A stupid, ignorant populace is easier to control

Public Education’s Alarming New 4th ‘R’: Reversal of Learning.

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.

The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.

Four years later, the money is almost gone and students haven’t made up that lost academic ground, equaling more that a year of learning for disadvantaged kids. Driven by fears of a spike in dropout rates, especially among blacks and Latinos, many states and school districts are apparently leaving in place the lower standards that allow students to get good grades and graduate even though they have learned much less, particularly in math.

It’s as if many of the nation’s 50 million public school students have fallen backwards to a time before rigorous standards and accountability mattered very much.

“I’m getting concerned that, rather than continuing to do the hard work of addressing learning loss, schools will start to accept a new normal of lower standards,” said Amber Northern, who oversees research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that advocates for academic rigor in schools.

The question is—why did the windfall of federal funding do so little to help students catch up?

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First Shots: Ruger .45 ACP LC Carbine.

New from Ruger is a .45 ACP version of the original LC Carbine. The original LC Carbine was chambered in the small and fast 5.7x28mm. This new model retains all of the features of the gun, but is chambered in the larger and slower .45 ACP round. All the original features are still retained, including a threaded barrel and a reversible, side-folding, adjustable stock. The firearm is designed to work with 13-round Glock .45 ACP magazines,…..

US appeals court revives Mexico’s $10 billion lawsuit against gun makers

BOSTON (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Monday revived a $10 billion lawsuit by Mexico seeking to hold American gun manufacturers responsible for facilitating the trafficking of weapons to drug cartels across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower-court judge’s decision dismissing the case on the grounds that a U.S. law barred Mexico from suing Smith & Wesson Brands, Sturm, Ruger & Co and others.

That law, the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), provides the firearms industry broad protection from lawsuits over their products’ misuse.

Mexico’s lawyers argued the law only bars lawsuits over injuries that occur in the U.S. and does not shield the seven manufacturers and one distributor it sued from liability over the trafficking of guns to Mexican criminals.

U.S. Circuit Judge William Kayatta, writing for the three-judge panel, said that while the law can be applied to lawsuits by foreign governments, Mexico’s lawsuit “plausibly alleges a type of claim that is statutorily exempt from the PLCAA’s general prohibition.”
Lawyers for Mexico and the gun makers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mexico says over 500,000 guns are trafficked annually from the U.S. into Mexico, of which more than 68% are made by the companies it sued, which also include Beretta USA, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Colt’s Manufacturing Co and Glock Inc.

In its August 2021 complaint, Mexico estimated that 2.2% of the nearly 40 million guns made annually in the U.S. are smuggled into Mexico, including as many as 597,000 guns made by the defendants.

Mexico said the smuggling has been a key factor in its ranking third worldwide in the number of gun-related deaths. It also claimed to suffer many other harms, including declining investment and economic activity and a need to spend more on law enforcement and public safety.

The companies deny wrongdoing. Their lawyers say Mexico’s lawsuit is devoid of allegations the gun manufacturers’ gun sales themselves did anything that would create an exception to PLCAA’s broad protections.

Mississippi mother shoots burglar to protect 3 children

CARROLL CO., Miss. (WLBT) – A mother heroically protected her three children from a man who broke into her home wielding a knife.

Monday, Carroll County deputies received a call for help from the mother’s husband, who was at work in Greenwood.

He told deputies that a knife-wielding man was attempting to enter his home in the Gravel Hill area of the county while his wife and three children were hiding in a closet. The father then described the man and the vehicle he was in.

A press release says that when deputies arrived at the home, the suspect, Steve Lamar Goss, Jr., 44, had already driven away. They learned that before Goss left, he drove his 2500 GMC pickup truck into the home’s dining room after he could not kick the front door down.

While all of this was happening, a press release says the mother prayed, and her three children recited scripture while hiding in a closet designated as the family’s safe room.

When Goss found them, a press release says the mother shot him in the arm as he entered the closet still holding a knife.

Other deputies responding to the scene found a vehicle matching the description given by the husband.

