to blame, because cartels inherently prioritize tribalism over excellence.

This Is the ‘Mathematics Operates as Whiteness’ Lady

Gutierrez’s December article is, perhaps not surprisingly, more of a blog post that quotes sources such as Medium.com and activist websites. Rather than being scholarship worthy of the name, it is essentially a political game plan for using math classes and teachers to follow the Marxist political playbook in “[d]ismantling White supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

In it, she details how “Alt-Right” institutions such as Fox News and Campus Reform publicized and simplified some of her previous “scholarship” that made, she says, “two key points: (a) mathematics operates as whiteness when we do not acknowledge the contributions of all cultures, and (b) mathematics operates as whiteness when it is used as a standard by which we judge others.”

This assumes, of course, that whiteness is inherently evil, which rather undercuts Gutierrez’s other attempts to present herself as anti-racism. This also assumes, oddly, that using objective standards is somehow a “white” thing, an assumption I don’t understand at all, given that some of the earliest and most profound mathematical discoveries we know of, which are all based on observing objective and testable relationships, were produced by ancient Egyptians and Greeks. But it seems neither objectivity nor knowledge are Gutierrez’s strong suits.

After right-wing media publicized her writings, Gutierrez, her university, and colleagues received rude emails and voice mails. Of course that’s a genuine shame. Not positively contributing to society should result in people being redirected to more productive employment, not being harangued. And I can see how the experience would warp one’s perception, like highly emotional experiences tend to do.

Nevertheless, this is an utterly reality-detached response: “Some of the email messages sent to me were carbon copied to random students and faculty, thereby inflicting violence upon them, for no apparent reason other than to instill fear or have them question my scholarship.”

Ma’am, get some perspective. Mean emails don’t inflict violence. Not only do numbers have concrete meaning, words do too, although they are more flexible. “Violence” means inflicting tangible physical harm. While hurting people’s feelings can arouse chemical responses, that’s not what violent means. To describe things inaccurately empties words of meaning. That makes them worse at doing their job, which is clear communication.

‘Revolution Should Be the Goal’

Social manipulation rather than clear, objective communication seems to be Gutierrez’s aim, however, starting with her premise that there can be no truth or objectivity, and ending with the inevitable power struggles that follow: “Within mathematics education, we have convinced ourselves that ‘equity’ is a strong enough agenda when maybe revolution should be the goal,” she writes in her “paper.”

Her takeaway from experiencing opposition to her ideas is essentially that she and her fellow professors are not ideologically leftist enough. Gutierrez says the real problem this incident exposed was that too many professors and math teachers falsely believe “our scholarship was neutral or absent from politics.” Instead, she calls not only for “a broadened view of ethnomathematics [sic], but a radical shift in how we do mathematics.”

In so doing, she also exposes the corruption deep inside contemporary American K-12 and higher education. Just check out the things she says are endemic within U.S. academia at all levels (emphasis and bracketed comments added).

When we look to other disciplines, we see that their goals are not simply to have historically oppressed people viewed as legitimate participants in the discipline as defined. They are seeking to radically change the discipline itself, partly through putting the needs, views, and contributions of historically oppressed people first [equality is not the goal, a racial hierarchy with whites at the bottom is] …

For decades, ethnic studies programs, departments of English, and even literacy professionals in K–12 schools have been: questioning what counts as the ‘canon;’ expecting to see different kinds of authors/perspectives on the discipline; choosing to teach ‘controversial’ texts; recognizing there is no one ‘truth’ but only interpretations; and rethinking literacies and knowledge.

Perhaps as a result, there is greater infrastructure for such disciplines to deal with backlash [i.e. refuse to change when parents and taxpayers voice their opposition to this kind of education]. See, for example, the National Council of Teachers of English’s Intellectual Freedom Center that supports English teachers under attack for the texts they choose to use. [NCTE also helped write Common Core and was a big Common Core supporter and promoter.]

Encouraging Teachers to ‘Betray Their Institution’

Gutierrez goes on to positively cite instances going back to the 1960s of taxpayer-paid teachers in public institutions using their public positions to deliberately and deceptively disregard the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives and civic institutions. She presents as examples of “revolution” Mexican-American studies teachers continuing to teach these Marxist, anti-American classes in public schools after state legislators banned the course.

She notes students chaining themselves to their desks and organizing school walkouts, of the kind we’ve seen recently when high schoolers protested to retain a more Marxist Advanced Placement curriculum. She says more teachers need to use their taxpayer-provided forums and access to students to foment political “backlash” that promotes her preferred curriculum and politics.

