Under the previous administration in 2024, the United States Army was granted a permit to have a parade on the occasion of its 250th anniversary. That celebration took place last Saturday, June 14, in Washington D.C.
Notice that the Vice President and his wife brought their three children.
Was that "paid protester" really offered money to protest, to play the part of an innocent demonstrator trying to change American policy out of sincere beliefs? Or did he make that up?
It wasn't just him. Someone published a craigslist ad seeking people to demonstrate in Seattle last Saturday for a pay check of $500/day.
"In case you believed the mainstream media when it said the anti-ICE protests aimed at frustrating the enforcement of just, democratically enacted, bipartisan U.S. immigration laws are spontaneous reactions from local communities to heavy-handed enforcement … well, just don’t."
Everybody seems to agrees that our education system is in crisis. Various opinions describe it as being teacher shortages, poor reading skills, student mental health, too much bureaucracy, and they're all right and there's more problems than these--they affect every educational level from K-12 right up to the college level.
Administrators and other non-teaching staff have grown by 7x the number of teachers in the last several decades. "Both students and staff are chewed up by a bureaucratic machine that favors ever larger budgets . . ." The cost keeps rising, yet test scores rise little or not at all.
Almost 100 Yale professors signed an open letter to its president, opposing the growth of non-teaching staff which now amounts to double the number there a couple of decades ago.
This Brown University student testified before Congress that he found enormous, wasteful spending bloat at the university level:
In the past, protests in America were mostly people caring passionately about some cause enough to go out on the streets and demonstrate for their opinion. Today many protesters are not moved by conviction but for pay.
They may carry a sign, shout, obstruct the right of way for their neighbors, destroy public property, destroy private property (photo), attack the police, throw bricks.
Here is a young man who was offered $150/day to protest in Los Angeles. He doesn't really care much about the point of it which is to protest ICE officers deporting illegal immigrants, but he needed the money so he took the job.
But he started realizing that he was involved in destroying the community. They told him to go to certain streets where he found pallets of bricks to use (in destroying the community). Later he saw a pallet of molotov cocktails and thought, "Man, should I really be doing this? Like, this is bad news." He didn't care about the city of Los Angeles, but he thought "But I'm American, after all, like, this is not good." This man's conscience kicked in.
"I got to thinking, whoever is funding this must really hate this country." Yup, I believe he's right.
from X post
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
If you followed a link on yesterday's post, you heard an ABC reporter telling people what he thinks is happening at the riots in Los Angeles: "just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burning".
"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.
Have you heard reports that the Los Angeles riots protesting federal ICE officers have been peaceful?
One way or another, people are still finding ways to report true conditions (photo), a fruit of the freedom of speech we still have.
Suggestion: if you heard that the protests are peaceful, a little suspicion would be appropriate in your future trust of that source.
from Stream
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Studying and learning are hard work. What if you, as a student, could delegate writing assignments to artificial intelligence? That would mean less work, more free time, and it's super tempting. So students do it all the time . . even in writing classes.
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She was trying to teach writing at the college level, which includes reading and returning feedback to the student. Sadly, she discovered that most of her instructive feedback was a total waste because it was directed toward the AI that "wrote" it. So she quit.
If a student doesn't discipline himself to learn how to think and write, he's going to be at a disadvantage for the rest of his life to people who did learn it.
How is our education system going to handle this?
from Time
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Hannah would assign her students to write a paragraph, or five sentences, or an essay. Many were not able to do it, or complained that it was too hard, or questioned the value of doing the work . . and of course, many completed assignments were written by ChatGPT or another large language model (there's technology to determine that).
Some students saw no value in learning how to write a resume or a cover letter if they could simply make AI do it.
Are these kids learning how to write (photo)? Will their new employer be surprised with the low level of skill these students can execute when they need to think and write in the job environment?
The problem is not only that turning in a writing assignment that the lazy student did not do is dishonest. It is dishonest, but there's more. Writing well requires a degree of clear thinking, often of making a reasonable argument. If this student ever has to recommend a certain decision to other people, in work or in the community, she will have to think through the options and make a case for the best one. She needs to build that communication skill.