A press release says they attempted a felony traffic stop in the parking lot of Acy’s Store. However, Goss ran into the business. Deputies then chased and arrested him inside the store. He was taken to Greenwood Leflore Hospital to be treated for the gunshot wound in his arm.

He was then booked into Carroll Montgomery Regional Correctional Facility on four counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary. Goss was already out on felony bond for possession of a weapon by a felon, a press release says.

Carroll County Sheriff Clint Walker says, “We can all learn a lot from this family about the importance of having an emergency plan in place in our homes and, most importantly, the power of prayer. I thank the Lord for this father’s preparation; the bravery shown by the mother and children, and that what could have been a tragedy was transformed into a testimony of their faith in God.”

Robbery turns deadly, suspect killed by resident

WICHITA FALLS, Texas (KAUZ) – The Wichita Falls Police Department said an attempted robbery Sunday evening ended with 32-year-old suspect Quincy Moore dead and others sent to the hospital.

Police said they responded to the Country Park Apartments in the 5200 block of Professional Drive at around 9:30 p.m., Sunday. Officers found three people with gunshot wounds, including one person who is a resident of the apartments.

The victim told police the other two males used a firearm in an attempt to rob him. Gunshots rang out after the victim also pulled out his firearm. All three males were wounded.

Police say Moore was pronounced dead at the hospital. The other suspect remains in serious condition and is under guard by police officers.

The victim of the robbery has been treated and released.

Police have not released the identity of the suspect under guard at the hospital.

THE JIG IS UP… EXCLUSIVE: Local Reporter Describes Election Expert Halderman Breaking into Dominion Voting Machine and Changing Vote Totals During His Georgia Testimony

Update: After speaking with election integrity expert Garland Favorito, we discovered the courtroom display was much more serious than originally reported. J. Alex Halderman demonstrated in court how Dominion machines were hacked and altered their tabulations.

J. Alex Halderman explained how to hack into an electronic voting machine in a previous lecture.

On Friday, in a Federal Court In Atlanta, Georgia, University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Alex Halderman testified in front of Judge Amy Totenberg’s courtroom about the Dominion voting machines used in the Georgia elections since 2020.

As reported earlier, during his testimony, Halderman was able to HACK A DOMINION VOTING MACHINE and change the tabulations in front of U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg and the entire courtroom!

Halderman USED ONLY A PEN TO CHANGE VOTE TOTALS!

His testimony was part of a long-running lawsuit by election integrity activists set as a bench trial.

The plaintiffs seek to remove what they say are insecure voting machines in Georgia in favor of secure paper ballots.

Following The Gateway Pundit’s explosive report on Saturday night, we spoke with Georgia reporter Amber Connor, who has been sitting in the courtroom during the trial for the past two weeks.

Amber confirmed what was reported earlier about Halderman’s demonstration live on how to hack a Dominion voting machine and change the totals using only a pen. In fact Halderman borrowed a pen from the defense attorneys for his demonstration.

The mainstream legacy news media has decided to ignore this historic case taking place in Georgia for some reason. Why is that?

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Leave The Pews

College campuses across the country were erupting in Jew-hating outbursts, and parents were rightly worried about their Jewish college-aged kids caught up in the frenzy of hate. On Facebook, a group called Mothers Against College Antisemitism (M.A.C.A.) was founded and grew quickly to over 50,000 members. They shared information, emailed, called, and signed petitions. They stood united against the oldest hatred rearing its head again.

But just as fast, fissures formed. The cudgel of DEI – that is, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that had been used against Jewish students – was the subject of feverish debate. Sure, the policies were bad for Jews, but weren’t we all good liberals after all? Shouldn’t that take precedence here? People earnestly wondered whether other minority groups would be mad at them if they fought to end DEI instead of simply fighting to get Jews included in the special identity groups recognized by the absurd system.

It wasn’t just DEI, either. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a plan to fast-track Jewish students who were feeling unsafe in their own universities who wanted to transfer to Florida colleges where he pledged they would be protected, commenters in the group warned not to accept his kindness as he was on the wrong political side.