Then, to top it all off, Gutierrez quotes approvingly from what appears to be an Antifa organizing group to call mathematicians and other academics to mimic their behavior to foment this kind of education “revolution.” More academics, she says leading up to this quote, should “seek ways to leverage resources and material support and/or betray their institution to further liberation struggles. An intellectual accomplice would strategize with, not for, and not be afraid to pick up a hammer” (emphasis added).

Um, excuse me, ya’ll, but this is straight up Marxism. Right outta the book. Remember, Marxists are the people who declare they are at war with family, religion, and America. This is far beyond mathematics competence now. This is a war for what kind of philosophy gets to control the country: totalitarianism or self-government.

This is a woman on the public payroll in a public institution encouraging other people on the public payroll to “betray” the public, and quoting groups affiliated with people who start riots to tell teachers they also should “not be afraid to pick up a hammer.” Hm, I wonder why so many Republicans no longer trust higher education. Maybe we don’t want to be forced to pay for people to subvert our God-given rights to choose the rules we have to live under, and want to actually control the institutions we’re forced to fund that shape how our children and future voters think.

That’s not even all. Gutierrez then goes on to say that mathematics has already turned in the direction of being willing to subordinate the field to political concerns.

Many of the mathematicians I know did not shy away from the ‘politics’ [sic] or ask me not to use words like White supremacy when naming the relationship between mathematics and power. I saw a different relationship between mathematicians and mathematics education researchers than what happened over a decade ago to Jo Boaler (Boaler, 2012), whose main opposition came from mathematicians.

[From an earlier part in the paper]: I am not alone in making these connections to mathematics. There is a robust domain of scholarship dedicated to chronicling the relationship between mathematics and power/domination in society stemming back more than 50 years. Moreover, a growing number of scholars have written eloquently about the connections between whiteness or White supremacy and mathematics education.

In the final section of this lengthy blog post masquerading as CV-worthy scholarship, Gutierrez considers ways to control the people who become teachers and mathematicians. “What would a mathematics education scholar look like that serves not the university [paying his salary and ostensibly defining the work he should do in return] but the most vulnerable/dehumanized?”

She suggested developing a list of readings for “decolonizing” math education, then making people read the list who are pursuing math PhDs, getting federal science grants and employment, running math departments, school boards, book clubs for students and parents, reporters, and lawmakers. People pursuing her Marxist project for math education need to think about how to make math graduate students “see the relationship between White supremacist capitalist patriarchy and mathematics.”

It is beyond time for all Americans to understand that, as Gutierrez says, the people running U.S. public education at all levels are at the very least influenced by the overt desire to overturn American-style governance and institutions. She’s not even hinting that here, she’s straight up saying it, and saying that academics as a whole agree.

Polls showing almost uniformly leftist professorships reinforce that assertion. They are already using their control of taxpayer-funded institutions to undermine and overthrow the very country that gave them this power in the first place. That’s chutzpah. It’s also Marxism 101. Neutrality is a facade that provides cover for genuinely sinister ideologies.

Rochelle Gutierrez and her “allies” get that education is not just political, but existential. The Right needs to get this too. And fast.

Authored by Molly Prince via The Daily Caller,

A private Wisconsin college banned students from exhibiting a Sept. 11 memorial fearing that it could foster an anti-Muslim environment on campus.

Ripon College ruled against a display by Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to honor the memory of those killed in the 2001 attacks and to help prevent the events from being forgotten, reported The Washington Examiner. It was part of an annual “Never Forget” project on college campuses around the nation.

The administration claimed that the memorial would create an atmosphere where “students from a Muslim background would feel singled out and/or harassed.”

“There is nothing that this poster, in particular, adds to the conversation about 9/11, or about the politics of terrorism, or about national security or responses to it that couldn’t be done easily and more constructively without it,” said Ripon’s Bias Protocol Board, according to the Examiner.

In addition to images of the Sept. 11 attacks, the exhibit also displayed subsequent radical Islamic extremist events such as Islamic State beheadings and the USS Cole bombing.

The college further claimed that Muslim terrorists only “represent a small percentage of the terrorist attacks that happen to this country” and that YAF is only showing “a very small picture of a specific religion or nationality instead of the larger viewpoint.”

YAF quickly refuted the aforementioned claim calling it false and fired back with a fact-check stating “from 1992 to 2017, Islamists were responsible for 92% of deaths caused by terrorism in the United States, and are ‘far and away the deadliest group of terrorists by ideology’.”

