Silver lining of the bug: Getting more kids out of the Public schools indoctrination centers and into home schooling where the parents are in control is all for the good.

Back to School? “No Thanks” Say Millions of New Homeschooling Parents.

Next month marks the beginning of the 2020/2021 academic year in several US states, and pressure is mounting to reopen schools even as the COVID-19 pandemic persists. Florida, for example, is now considered the nation’s No. 1 hot spot for the virus; yet on Monday, the state’s education commissioner issued an executive order mandating that all Florida schools open in August with in-person learning and their full suite of student services.

Many parents are balking at back-to-school, choosing instead to homeschool their children this fall.

Gratefully, this virus seems to be sparing most children, and prominent medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics have urged schools to reopen this fall with in-person learning. For some parents, fear of the virus itself is a primary consideration in delaying a child’s return to school, especially if the child has direct contact with individuals who are most vulnerable to COVID-19’s worst effects.

But for many parents, it’s not the virus they are avoiding by keeping their children home—it’s the response to the virus.

In May, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued school reopening guidelines that called for:

  • Strict social distancing tactics
  • All-day mask wearing for most students and teachers
  • Staggered attendance
  • Daily health checks
  • No gym or cafetaria use
  • Restricted playground access and limited toy-sharing, and
  • Tight controls on visitors to school buildings, including parents.

School districts across the country quickly adopted the CDC’s guidelines, devising their reopening plans accordingly. Once parents got wind of what the upcoming school-year would look like, including the real possibility that at any time schools could be shut down again due to virus spikes, they started exploring other options.

For Florida mother, Rachael Cohen, these social distancing expectations and pandemic response measures prompted her to commit to homeschooling her three children, ages 13, 8, and 5, this fall.

“Mandated masks, as well as rigid and arbitrary rules and requirements regarding the use and location of their bodies, will serve to dehumanize, disconnect, and intimidate students,” Cohen told me in a recent interview.

She is endeavoring to expand schooling alternatives in her area and is currently working to create a self-directed learning community for local homeschoolers that emphasizes nature-based, experiential education. “There is quite a lot of interest,” she says.

According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 60 percent of parents surveyed said they will likely choose at-home learning this fall rather than send their children to school even if the schools reopen for in-person learning. Thirty percent of parents surveyed said they were “very likely” to keep their children home.

While some of these parents may opt for an online version of school-at-home tied to their district, many states are seeing a surge in the number of parents withdrawing their children from school in favor of independent homeschooling. From coast to coast, and everywhere in between, more parents are opting out of conventional schooling this year, citing onerous social distancing requirements as a primary reason.

Indeed, so many parents submitted notices of intent to homeschool in North Carolina last week that it crashed the state’s nonpublic education website.

Other parents are choosing to delay their children’s school enrollment, with school districts across the country reporting lower than average kindergarten registration numbers this summer.

School officials are cracking down in response.

Concerned about declining enrollments and parents reassuming control over their children’s education, some school districts are reportedly trying to block parents from removing their children from school for homeschooling.

In England, it’s even worse. Government officials there are so worried about parents refusing to send their children back to school this fall that the education secretary just announced fines for all families who keep their children home in violation of compulsory schooling laws. “We do have to get back into compulsory education and obviously fines sit alongside as part of that,” English secretary Gavin Williamson announced.

When school officials resort to force in order to ensure compliance, it should prompt parents to look more closely at their child’s overall learning environment. Parents have the utmost interest in ensuring their children’s well-being, both physically and emotionally, and their concerns and choices should be respected and honored.

After several months of learning at home with their children, parents may not be so willing to comply with district directives and may prefer other, more individualized education options. Pushed into homeschooling this spring by the pandemic, many parents are now going willingly, and eagerly, down this increasingly popular educational path.

Intrusive snoop apps on the phone? Not if Ich Bin can help it.

Survey Finds Americans Skeptical of Contact Tracing Apps.

Confusion and skepticism may confound efforts to make use of digital contact tracing technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent survey found that just 42 percent of American respondents support using so-called contact tracing apps—an indication of a lack of confidence that could weaken or even derail effective deployment of such technologies.

Most contact tracing apps generally try to collect some form of information about a smartphone user’s encounters with other people and notify those users if they were potentially exposed to a confirmed COVID-19 case. But each app has its own approach to privacy and can differ in whether it collects more specific location data based on GPS or merely records close encounters with other smartphones based on Bluetooth radio-wave transmissions. Those differences, coupled with public misunderstanding of different apps, can make it tricky to assess public opinion of specific digital contact tracing technologies.

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Self-defense is not immoral, and neither is arming oneself

In his response to Jeff Jacoby’s recent column about rising gun ownership among Blacks (”Must self-preservation be the top priority?” Letters, June 29), Remy Trahant praises 1960s civil rights protesters for their willingness to die for a cause. He contrasts them with present-day gun owners, who selfishly indulge “the urge to protect [their] own life and family and property and to heck with everyone else.”

I wonder what Trahant believes “everyone else” loses when a person acts to protect their family or property. Other than the criminal, I can’t think of anyone who suffers when a crime is prevented.

The morality of self-defense probably isn’t a hot topic in the cities still smoldering from riots, and the potential need for self-defense is obvious where city governments refused to protect their own citizens. No one should be surprised that people are arming themselves in this environment. Their logic is impeccable.

 

I’m not familiar with most of the people who signed off on the letter, but it occurs to me that most of those who I do know of are quite the far leftists themselves. Which brings the question to mind; ‘why are they pleading with their own kind to stop?’ One interesting possible answer is that they’re smart enough to realize that the rest of the populace is getting fed up to the gill with all this and when we decide to take care of business, they’ll be included just for the sake of completeness.

