When it comes to connecting fraud and gang activity to Somali people in the Twin Cities, there's controversy.
Not even the verifiable facts of the issues are agreed upon, since the Hennepin County Attorney calls statements of the Ramsey County Sheriff and his department "lies" (yesterday's post).
We can get some clarity about Somalia from Ayaan Hirsi Ali who is a heroic, naturalized American citizen today but grew up in Somalia. She has the authority of personal experience when she talks about the country and religion of her birth.
Get acquainted with her as she tells her story below. It includes how she came to faith in Jesus.
Faith in God is not irrational, though some have claimed that. There is strong evidence to support belief in God, and I bring that to you sometimes. Atheists have their points to make as well. But neither view is actually proved.
A big part of your own decision to believe - or not -goes way beyond evidence and proof, though. Do you want there to be a God? Some decidedly don't. You can choose cynicism. You can choose to say Beauty and Goodness and Truth and Meaning are just illusions. Is that what you want?
The great Dr. John Lennox clarifies the two belief options:
Robby's effectiveness in changing corporate minds about DEI caught the attention of the NYT, which did a story on "how to handle the Robby Starbuck problem in corporate America." Large sums of money were spent on "oppo" research to find something negative that could be used as leverage against him.
Even worse, Google's AI started reporting very bad things about him when a search on his name was done. Most of us routinely believe answers from artificial intelligence, right? So, these accusations were injected into public opinion and were a direct threat to his reputation.
But the accusations (child rapist, financial cheater, convicted of sexual assault, etc.) were all made up by AI and completely untrue. When asked to verify these charges, Google's AI invented both fake police reports and fake articles written by real journalists. That is, it made up both the lie and the documentation of it.
Bret Weinstein makes some chilling remarks about the danger of AI misleading its readers and ruining people's reputations at about 4:45 and following in video below.
He loves the First Amendment (image): "It assumes that human beings will disagree deeply--and refuses to grant the state authority to referee truth." What an important insight: governments consist of flawed people, the only kind there is. People can only be free where they are not forced to speak the government's "truth," where they can speak their consciences.
"To become an American citizen is not to inherit perfection. It is to inherit responsibility--to participate in a fragile, magnificent experiment that only survives if enough people remember why it exists, and what it asks of them. *
"America is not great because it is easy. It is great because it trusts its people with freedom [per Pres. John Kennedy] and demands that they be worthy of it. I can only hope to be."
* For more on this responsibility, read If You Can Keep It by Eric Metaxas
Real people--people educating the children of Britain--really tried to put shame into the hearts of those children: shame for their ancestors, for their nation, for their race. Shaming kids for what others did before they were born is not fair. It's not justice.
Someone could wonder if all these positive videos about Britain are historically accurate. A doubter could wonder, "are these videos just spin, an attempt to whitewash the wrong things of the past?" It's a valid question because, yes, the videos must be true if they're to have value.
While out to lunch last Sunday, I picked up a newspaper and browsed through one section. Every headline assumed a single point of view, the left-leaning view.
Minneapolis is wracked with conflict (image) right now, as you probably know. But a reader of the biggest Twin Cities' newspaper would never learn from the headlines I saw that there are other worthy interpretations of what's going on, that there are non-left decent people who have something to say.
Emotions are amplified. Additional facts and context to the stories don't get reported as they're discovered, because opinions and feelings are hardened. Stories or narrative get "crystallized before facts emerge."
"Emotional polarization [is] amplified by ideological media driving radicalized behavior," according to this pollster.
Would you believe that, by some estimates, at least half of new internet content is generated by artificial intelligence? That means it was written or created by AI at the command of a human giving a prompt. Casual viewers assume a human creator of this content and are easily deceived.
It's happening on Grok, the AI of X (old Twitter), and it makes people mad. None of us want untrue videos, images or stories about ourselves circulating.
How to stop it is the question. Grok is working on it: "We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis." Image creation and editing are only available to paid subscribers, so they can hold bad actors accountable.