“This attempt by Ripon College’s ‘bias protocol board’ to sanitize the truth out of remembering the anniversary of September 11 proves the necessity of YAF’s iconic 9/11: Never Forget Project, as well as the need for bold YAF activists,” said YAF’s spokesman Spencer Brown.

“The administrators’ reliance on feelings rather than facts betrays their intention to cower from the truth rather than highlight the scourge of radical Islamist terror for what it is: evil.”

FBI Special Agent Jonathan Moffa told Congress on Friday that the FBI has used leaked stories to obtain FISA warrants Rep. Mark Meadows alluded to the information in a tweet on Monday Meadows’ tweet was referring to Moffa’s testimony, a source tells The Daily Caller News Foundation An FBI special agent told Congress earlier in […]

Lawyer Lanny Davis confessed to BuzzFeed News that he was a source for CNN’s July story that reported his client Michael Cohen was claiming President Donald Trump had advance knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting.

Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about the June 2016 meeting between members of his campaign and Russians, and if the CNN report were true, it would contradict the president’s denials.

The story — written by CNN’s Jim Sciutto, Marshall Cohen, and Carl Bernstein — was called into question after Davis backed away from his claims Cohen was ready to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller Trump knew in advance about the meeting.

Davis also told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview last week: “I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation. We were not the source of the story.”

Now Davis is claiming his comments to Cooper were false.

Per BuzzFeed News’ Steven Perlberg:

On Monday evening, Davis told BuzzFeed News that he regrets both his role as an anonymous source and his subsequent denial of his own involvement.

Davis told BuzzFeed News that he did, in fact, speak anonymously to CNN for its story, which cited “sources with knowledge” — meaning more than one person.

“I made a mistake,” Davis said. Regarding his comments about a month later to Cooper, he added, “I did not mean to be cute.”

CNN told BuzzFeed News: “We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it.”

Read the BuzzFeed News report here.

[image via screengrab]

CNN’s Chris Cuomo spoke to Rick Santorum and Bakari Sellers on Monday night, though their panel discussion dissolved into a food fight as they argued over what the Donald Trump–John McCain dynamic means for the rest of the country.

It all started when Santorum accused the media of using McCain’s death as a “cudgel” to slam Trump for his constant disrespect of the senator, even with his passing. Cuomo pushed back on Santorum as he persisted with this argument, saying “he’s not a cudgel” and McCain made his position on Trump clear by saying he wouldn’t be welcomed at his funeral.

Sellers got in next, and he took several direct shots at Santorum while calling this another example of Trump defenders making endless excuses for his indecent conduct. When Santorum tried to dispute the idea that Trump tried to minimize McCain over the last few days, Sellers continued by saying its pointless to expect anything more of Trump, and that’s when the two started to clash as Santorum wrote off the critiques as “noise.”

Shortly after that, Santorum took a pot shot at Cuomo by invoking his brother, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who recently faced controversy by saying America “was never that great.” This caused another three-way sparing match when Sellers told Santorum “You’re so petty,” while the CNN host admonished the latter for lowering himself.

“He was wrong and he corrected it,” Cuomo said of his brother. “God forbid our president try that once, God forbid you try that once.”

From there, Cuomo hammered Santorum and asked him if he ever heard Trump apologize for any of his disrespectful conduct towards McCain. Sellers lamented that the dialogue about McCain took a bad turn, though Santorum jumped back in and said “that’s because we decided to politicize John McCain’s death.”

Watch above, via CNN.

[Image via screengrab]

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>> Follow Ken Meyer (@KenMeyer91) on Twitter

Sneaky

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

Malthusian theory holds that depopulation (or zero population growth) is a necessity to control a species (namely humanity) that reproduces and consumes natural resources without limits. This is a “New Age” mantra adopted early on by Communists as far back as Marx and Lenin. The ball has been carried successively by Edward House and Woodrow Wilson, and further exacerbated by such “gems” as Kissinger, Bill Gates, Al Gore, and so forth. Much of the public and almost all of the youth (a recent poll taken showed young people prefer Socialism to Capitalism) have fallen for this mantra.

The “problem” for them is how to push it along quickly: war is one answer, and disease is another.

There has been another outbreak of Ebola in the Congo, with WHO (World Health Organization) estimates as many as 1,500 people have been exposed to it. The Daily Mail has a good article on this that was posted on 8/17/18, titled to that effect. It is a good read, as it summarizes with brevity the parameters of the disease itself.