Teachers have been fleeing the profession in higher numbers for a while now, frequently citing poor behavior. Since ChatGPT came out in fall of 2022, it use and the widespread use of "large language models" (LLM's) like it have made teaching even harder, in the opinion of some.
Here's one of them, a high school teacher for three years. She thinks technology should be kept from students until college.
(cont'd from this post)
A Harvard graduate, author, and columnist came to speak on a Hillsdale College stage in April. He came to say that, yes, the U.S. vice president was correct about EU leaders departing from the values they used to share with us . . like democracy. It's not very democratic if Europeans have voted for 50 years to reduce immigration but their leaders keep giving them more.
Regarding the annulled election in Romania, he added information. When the "populist" candidate beat the established elite candidate last November, authorities cancelled the election while claiming Russian disinformation interference. (Sound familiar?) Voters were told they must just believe it, without evidence.
When it was obvious that the populist was going to win the re-scheduled election too, he was arrested and banned from the vote.
Regarding Germany, the leftist establishment say that they had to keep the anti-immigration AfG out of legislative functions to which they are constitutionally entitled as the largest opposition party. Why? If they allowed them into power, they would risk going back to Nazi horrors!
"Then the federal office of constitutional protection declared that AfD would be placed under heightened surveillance because they're a “threat to human dignity.”
Troubling signs from the European Union (image).
from Imprimis
All governments try to prevent "leaks" because they all keep secrets from citizens. A report on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in France was recently leaked to a "newspaper of record," Le Figaro.
Intended only for top government officials, the report claims "that the Muslim Brotherhood has built an extensive ideological infrastructure in France--not through violence, but through schools, charities, mosques, and soft power." Its goal is to infiltrate civil society "under the guise of religious and educational activities." (Image)
The Brotherhood's French network includes 21 private schools (3 are state-funded), 815 Quranic schools ("66,000 minors are taught to see themselves as part of a global Muslim community in moral and cultural opposition to Western secularism"), and hundreds of mosques. A core concept is the hatred of Jews.
None of this is illegal. It's a patient, gradual takeover which takes years. Will the French ultimately comply?
That depends. How do they feel about being colonized?
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Social media is addicting. In fact, this author calls it "maximally addicting." When you think about it, social media companies have to be as addicting as possible for maximum profit and power (if they're not also and equally driven by a moral conscience).
Are they not aware of the bad effects on kids? She says they are aware of it, but they choose to do nothing. Snapchat, for example, gets 10,000 complaints about "sextortion" every month. How many are unreported? Parental controls are just a myth.
“It’s possible to reset a child’s brain,” says the author. "Despite how bad tech addiction can get for a child, it is possible for the brain to heal and reform itself."
Parents can agree with all this, but what should they really do about it? That's the focus of her book, how to replace screens with real world relationships and responsibilities. Hint: parents will have to be more intentional and more engaged, probably enlisting the support of other families.
Parents were put on alert to the harmful effect of smart phones on their children last year when The Anxious Generation came out. Many already suspected it, school administrators and teachers saw it, but that book really woke up the public.
Bringing phones to school was blocked in some districts, and parents have tried to figure out how to limit their kids' use of tech. But a new author says that screens are "digital fentanyl" and inherently harmful. So what's actually needed is a "Tech Exit."
Even adults know they can easily get addicted to their phones. Children don't have all the skills or discipline or wisdom to be self-sufficient--they need their parents to parent.
A Christian organization submitted a request for a permit to hold an outdoor event in Seattle. Their application specified a venue request for Pike Place Market. The city denied that request and directed them to Cal Anderson Park.
So they complied and held it there on May 24. Maybe that was a mistake.
The park is "in the heart of the Queer community," according to a group called "Radical Women Seattle" which turned up to protest against "fascist family values."
Many hundreds of protesters tried to disrupt the event with bullhorns, shouting, signs, heckling. Police made 22 arrests.
It turned out that the mayor of the city is solidly behind the protesters. He made a public statement:
"Seattle is proud of our reputation as a welcoming, inclusive city for LGBTQ+ . . . Today's far-right rally was held here for this very reason – to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city's values, in the heart of Seattle's most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood."
Somebody is lying about the choice of this park, and it should be easy to verify. The FBI is looking into it.
from CBN