But we know that fake stuff on the internet will continue. How do we know what posts are true and which are fake?
Grok has been trained to look for the truth. Of course it won't be perfect. But as far as I can tell, the other systems don't even make it a goal. That's enough for me. I'm using Grok.
Artificial intelligence exploded into public life just a few years ago but it's changing our lives, as so many have predicted.
Nvidia, a major force driving the movement, describes it this way: "AI can be thought of as the development of computer systems that can perform tasks autonomously, ingesting and analyzing enormous volumes of data, then recognizing patterns in that data."
NASA uses the government's definition, which you might summarize this way: "An artificial system designed to think or act like a human."
IBM says there are three types. The only one currently operating, as John Lennox once explained, is "Narrow AI" which can only perform the task it was trained to do. "General AI" will have human intelligence, and "Super AI" will surpass human intelligence. They're still theoretical.
When we ask AI a question, do we want its answer to be true: factual, based on reality, accurate? Yes, and we assume it is. But there's a lot of room for interpretation or opinion on any given topic. How was it trained . . and whose integrity or values were built into it?
Our whole education system needs to be re-worked, re-prioritized, re-organized. Woke ideology was ingrained over the years and we didn't even notice it.
It's not just gender madness or the new "anti-racism" racism: even mathematics education surrenders to woke ideology. Solid, foundational facts may be denied. You may say, "that can't happen because everybody still knows that 2+2 equals 4."
No, unfortunately in the minds of some educators the answer could be 5. True or correct math answers, they claim, is a symptom of "white supremacy." That's what the Oregon Department of Education told teachers in 2021. (Maybe they've stopped that. One can only hope so.) It's a diabolical trend.
The short fictional film below suggests the chilling scenario where children are taught to believe a lie just because the teacher says so.
Atheist (Boghossian) and Christian (Miller) are now friends, fighting on the same side. They have travelled together and spoken together on the same platform. What do they have in common? They both believe in freedom of speech and objective truth. Passionately.
Miller, like me and most believers, has always defended the rights of people who disagree with us to speak what they believe. It was no great leap for him to fight cancel culture on college campuses. But it probably was a leap for Boghossian because his own preferred politics on the left tends to silence dissenting opinions.
As a Portland professor, Boghossian invited a speaker to campus in 2017 to talk about possible biological gender differences. "Social justice advocates" on campus retaliated by tying his name to the Nazi swastika, by making threats and leaving a bag of feces. He says they silence and punish diverse views, becoming "what they claim to hate - thugs and bullies."
Like Robert George, Peter believes that speaking what you believe to be true in spite of danger . . is a moral duty. It's being suppressed where he worked, at Portland State University. So, putting his money where his mouth is, he resigned.
From his resignation letter: "Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly."
If you have doubts about your Christian faith, don't be ashamed of that. Doubts are good questions that you don't know the answers to yet.
Greg Koukl has made a career out of finding answers. He doesn't like to use "cookie-cutter" methods when talking to people, but rather to be flexible and adapt to each person.
His interview below (about 15:45 and following) advises us to:
ask what the alternative to Christianity is
ask what different worldview answers all your questions
ask what different religion explains reality
Yes, it's good to believe strongly, to get to the point where you're strong in your faith. But the way forward is not to repress or stuff or ignore every doubt.
You want to know what's true. God put that desire within you and you're not wrong to pay attention to it. So start looking for answers. That leads to stronger faith.
Go to his website and put your question in the search bar.
Christians in America are waking up to a couple of modern facts: our views and our churches don't enjoy near-universal approval anymore, and we need to re-think our response to our culture in light of that.
Modern life is confusing. American culture has been disrupted by people who don't share our values.
This journalist (below) is a Christian. He challenges both himself and the rest of us to be careful to tell the truth rather than just play for hits and likes on social media, to do things God's way rather than the selfish way. He challenges all of us to respond with restraint and kindness even when confronted with opposition and hate.
