Serious Concerns about Chronic Absenteeism in Virtual Learning Classes in The Bahamas Public School System

A suggestion on Online Education - to the Minister of Education, The Bahamas

From: Linda P. Virgil

I have read your reports, and note your concern for the students in your care.

As a former educator, I am saddened about events regarding children who are missing hours of school due to the crisis we are facing; clearly these children are disadvantaged - and will pay dearly later on.

It is our belief that there is a problem that is causing the non attendance or non appearance on virtual of many of the children.

My daughter Melissa and I believe that they do not have access to WiFi, and many do not have electricity.

This may be the root cause of children not attending Virtual School.

My daughter Melissa, a graduate from the great - one and only Queens College, made these suggestions which I thought were spot on and I felt should be shared with you as Minister of Education.

Melissa worked at Cable Bahamas as the Marketing Manager until last year.

I told her I would share with you as it may be the answer to all of our problems - for you, this country and our children:

1) have the Cable Companies, BTC and Cable Bahamas donate WIFI to the Communities. This WIFI would be locked and accessible with a code; or placed these WIFIs at Community Parks for access by our children and adults.

Schooling can continue with supervision, and with the help of Community policing and teachers.

2) Crowding in the classrooms is a problem. Alleviate this by having Businesses donate tents by grades - for each Public School; so that schooling can continue with supervision.

Again, you can stagger the days accordingly.

The Community WiFi will assist with outdoor schooling, and also for those who are not present - due to the alternate days. They too can continue schooling.

We feel that businesses can contribute greatly to these efforts. Perhaps the Government can give businesses which take part in this project incentives.

I ask (1) request - and that is to let the record reflect that these ideas are Melissa’s

Name : Melissa (Baker Virgil) Colebrook (Mrs).

I am thankful that as a citizen and a new mother, she is still conscious and kindhearted to think about those among us who are experiencing difficulties during these trying and unprecedented times.

Have a great day safely.

Linda P. Virgil

Social Crisis in Public Education in The Bahamas

The Social and Political Challenges of  Virtual Education in The Bahamas Public School System

8,000 students inactive on the virtual learning platform throughout the COVID-19 pandemic!

Social Crisis in Public Virtual Education in The Bahamas as CoViD19 Rages

NASSAU, BAHAMAS —  An education recovery task force has been established and will have just 14 days to track down some 8,000 students who were inactive on the virtual learning platform throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Minister of Education Glenys Hanna-Martin.

Hanna-Martin’s comments came as schools reopen fully virtual for the New Year, with the expected hybrid model postponed for two weeks due to the recent spike in COVID-19 cases.

She insisted that the task force is a multiagency public-private sector, who started their efforts on Monday with a walkabout in the Kemp Road area which was to raise awareness.

“This task force which will meet again tomorrow will look nationwide as to where there is a situation or phenomenon of children not attending school, some of them for as much as two years,” Hanna-Martin said.

 

“It’s a two-phased effort. Firstly we are going to find them. We have committed to finding every child wherever they are…We are going into the communities, we will find these children through telephone calls and direct contact.”

 

She noted that the second phase will be a diagnostic review of the student to understand the extent of the impact of them being out of school.

“We will devise acceleration programs so that these children in the shortest possible time can reestablish their positioning age-appropriate of where they should be educationally wise,” Hanna-Martin said.

The education minister said today’s meeting with the task force will be to design specific strategies to find these students within 14-days and to put in place goals and an action plan once they have been found.

“We don’t know the reasons why every child has been out of school,” she added.

“One situation may require different interventions. There may be more expanded issues. We will be in the business now of just trying to understand fully what’s happening to that child and see how that child can be supported in being reintegrated into an education program”.

Source 

Covid is forever

COVID: THE FEARFUL SYMMETRIES

By Professor Gilbert Morris

IMAGINE: a new brutal variant that exceeds the protection of vaccines…

The Samurai is the finest master of self-discipline the world has ever known; more Stoic than the Stoics of ancient lore, more vicious than the Cossacks of Russia or the Gurkhas of Sri Lanka (the most fearsome worries of modern times).