What became clear within that Facebook group and in so many other quarters since Oct. 7 is that much of secular Judaism, in both the Reform and Conservative branches, had become overtly political and not really religiously based at all. For many Jews, their religious identity had become so intertwined with leftist politics that they couldn’t force a separation even when they themselves were being targeted with their own bad ideas.

They pledged allyship to other groups in their tent, not to Judaism or Israel. This was evident in 2019 when daily attacks began on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Activist synagogues in places like Park Slope, which would have been at the forefront of marches had any other group come under attack, spent years staying silent about it. The attackers, often caught on video, were frequently other minorities, not MAGA hat-wearing white people as they would have hoped, so it was awkward to raise a fuss. Progressive politics was the code they followed, and Judaism was an identity umbrella like all the others in their movement. “As a Jew …” they would begin their lectures. As a Jew, they were rarely interested in Judaism.

The Oct. 7 attacks in Israel woke many in the diaspora from their comfortable slumber. Jews in America and elsewhere, traumatized already from images of Jewish children stolen from their homes and Jewish teenagers mowed down while dancing at a music festival, also had to contend with a huge outpouring of hate in their own countries.

For many liberal Jews, it was hard to ignore that it wasn’t the boogeyman white supremacists that they had been warned about their entire lives. No, it was their professors, their co-workers at the nonprofit, friends of their college-aged kids calling for an end to Israel and celebrating the murder of Jews. And these hateful marches were not happening in rural Alabama, in the places they were taught to fear, but mainly in the bluest of blue cities.

The political bedfellows they had slept beside were sharply opposed to Israel doing anything but simply accepting the attacks of Oct. 7.

By Oct. 8, their “allies” had already taken to the streets, some in grotesque glee over the slaughter of Jews in their homes, others tearing down posters of kidnapped children, to say Israel should just sit down and take it.

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The Supreme Court Just Took a Side in the Biden Border Crisis

The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration on Monday in a split decision that will allow federal agents to cut razor wire installed by Texas officials along the U.S.-Mexico border amid the worsening crisis created by President Biden’s policies.

The 5-4 decision granted an emergency appeal filed by the Biden administration to reverse an injunction from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and now allows the feds to dismantle concertina wire while the lawsuit over Texas’ efforts to assume the duties of enforcing the international border — a responsibility that’s been abdicated by the Biden administration — moves ahead.

According to the Court’s order in Department of Homeland Security et al. v Texas:

The application to vacate injunction presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is granted. The December 19, 2023 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, case No. 23-50869, is vacated.

Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Kavanaugh would deny the application to vacate injunction.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberal wing constituted by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to grant the Biden administration’s appeal.

As Fox News Channel’s Bill Melugin noted on X following the Supreme Court’s ruling, this is “potentially setting up a significant state vs federal showdown.” That’s because most of the razor wire installed by state officials in Texas lies in Eagle Pass’ Shelby Park which was seized by Texas as it fights to secure the border amid Biden’s failures. Texas booted federal agents from the park, but the SCOTUS order means Border Patrol needs access to the park to cut the razor wire.

Vivek Ramaswamy suspends presidential campaign, endorses Trump

Vivek Ramaswamy suspended his campaign after a deflating Iowa caucus result on Monday, throwing his weight behind his onetime opponent, former President Donald Trump.

The Ohio biotech entrepreneur, who promised his far-right and anti-establishment policy proposals could unite the country around a shared identity, garnered less than 8% in Iowa’s caucuses.

He trailed far behind Trump, who pulled in more than 51% of the votes, and Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who garnered 21% and 19% respectively, with 97% of results reported as of 11:30 p.m. Monday.

“We are going to suspend this presidential campaign,” Ramaswamy said. “There is no path for me to be the next president, absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.”