We 're all going to have to "dig for truth" in this environment. Think things through.
"Fun"?? This is from a used-to-be-trusted legacy media news outlet. To the degree that anyone agrees with this deluded view of a violent situation, we have a genuine crisis going on in this country.
Harvard University has lost its credibility among American taxpayers.As the federal government removes billions of dollars of public funding, they counter with the claim that they can do whatever they want to do under the umbrella of free speech and academic freedom.
Yes, they have free speech but we don't have to pay them billions for misleading students and breaking civil rights law.
A psychiatrist who taught in their medical school felt compelled to break away a year ago. He explained his understandable reasons:
"I stopped teaching at Harvard last year [2024] primarily because of its
anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender
discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism . . Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased
truth-seeking . . ."
He doesn't hold back: "Harvard remains in denial of its own radicalism. It sneers and looks
down on most of America and on American values like color-blind
equality, meritocracy, free speech, hard work, and individual
responsibility."
News reporting and broadcasting should be "fair and balanced" in America, and that's what we look for. But of course there are journalists who think their own opinions are right and refuse to give coverage to other views.
It's allowed in America, where we have protected free speech. But the other half of Americans, who see things differently, certainly should not be forced to pay for the broadcasting of opinions they believe to be wrong. That wouldn't be fair.
Those other Americans have been in this position for decades. Complaints that government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR and PBS) is biased go back to the 1960's. But moves to cut public funding were always de-railed by appealing to kids' programing like Big Bird and Mr. Rogers.
Legacy ("old") media has lost the trust of many Americans, demonstrated by declining subscribers and declining influence. Some are trying to face that fact, to "right the ship," and to regain trust. Surging in the gap is "new media," including podcasts and X and independent videos/reports.
For example, there were hundreds of authentic videos (like yesterday's) published on X of real conditions last fall after Hurricane Helene created chaos in western North Carolina. They challenged some misleading legacy media reports in newspapers and on TV.
We learned not to trust "old" media's version of reality. Now there's an alternative that seems more trustworthy. As Konstantin Kisin says, "what could go wrong?"
Hopefully, new media will prove more reliable. But it will still be produced by flawed human beings, like the "old."
If
you wanted to find out what DOGE is, would you go to Wikipedia? Many
would, because they think it is neutral and honest in reporting
factual information in a non-partisan way. I wish that were the case.
It has nothing good to say about this heroic effort to trim the federal budget. On the contrary, the reader only learns that DOGE is controversial, it inspires lawsuits, its claims to the discovery of fraud are false, its leader is ambiguous, it cuts good programs, it's a partisan political tool, etc., etc.
In short, Wikipedia's article is a hit job on DOGE and on Elon Musk. It reads like a partisan political tool itself.
Wikipedia is the product of Katherine Maher's priorities.
"Consensus" and "getting things done" come before truth on her priority
list. Vital information is missing from the article. There's no effort to acknowledge the legitimate views of the people who support it.
"Reliable" ? Well, not exactly . . not if you really need to know the reality about a situation. True information is not her goal in leading this news-gathering organization. She says:
So her goal for NPR is to get everybody to agree, presumably with their point of view. She probably has nothing against true information . . but only if it helps them get more important things done.
Americans don't trust news media, as Jeff Bezos said. This helps explain why.
Some people claimed during the campaign that the president-elect is "literally Hitler." The current president said that the man is a fascist and a threat to democracy. But last week he gave him happy congratulations and a "Welcome back" to the White House.
A radio host feels confused. "What happened to fascist?" Did he believe those accusations?
Back in 2006, journalist Leslie Stahl reminded the incoming Speaker of the House that she had said terrible things about the opposing party's candidates. She asked, "How will you be able to work with him after saying those things??"
Said the Speaker, "Oh that's just politics. I'm sure he understands."
Alarming, emotional, exaggerated attacks are not to be taken seriously. Even the politician who says these things often does not actually believe them, but just says them for effect. Any connection to genuine truth could be a coincidence.