One core element of Samurai culture is he must contemplate his death dozens of times in a day: he must cultivate commerce and comfort with the varieties of death’s multitudinous propensities.

As a strategist, one’s brief is to show clients the varieties of means, methods, incidences, architectures and emerging possibilities of the death of their enterprises; whether they be companies or countries.

There is a childish notion in modern culture by which disease of the mind, the Samurai imperative is avoided. People say things like: “couldn’t you put a positive spin on that”? As if strategy is their favourite ice cream or pizza, upon which they can heap their desired delights!

Others plead, “let’s look at the bright side”, as if one is the marketing and promotions department.

The strategist is a scavenger of risk: his job is to induce discomfort based on the most realistic analysis, not by prediction or even forecast, but by immediate extrapolation from the factual circumstances.

Where the lazy analyst says “well, thing A could likely impact thing B. The competent strategist demonstrates A and B are extremes of a single continuum.

Or where the fawning ‘yes man’ says: ‘things go in phases, there are always ups and downs’, the master strategist shows the phase-guide lacks structural depth or systemic coordinates.

Where the fool treats “success” as organic. The strategist framed it as a “success window”, that is already closing at the moment of its most obvious prowess (Ask Nokia or IBM).

The role of the strategist is to game the situation, enterprise or national prospects in such a manner, at such a scale and with such dimensional scope as to force the client out of complacency into innovation…before the risk metastasises or is realised; to drive the client into the Samurai imperative.

Let’s take the current pandemic: In 2020, I gave four 90 minute lectures on the history, logistics and economic consequences of pandemics from the 4th Century AD to the present. In interviews leading up to the lectures I extrapologised the following:

1. Covid is forever

2. Covid will change the world more in 3 years than the last 300

3. Countries will optimise to save lives but will cost more lives by the measure they impose

4. Democracy under the pandemic will transition to a power vertical with the public’s safety as an excuse

5. Variants will outrun vaccines

6. Vaccine visas will emerge

7. You have to check into countries the way you check into hotels

8. Health records will become the new identity

9. No country will arrive at “herd immunity”, because of the lack of global coordination

10. A variant will emerge and generate so much fear that citizens and governments would turn on each other

I am satisfied that all of these have proven true…yet, it does not have to be this way: the strategy for which I argued was/is:

1. Universal free testing, with 48 billion free tests in an 8 week period

2. Upload tests to a database to gain pattern and flow of the virus

3. Deploy Blue tooth contact tracing and digital diagnostic surveys to overlay the Fibonacci patterns as the emerge

4. Make decisions from data/extrapolations and not events, because humans react arithmetically but pandemics have exponential velocities.

5. Hold global summit to streamline boarder entry protocols

6. Embark $4.5 trillion for global stimulus (using SDRs) rather than raising interest rates

Across the world, only 8 nations gain a measure of these protocols.

Now, today, during this holiday season, in more than 9 European nations, citizens will suffer lockdowns again because of the result of poor, reactionary Covid management by their governments.

In the US, governors of more than 7 states are openly defying basic public health management measures for purely political reasons.

In much of the rest of the world, useless national dashboards, fascistic attacks on unvaccinated persons, desperate copycatting and inflexible, convoluted procedures rule the day: the result will be VARIANTS!

I seem to see (to quote the ancient Seer) that this is all metastasising toward an eschatological global health crisis orders of magnitude beyond what we’ve witnessed or suffered so far. This level of global leadership vacuum and incompetence cannot continue without consequences.

IMAGINE: a new brutal variant that exceeds the protection of vaccines…countries would slam their doors shut, the global economy would collapse, within countries, their oligarchical structures would undermine public trust, billions of children would go uneducated, those with non-Covid medical complaints would die in equal numbers to Covid sufferers. That is to say…our social worlds are poised to retreat by fear, ignorance and hysterical speculation into the worlds imagined in Zombie apocalypses.

Terrifying?

This is what a Samurai would imagine, given what we are witnessing…then he would act to prevent it.

The problem is…it’s happening now!