This is how they’re “setting the stage” for this planned “mishap” tied in to the recent outbreak. Read this excerpt very carefully to see the hidden agenda:

The World Health Organization said on Friday [8/17/18] that at least 1,500 people had potentially been exposed to the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu region, where fear of local militia is preventing aid workers from reaching some areas. But it is expected more people to become infected and could not be sure that it had identified all chains by which the virus is spreading in the eastern part of the country beset by militia violence. The region is haunted in particular by the Allied Defence Forces, a Ugandan Islamist rebel group blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths over the past four years.

Now this is setting the script: the valiant doctors and aid workers are unable to break the flow and transmission of the disease because of those pesky Islamic rebels... the militia, to be specific. In addition, don’t forget to expect “more people to become infected!” We have had more than a few scares over the past couple of years with elaborate precautions to transport Ebola-infected patients into the U.S. for treatment: a preposterous action considering the potential for a release into this country.

When those patients were here, do you think that Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S.’s primary biological weapons research facility is located…do you think they received any blood samples from these patients?

You bet your bottom dollar they did. Read “The Hot Zone” and “Devil in the Freezer,” works that chronicle events with diseases such as Ebola, and Anthrax respectively regarding accidental releases and protocols of nations regarding biological warfare. A few years ago they resurrected frozen viruses in the Arctic region, amidst the protest of several scientists who (prior to being “muzzled”) argued about the potential lethality of these viruses even if not weaponized. No matter. Smallpox has been eradicated except by governments and their laboratory storage facilities: biological warfare and all of its associated researches, treatments, testing, and drugs (backed by pharmaceutical firms) is big business.

Regarding Ebola, a documentary was released in 1996 by NOVA, entitled “Ebola: The Plague Fighters.” This graphic but excellently made film shows an outbreak of Ebola in Zaire in May of 1995 and the almost nonexistent medical conditions in the country, coupled with the ineffective actions of foreign doctors and aid-workers. Such squalid, primitive conditions, lack of facilities, and ineffective treatment exist in Congo today virtually unchanged from twenty years ago as shown in the documentary in Zaire.

If a government is going to release it, the disease (in this case Ebola) is still not as lethal as they need it to be. Rest assured, they’re all working on ironing out these “glitches” in order to follow the plan that originated with Thomas Malthus. We are seeing a controlled laboratory experiment proceeding in China regarding surveillance there: a total surveillance system that will be tested on their citizens and then adopted (and adapted) by other nations for use on their own citizens.

Conditions are perfect for this type of “lab,” as China is a controlled Communist country and the technology is high enough to be perfected as the society is already compliant and under complete governmental control. This kind of “lab” would not be feasible in African nations where power and running water alone are in short supply and cannot sustain all of the infrastructure needed for the surveillance grid-state in China.

For testing of biological weaponry, however, African nations (especially those such as Congo and Zaire) are perfect for the release of created viruses and other tailor-made bio weapons. Sound farfetched? Consider the releases of Bacillus subtilis by the U.S. government to “test” the spread of microorganisms in civilian mass-transit facilities such as subways and buses just a few years ago. Consider all of the times the government has tested nuclear and biological weapons on soldiers and civilians.

Africa is perfect for them to take existing diseases and structure them for even more lethality. When the time is right, quarantines could be ineffective and permit passengers that are infected to board aircraft and spread the disease in the course of travel. Or they could simply transport an infected patient and allow the disease to escape from quarantine and controlled lockdown.

If you doubt this potential, you have only to read about Bill Gates and his lovely wife’s belief in depopulation as a means of “fixing” the planet. This is the same Bill Gates, by the way, who (with a consortium of investment firms and tech start-ups) plans on placing 500 satellites into orbit to enable real-time monitoring of every inch of the surface of the globe…sometime next summer.

Ebola is a serious disease, but what is even more deadly and more serious is the group of people and moneyed interests that wish to form a global government. They have the political connections, the money, and the alliances to effectively alter every facet of a nation and even to destroy it militarily. No heinous action is outside of their reach.  Ironically, all of these people…all of them…believe that depopulation is the only way to accomplish this “utopian” global governance effectively.

These oligarchs and controllers view those not in their company and of their ilk as less than insects to be crushed, and at the most to be their slaves and servants. Depopulation is their goal, and a deadly disease would enable it without culpability. This Ebola outbreak is more likely a “planned mishap” in a laboratory with human beings as the test subjects. The results of these experiments may eventually be used against unsuspecting populations to reach the end-state of global rule, minus a few billion lives or so.

President Donald Trump announced a new bilateral trade deal with Mexico on Monday morning from the Oval Office alongside U.S. and Mexican officials.