I keep seeing LIbsOfTikTok in my Twitter feed, sharing videos posted by teachers who are advocating for pushing gender ideology in the classrooms. I used to wonder what was causing all of these teachers to sexualize children who aren’t even old enough to drive a car. It turns out that those teachers are being coached by teacher unions.

Here’s the story from ABC local news:

A new report accuses the two largest teachers unions in the United States of training educators on how to include “gender identity politics” in their curriculums and classroom practices.

The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) together represent nearly 5 million public school teachers nationwide. In a report published Wednesday by the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI), the two unions are accused of encouraging teachers to discuss gender identity and sexual orientation with students regardless of parents’ wishes.

The report details a July conference where AFT allegedly “coached its members on how to inject gender identity politics” into classrooms. The conference, titled the Together Educating America’s Children (TEACH) conference, was comprised of sessions on “strategies to improve teaching and learning.”

Two of the sessions included “Affirming LGBTQIA+ Identities in and out of the Classroom” and “The TGNCNB [transgender, gender nonconforming, nonbinary] Inclusive School and Classroom,” according to DFI’s report.

I’ve blogged before about how teacher unions are HUGE supporters of the Democrat party, and they are always getting involved in politics to undermine parental rights. They don’t want children to inherit a worldview from their parents.

The article notes:

At a rally earlier this year, NEA leaders called Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act “extremist,” according to DFI’s report. The Florida legislation requires, among other things, that teachers in the state refrain from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation with students in third grade and younger.

[…]Last month, NEA issued guidance on placing “inclusive symbols” in classrooms, encouraging teachers to challenge policies prohibiting Pride flags and Black Lives Matter imagery. The guidance followed the union’s inclusion of “Gender Queer” on its summer reading list, a book that has been removed from schools nationwide due to its sexually explicit contents.

When I was a young man, still in high school, I actually wanted to become an English teacher. My Dad was pushing me to go into computer science. So he enrolled me in a university course taught during evenings, by a lesbian woman. That quickly cured me of wanting to become a teacher – English departments were absolute hotbeds of progressive politics, even 25 years ago.

I did some searching around and found that there was no way I was going to be able to work without paying dues to the teacher unions, too. And I knew enough to know that the teacher unions were far left. I just didn’t want to get roped into a situation where my income was being taxed to pay for abortion and LGBT policies. So, I decided not to become a teacher. And that was a great decision.

I was reading an interesting article from J. Warner Wallace last week that he wrote for Townhall. In the article, he said that the real driver behind people turning away from truth, the big questions, religion in general, etc. was because of a desire for autonomy. People have enormous confidence about their desires, believing that following their desires is the surest way to reach happiness. But is it true?

In blue states, people consistently vote for leaders who make them feel good. Voters want to feel good, and they want to look good to other people – virtue signaling. And they are sure that feeling good and looking good will produce good results.

Hawaii is one of the bluest states in the country. There, the people consistently vote for policies that are much more progressive than the policies of those terrible red states. Policies like re-making the power grid to be driven by renewable green energy sources.

Here’s what happened next, as reported by Daily Wire:

Hawaiian Electric is under scrutiny for allegedly slow-walking modernization and repairs of its electrical grid before the fire that ripped through the island of Maui last week.

Hawaiian Electric is Hawaii’s principle electric utility, providing power to roughly 95% of the state. Financial disclosures and reports show the company worried about the state of its electrical grid, and specifically the risk of wildfires, but devoted resources to building out the utility’s green energy network with limited action to mitigate fire risk, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In 2015, the Hawaii State Legislature amended the State’s Renewable Portfolio Standards to establish the nation’s first goal of 100% renewable energy:

The focus on Hawaii’s energy priorities over the past decade has been dominated by its push for green energy. The state enacted a first-in-the-country law in 2015 mandating that Hawaii’s grid be powered by 100% renewable energy by 2045.

In 2021, regulators finished a top-to-bottom restructuring of the regulatory framework to guide that transition, offering Hawaiian Electric large bonuses for finishing green energy projects on time, and threatening the utility with fines if it missed deadlines.