Source/Comment

45 Percent of Prime Working Age Women (ages 18-44) will be Single by 2030 - the Largest Share in History

THE ERA OF FEMALE LONELINESS IS COMING!

By: Professor Gilbert Morris

One must approach these subject matters with some intellectual discipline. What this data is…is not an attack on women. Second, it does not equate singleness with loneliness…because that’s silly.

This is a demographic and sociological problem at scale, which we see in dying villages in Japan (owing to ageing) and in China and India (owing to high concentrations of males).

Econometric analysis says a 17% demographic distribution in age or gender in a civilization, is a downward slope to toward extinction.

The difference in demographics in youth, because it posits potential, which neither age nor gender properness.

Therefore, this is not some happy notion of a gigantic global “girls night out”. This is a premonition of misery.

That is not because these data suggests conventional marriage. But rather, the social formations in which gender distributions ebbs beyond 17% comparatively, also points to shrinking capacity, creativity and resources.

This is why this study has been carried out by a bank. Because projecting an economic future, they can forecast the social entropy, dislocation and systems failures already emerging from this phenomenon.

Source / Comment

ENDGAME: WHAT’S THE COVID 19 EXIT STRATEGY?

By Professor Gilbert Morris

 

Covid 19’ patterning follows the Bubonic Plague of 1347. Therefore, I reject the notion that Covid 19 will “Peter out”. 

If the vaccinated can still be infected and transmit, mutations are likely and petering out is a hope rather than a scientific extrapolation. 

This means several things: 

1. These vaccines ought never to be compared to previous vaccines - like Polio for instance - those vaccines ended infection and transmission. 

And continued infection and transmission is the anomalous problem of the Covid 19 vaccine regime. 

2. What is missing that is obvious from the facts, is if the vaccinated can become infected and transmit, logically, there will never be “herd immunity”. 

The benefits of being vaccinated are two: 

1. It makes it less likely that a vaccinated person will be sick (within a statistically dense frame) 

2. Therefore, hospitalisation is less likely; as the data shows, only a statically significant, but generally insignificant number of an aggregate of vaccinated persons are hospitalised post-vaccinated infections. 

It is a lively nonsense, oft repeated, that unvaccinated persons pose a threat…because both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons pose the same threat if both can be infected and transmit; without further evidence of any distinctions in the relative infection patterns. 

What is clear is that vaccination is only one tool and it’s foolhardy to assert that with vaccinations, economies can “return to normal”: again it’s perfidious nonsense since infections and spread are still possible. 

The solution is the method which the 7 best performing countries deployed - all of which propose but none of which mandates vaccination: 

1. The 7 best performing nations in the pandemic succeed by mass, spot and randomised testing. 

Why?

1. To gain epistemological coverage of their entire countries: Multimodal testing (eDiagnostics, Bluetooth Thermometers, eTesting and home testing generate DATA!

2. That data then characterises general and interstitial demographics; discrete insular dynamic demographics within a general demographic pool. 

3. That produces granular DATA!

NEXT: 

1. Bluetooth contact tracing links the patterns and the multimodal tests, discovering alignments and positing options for coordination 

2. This produces a national digital “fever map”!

The 7 best performing nations in the pandemic all erected this mechanism, which I lectured about in the SpaceNex Global  ROUNDTABLE Lectures on “The History of Economic Consequences of Pandemics”.

NEXT:

1. Once the ‘fever maps’ are functional, the data produces deep patterns that are at first descriptive; then the data becomes diagnosticative; then the link between data-patterns and policy outcomes error-corrects toward self-evidence…and becomes prognosticative. 

This equilibrium is called generally a “proportionality constant”.

2. At this stage, you can see the effects of social protocols (mask wearing, hand sanitation, social fumigation) immediately.

This multimodal platform is necessary because vaccination and even walk-in testing are arithmetical, but the disease - particularly accounting for superspreaders - is infecting exponentially. 

So its actually counterproductive to depend on vaccinations or walk-in tests alone. One needs dynamic readable datasets. If a country hasn’t done this and merely harps on vaccinations, it will fail!