NH Supreme Court Affirms No Duty to Retreat When Acting in Self-Defense

It feels like it’s a rare occasion these days for any court with more than one judge to issue a unanimous decision, much less one that comes down on the side of our right to keep and bear arms, but that’s exactly what happened in New Hampshire on Monday as the state Supreme Court sided with a man who drew his gun to ward off an aggressor in a road rage incident, only to find himself charged (and convicted of a crime).

It was almost three years go when Joshua D. Shea’s was convicted on a single charge of criminal threatening with a deadly weapon, but the court has now thrown out that conviction after ruling that the judge overseeing the case erred by instructing the jury to consider whether Shea had the opportunity to retreat from the encounter. As the court pointed out in its ruling, lawmakers had removed any such duty to retreat from state statutes a decade earlier, and the judge had no basis to demand the jury consider the long-repealed law when weighing the evidence against Shea.

“After 2011, a person is justified in using deadly force when he reasonably believes that another person is about to use unlawful, deadly force against him, and he is not required to retreat if he is anywhere he has a right to be and was not the initial aggressor,” wrote Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi.

Shea claims he pulled his gun after another driver threatened to “beat his ass” following a close call on Route 28 in Epsom, according to the ruling’s recitation of the case. While the complainant claimed Shea pointed the gun at him, Shea testified he merely showed the gun to warn the other man off.

The incident started when the other man pulled his car in front of Shea’s truck as they drove on Route 28, forcing Shea to slam on his brakes and hit his horn. After the two men “exchanged middle fingers” they both pulled into a gas station parking lot off a traffic circle, according to the ruling.

In the gas station parking lot, according to Shea’s testimony at trial, the complainant began “aggressively swearing and saying he was going to . . . rip (Shea) out of [his] car.”

Shea further testified that the complainant said he would “beat (Shea’s) ass,” and asked the defendant to pull into the parking lot next door where there were no cameras.

At this point, Shea testified, the complainant began walking toward Shea’s truck and he was in serious fear for his safety. Shea testified he unclipped his pistol from its holster and warned the other driver he had a gun. Shea says he brought the gun up to his chest to show the man the gun, while the other man claimed Shea pointed the gun at him.

Despite the fact that no duty to retreat exists in New Hampshire law, Judge Andrew Schulman still informed the jury that one of the factors in the case was whether Shea “could have completely and safely left the area without any risk to himself or others.” In doing so, the judges ruled, Schulman went above and beyond what is allowed by law and contradicted what the state legislature has had to say about retreating in the face of danger; namely, that there is no requirement to do so if they were not the initial aggressor. Even when deadly force is not used, merely the display of a firearm to prevent the threat from escalating, the gun owner has no duty to retreat or present their back to the individual threatening to commit an act of violence against them.

I have to say, it’s nice to be able to cover a decision involving our right to self-defense that doesn’t include anti-gun judges trying to twist the law to suit their own purpose. Granted, four of the five justices on the court were appointed by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, but even the lone justice named to the bench by Democrat John Lynch didn’t try to play any games with the decision. The five justices all made it clear that folks who aren’t the aggressor are not compelled to walk, run, or drive away instead of taking steps to lawfully protect themselves, and I’m glad that the court reiterated that fact in no uncertain terms. Hopefully Schulman’s jury instruction was just an aberration to begin with, but now there’s no excuse for any other Granite State judge to assert a duty to retreat that doesn’t exist in state law, and that’s a big win for those of us who believe in the human right of self-defense

Business Insider: Very Dangerous to ‘Indoctrinate’ Young Americans That They Can Lawfully Possess a Firearm.

Get woke, go broke and learn to code. Such is the hard lesson over at Sports Illustrated after the announcement that all of their writers will soon become unemployed and the publication’s future remains “uncertain.”  Enter Business Insider.  nstead of writing about issues germane to commerce and ways to operate businesses more effectively and profitably, BI’s crack team of future coders have gone another direction.

Their latest pearl-clutching screed laments the dangers of teaching America’s young people that they have the God-given right to own a gun for lawful purposes, including self-defense.  Why, it’s almost as if BI interns took a press release from the “Brady” gun control org and decided to post it as headline news on their website.