[…]“You have to look at the scope and scale of the transformation within [Hawaiian Electric] that was occurring throughout the system,” Mina Morita, the 2011-2015 chair of the state utilities commission, told WSJ. “While there was concern for wildfire risk, politically the focus was on electricity generation.”

The government, which was elected by the people, mandated that the energy company would make going green their highest priority. Politically, the focus was on global warming alarmism. Not on lowering electricity prices for consumers. And not on protecting taxpayers from wild fires.

I had a quick look on LinkedIn at the resume of the CEO of the energy company, and she had no earned degrees in science, engineering or technology. She has a bachelors degree in accounting. Good degree, but not for the top job in energy production. Why is she the CEO of an energy production company? Will she face consequences for her failure to perform?

A very good book on science apologetics was published recently, called “The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos“. Well, there’s an ongoing series of posts about the book at Evolution News, and one of them caught my eye. They are talking about the origin of life, and what’s needed to create life from non-life.

Here is the post from Evolution News.

The article starts by explaining the what is required to show how non-living components could be organized into a living system:

• plausible biochemical paths from individual bio-building blocks like amino acids or nucleic acids to functional polymers such as proteins and DNA.
• ways to speed up chemical reactions that are naturally slow.
• the ordering of amino acids in proteins and nucleotide bases in RNA and DNA that allows them to function properly.

The leading naturalistic explanation to solve these problems is called the “RNA world” hypothesis:

The most popular proposal for the first self-replicating molecule is RNA — where life was first based upon RNA carrying both genetic information (akin to modern DNA) and performing catalytic functions (akin to modern enyzmes), in what is termed the RNA world.

The article lists several problems with the RNA world hypothesis. Dr. Walter Bradley lists two of those problems.

First, the assembly of RNA requires intelligent design:

First, RNA has not been shown to assemble in a laboratory without the help of a skilled chemist intelligently guiding the process. Origin-of-life theorist Steven Benner explained that a major obstacle to the natural production of RNA is that “RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water, and does not persist in water without repair” due to water’s “rapid and irreversible” corrosive effects upon RNA.³ In this “water paradox,” Benner explains that “life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to polymers (e.g., RNA) necessary for life.”⁴

To overcome such difficulties, Benner and other chemists carefully designed experimental conditions that are favorable to the production of RNA. But Robert Shapiro explains that these experiments do not simulate natural conditions: “The flaw is in the logic — that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth.”⁵ Reviewing attempts to construct RNA in the lab, James Tour likewise found that “[t]he conditions they used were cleverly selected,” but in the natural world, “the controlled conditions required to generate” RNA are “painfully improbable.”⁶ Origin-of-life theorists Michael Robertson and Gerald Joyce even called the natural origin of RNA a “Prebiotic Chemist’s Nightmare” because of “the intractable mixtures that are obtained in experiments designed to simulate the chemistry of the primitive Earth.”⁷ In the end, these experiments demonstrate one thing: RNA can only form by intelligent design.

The second problem is that the RNA world hypothesis is that it requires the existence of a self-replicating RNA molecule in order to get started. But this self-replicator contains a lot of biological information that is beyond the reach of chance to produce:

The most fundamental problem with the RNA world hypothesis is its inability to explain the origin of information in the first self-replicating RNA molecule — which experts suggest would have had to be at least 100 nucleotides long, if not between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.¹⁰ How did the nucleotide bases in RNA become properly ordered to produce life? There are no known chemical or physical laws that can do this. To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, origin-of-life theorists have no explanation other than blind chance. As noted, ID theorists call this obstacle the information sequence problem, but multiple mainstream theorists have also observed the great unlikelihood of naturally producing a precise RNA sequence required for replication.

Whenever I sit down to write some code or to write a blog post, I can start with one letter, then add another, then add another, until I have a functioning program, or a legible blog post. It might be possible for random chance to make a meaningful word out of 3 letters, like “the” or “hat”. But it’s not possible to make a self-replicating RNA molecule that way. The required sequence is just too long, and every letter has to be just right in order for it to function as a self-replicating system. The simplest self-replicating molecule is extremely complicated.

Anyway, check out the article, and if you want to read all about Walter Bradley (my role model), there is a new book out about him called “For a Greater Purpose: The Life and Legacy of Walter Bradley” which I finished, and it was great.