Source

Defending Latin American and Caribbean dignity

 

Anti-Cuban maneuver in the Organization of American States (OAS) defeated

...the OAS - an organization with no moral authority and a long history of betraying the peoples of Latin America

Author: Internacional news staff | informacion@granmai.cu

A call for a meeting made by the United States to the Organization of American States (OAS) to "analyze the situation in Cuba," no doubt to justify interference, failed miserably due to the refusal of the majority of its member countries.

Party Political Bureau member and Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla posted a tweet yesterday, July 28, describing the events as a defeat for the U.S. within the pro-imperialist entity.

"Anti-Cuban maneuver in the OAS defeated. Rejection by a majority of member states forced suspension of a Permanent Council meeting," the Foreign Minister stated, adding that the President pro tempore of the Council admitted the failure through a "pathetic letter insulting Cuba."

Rodríguez Parrilla also thanked the countries which "defended Latin American and Caribbean dignity," refusing to support the maneuver.

According to a report by Russia Today, Washington Abdala, president pro tempore of the Permanent Council, reported that, after receiving statements from several countries, it was decided to postpone the meeting to conduct consultations that could be useful.

Abdala added that he has asked the organization's Secretariat for Legal Affairs to prepare a report on the situation in Cuba in relation to the OAS - an organization with no moral authority and a long history of betraying the peoples of Latin America. He said the document will be shared with OAS members when it is available.

Source

The Opposition PLP and the COVID-19 alter of sickness and death in The Bahamas

We are in a general election season in The Bahamas, and all common sense and logic seem to be thrown out the window

By Dennis Dames

COVID-19 is right in our faces, and we don’t see it for what it is. It’s a highly contagious killer virus that’s mutating rapidly into more lethal strains. The coronavirus is a global force to be reckoned with right now, and it is dubbed the invisible enemy for good reasons – because of its potentially devastating impact on the international front.

It is a serious danger to worldwide peace and stability. COVID-19 is also a grave threat to universal commerce and relationships. Every nation appears to be uneasy about their immediate future because of the raging coronavirus.

It doesn’t look like our political leaders get it. We are in a general election season in The Bahamas, and all common sense and logic seem to be thrown out the window, in my view. For example, I saw a PLP ad recently which states that a PLP government will implement free COVID-19 testing and so on.

What does free COVID-19 testing have to do with the reality that COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire now? What does free COVID-19 testing have to do with our overcrowded hospitals and morgue at this time? How will free COVID-19 testing curb the spread of COVID-19 in a tourist-dependent economy? How will free COVID-19 testing stop new COVID-19 variants from entering the country?

Let’s get real, PLP. The focus, in my humble opinion, is to convince our hardheaded unvaccinated brothers and sisters to get vaccinated soon. After all, they comprise the vast majority of COVID-19 hospital and morgue clients – 90 percent-plus.

It’s a pity and tragedy that the PLP is prepared to sacrifice many Bahamians on the COVID-19 alter of sickness and death. We lack national unity on such a dreadful issue, PLP; and all of us should be ashamed of it. It’s sad that winning an election tomorrow appears more important than saving Bahamian lives today.

Things are getting absolutely toxic and dire with the livid COVID-19 virus throughout the universe. We need to unite as one people and resolve to fight COVID-19 together. The unvaccinated is the big problem in the battle to defeat COVID-19.

Medical statistics everywhere show this, yet fools are determined to be fools. Yes PLPs, you could continue to promote your time-wasting, money-wasting and bogus free COVID test promise while our unvaccinated folks remain wickedly vulnerable to an unmerciful foe.

Yes PLP, all of your leaders are fully vaccinated. Why is it that they don’t want to share the wisdom and joy of vaccination with the unvaccinated citizens? 

Take note, PLP: There are only two choices to deal with COVID-19 – go back to lockdown, or keep the economy open.

If we choose the latter, then we must encourage the unvaccinated among us to get vaccinated. If we fail to do so, sickness, death and misery will rain down on us like a ton of bricks – and your free testing promise will prove to be dead on arrival.