Shudder.

From Business Insider:

The NRA wants your kid to love guns: programs promote 2nd Amendment absolutism to Kindergarteners on up

For the National Rifle Association, no American is too young to join in their absolutist defense of the Second Amendment — and that includes Kindergarteners.

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If they don’t figure a way to make Asimov’s 3 Laws part of the permanent programming, go long on 5.56NATO and 7.62Soviet.

Demand and Production of 1 Billion Humanoid Bots Per Year

Tesla’s CEO @elonmusk agreed with a X post that having 1 billion humanoid robots doing tasks for us by the 2040s is possible.

Farzad made some observations which Elon Musk tweeted agreement.

The form factor of a humanoid robot will likely remain unchanged for a really long time. A human has a torso, two arms, two legs, feet, hands, fingers, etc. Every single physical job that exists around the world is optimized for this form factor. Construction, gardening, manufacturing, housekeeping, you name it.

That means that unlike a car (as an example), the addressable market for a product like the Tesla Bot will require little or no variations from a manufacturing standpoint. With a car, people need different types of vehicles to get their tasks done. SUVs, Pick Ups, compacts, etc. There’s a variation for every use case.

The manufacturing complexity of a humanoid bot will be much less than a car, and the units that one will be able to crank out over time through the same sized factory will only increase as efficiency gets better over time.

Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, ~60% of all civilian workers in the US have a job that requires standing or walking for a majority of their time. This means that ~60% of civilian workers have a job that is also optimized for a humanoid robot.

There are about 133 million full time employees in the US. Applying the 60%, we can assume there are about 80 million jobs that are optimized for the form factor of a human or humanoid robot. Knowing that the US has about 5% of the total global population, and we conservatively assume that the rest of the world has the same breakdown of manual vs non-manual labor, we get about 1.6 billion jobs that are optimized for a human or humanoid robot. The real number is likely to be significantly higher due to still developing nations.

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Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of freemen. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
– Patrick Henry

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Sordid Lessons from Uvalde School Shooting; Justice Department Cites “Cascading Failures.”

WHEN SECONDS COUNT, THE POLICE ARE MINUTES AWAY JUST NOT COMING

The U.S. Department of Justice released its findings yesterday on the May 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead and another 17 wounded. The report, “Critical Incident Review Active Shooter at Robb Elementary School,” found what it called “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” also using terms such as “critical failure,” “breakdown,” demonstrations upon leadership “of no urgency,” policy “training deficiencies” and more on the part of mostly local law enforcement officials. The word “failure” appeared dozens of times throughout the report.

The report noted that law enforcement officers were on the scene within 3 minutes of the first 911 call, yet the threat was not eliminated until more than an hour later.

The central issue was found to be a failure by law enforcement to treat the scene as an active shooter situation upon arrival. Specifically, first-on-the-scene responders, including the commanding officer reportedly shifted the response to that of a barricaded shooter…despite 911 dispatchers relaying they had received calls from children inside the classroom four minutes after officers arrived. Leadership also failed to establish a clear command structure, leaving many arriving support officers confused and without clear orders. 

Officials received intense criticism in the aftermath of the attack, with more than 75 minutes passing after the initial police response and before action was taken against the shooter, during which multiple calls by students were made to 911.

Former Uvalde Acting Police Chief Mariano Pargas and Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, neither who are still on their jobs, is where much of the initial blame has been placed as they were both ultimately in charge. Indeed, many families of the victims and within the community of Uvalde want officials who were responsible for the botched response to face criminal charges, according to the Texas Tribune. According to the Associated Press, local officials are still “weighing whether to bring charges.”

What added more pain and disgust to the situation for many Americans at the time of the massacre was the scene of police officers, who we now know went from “active shooter” mode to dealing with what they simply were communicating as a “barricade situation,” keeping understandably panicked parents—some getting text messages and calls from their children inside the school—from entering to save their children.

To review the complete 610-page Justice Dept. report, click here.