No One Asked Me But… (November 29, 2017)

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… In an article that appeared in the Las Vegas Review Journal, the State ratings for schools in Clark County were exposed. The paper has jumped the announcement by the State Department of Instruction, which is not due out until early in 2018. However, the State Department indicated that the papers evaluations are correct.

The elementary and middle schools have been assigned a STAR ranking, one-star being the worst and a five-star rating the best. The high schools were merely placed by number ranking as the State has not determined how to break down the star ranking for them.

According to the RJ report, Ute V. Perkins Elementary School is a four-star school, only 2.5 points from a five-star school. Mack Lyon Middle School is a five-star school.

Moapa Valley High School is the tenth-ranked high school out of a total of 54 high schools. MVHS is the second highest ranked comprehensive high school in the District. Nine of the ten schools that rank higher than MVHS are magnet schools that get to hand pick their student body. The anomaly in this is Coronado High School in Henderson. This school leads all comprehensive high schools by a wide margin. Someone needs to find out what Coronado is doing that all the other large schools in the district are not doing.

According to this report, Grant M. Bowler is a two-star school, “a school that has room for improvement in whole school proficiency and growth.” Unless there is a point of perfection for a school, that statement is true for all schools no matter what their star rating. One must wonder how a two-star elementary school can be the feeder base for a five-star middle and a five-star high school?

One must also remember that these are ratings based on speculation that has been confirmed by the State Department. Before we get jubilant or depressed by the results, we need to see the State’s official standings.

No one asked me but… Spoliation is the legal term for the destruction or alteration of a document that destroys its value in a legal proceeding. A spoliator of evidence in a legal action is an individual who neglects to produce evidence that is in their possession or control. When spoliation takes place, the judge and jury may infer that the spoliator had “consciousness of guilt” or other motivation to avoid the evidence. They may conclude that the evidence would be unfavorable to the spoliator.

BLM agents shredded documents about their roundup of 400 cattle in the Gold Butte area that belonged to the Bundy family. (Cliven should be grateful to the BLM; for while he was in jail his herd has grown to over 1,000 according to court documents presented in his trial.)

But back to the issue of spoliation of evidence. The issue was ruled on in an earlier federal court presided over by a federal judge who found in favor of the federal government stating that the action of destroying evidence did not meet the standard of spoliation. BLM agent Kent Kleman stated that the destruction was done to protect the agents and not to hide evidence. The action was taken due to the threat of the Bundy’s to overrun the headquarters of the BLM operation.

There is no evidence that there was any attempt to overrun the BLM headquarters. Oh! The evidence was shredded. However, in fact, the only confrontations took place miles from the headquarters of BLM.

Further the operation was orchestrated out of the office in Las Vegas. In this day and age can one believe that the information that was shredded is not on BLM computer hard drives somewhere, most likely in Las Vegas?

I am old school. Everything I have is backed up on paper. However, if I were to shred all my paper copies, I would still have that information on my hard drive and backed up on the CLOUD.
One must ask why the government can’t or won’t produce the documents from their computer hard drives.

Now I may be completely wrong about the retention of computer information but it seems logical to me in this day of computers. I may have been watching too much Forensic Files but I am amazed at what can be reconstructed from computer files. It is my understanding that almost anything created on a computer can be reproduced if one really tries. Unless the BLM was using a quill-pen or stone tablets, the information should be retrievable.

I really don’t care whether the information would be favorable or unfavorable to one party of the dispute or the other; but it should be made available. At the very least, the fact that the information was destroyed should be presented to the jury deciding this case.

No one asked me but… One of greatest threats to America today is the politicizing of the American court system. I cringe every time I see a political campaign that says we must have Republican control of the Senate so we can appoint more conservative judges. For eight years we heard that we needed to have an Obama Court. Old Supreme Court justices don’t retire because it will change the political make-up of the Supreme Court.

We don’t need a conservative Supreme Court. We don’t need a liberal Supreme Court. We need an apolitical court that will look at the merits of a case and decide it on legal merit rather than political implications.

Political parties have already made it nearly impossible to govern through the Senate and the House of Representatives forcing Presidents to use powers not granted a President except in time of war. The Supreme Court has now become the major arbitrator of all laws and the final power in the country. The political hacks understand whoever controls the courts controls the country.

The greatest example of the evils of politicizing the courts is to be found in the Ninth Circuit where everything is decided based on liberal politics. We have federal courts that are more interested in supporting causes than finding justice.

Those who are old enough to remember Nikita Khrushchev, the last dictator of the Soviet Union, will remember his statement that “We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.” If we continue down the road we are taking, we will destroy ourselves without the help of anyone else.

Thought of the week… “When enough people move, that is a movement. And if the movement has enough energy, that is a revolution. And in education, that’s exactly what we need.”
–Ken Robinson