150 Top Intellectuals Sign Open Letter Decrying Cancel Culture

150 of the world’s top intellectuals, authors and activists have signed an open letter decrying leftist cancel culture, censorship and the totalitarian march of “ideological conformity.”

Signatories include liberal icon Noam Chomsky and ‘Satanic Verses’ author Salman Rushdie.

The letter, which was published by Harpers Magazine, is also signed by J.K. Rowling, Fareed Zakaria, Garry Kasparov, and, perhaps surprisingly, feminist activist Gloria Steinem.

“The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides,” states the letter, highlighting how “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted” as a result of “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

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Know Your Enemy: Undeniable Truths About the Left

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.  If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”— Sun Tzu

As my high school football coach used to say, “It is time to fight like men or hike up your skirts and say, here it is.”  Freedom-loving, patriotic Americans need to take a deep breath, calm down and accurately assess the current cultural and political situation in the country. It is time to stop reacting to what the left does and instead focus on some undeniable truths about our enemies.  Victory only comes after finding your opponents’ weaknesses and exploiting them, but such flaws cannot be found without honest and careful study.  This is how patriots fight.

First, we must begin by properly labeling the truth as it is. For example, everything that is happening now is because the left’s plans to remake the United States from a Constitutional republic into borderless global state were thwarted by the people electing Donald J. Trump for president. As a result, the left not only hates Trump for beating their savior Hillary Clinton, it also loathes the citizens who voted for him.

Once you honestly grasp the level of hatred the left has for us, you begin to understand that the Wuhan virus extended lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter/Antifa led riots are for express purpose of bringing misery and terror to those who dared to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 and those who are planning to vote for him in November. The left has turned up their intensity to eleven in their ongoing effort to isolate Trump from his base. Democrat governors and mayors are holding your Constitutional freedoms hostage and the unspoken ransom for you to make all this desolation go away is to vote Democrat. “Abandon this ogre, Trump, and things will go back to how they were before you made the mistake of voting for him.”

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“America’s values are grounded in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of 1787, which are themselves outgrowths of the European Enlightenment and England’s Glorious Revolution (1688-89). The genius of the American Founding was to block the consolidation of state power in one location (the central government) or one branch of government. These arrangements envisioned a broad public sphere, where citizens could speak freely and assemble peacefully. Those arrangements were codified in the Bill of Rights.”

The Fierce Fight Over America’s Ideals and History.

Americans do more than tolerate calls to live up to our highest ideals. We embrace them. Martin Luther King knew that when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … So we have come to cash this check.”

Honoring that check brings together Americans of all political stripes. Most think, rightly, that King’s dream is the American dream. They do not believe the dream itself is a fraud, an opiate for the masses. They reject this frontal assault on America’s history and basic values. They see it every day on television and, more privately, when their children come home from school and say what they are being taught.

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“Today, the ice-cold reality of self-reliance settles in when people observe professional protesters rioting with violence and destruction. That’s why they are buying guns.”

The Record-Breaking American Arms Race of 2020 Means One Thing: You Loot, We Shoot!

Florida – -(AmmoLand.com)- Record numbers of firearms have been purchased over the past couple of months in Florida and around our nation. Many of the firearms were – and are – purchased by people who never thought they would want or need a gun. Firearms training classes are full and booked for months ahead. Florida Tax Collectors are reporting huge increases in the number of Concealed Weapon or Firearm License applications being processed locally.

Around the country, professional rioters and violent protesters have been destroying private property. These acts of violence are soon followed by looters who help themselves to what’s left. These are not acts of civil disobedience; these are planned and orchestrated acts of domestic terrorism.

People around the nation are getting fed up and are buying guns, getting trained, and are preparing to protect what they have worked hard to achieve. We’ve seen people wake up and take responsibility for themselves and their property like never be before.

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Biden Vows to “Transform” Nation if Elected President, Doesn’t Reveal How

Democratic nominee Joe Biden vowed on Twitter Sunday that if he is elected president, his administration “won’t just rebuild the nation — we’ll transform it,” raising questions from critics about what exactly will be transformed and how he plans on accomplishing it.

Those on the left say the former vice president has spent more than 40 years in the federal government without solving any major issues, Fox News reported.

His critics on the right, however, fear Biden will take direction from those on the far-left of the Democratic Party. Who Biden chooses for his running mate will be an early indicator of which direction his administration will lean.

When asked by Fox News for a comment regarding his vague tweet, Biden’s campaign sent a link to his website, which listed several of his policy points and plans.

  • Wide availability of free coronavirus testing
  • Emergency paid leave as a “decisive economic response”
  • An agenda for the black community
  • Criminal justice reform
  • An initiative for gun violence

Biden also appears to have some issues that need further explaining ahead of the 2020 presidential election on November 3, including his position against defunding the police — which Politico has called one of the Black Lives Matter movement’s “boldest proposals.”

Barack Hussein Obama is Running for a Third Term

President Trump’s Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore was a good first step, but he must now identify the enemy by name – Communist China. We are at war. The China virus has been followed by riots instigated by pro-Chinese groups in our major cities. Meanwhile, China has taken Hong Kong, and its sights are set on the United States. We could drop into their hands like an overripe fruit. Those are the stakes.

Candidate Joe Biden, a shell of a man with no coherent ideas of his own, is the vessel for our domestic enemies with foreign ties to take control of the federal government and reduce the once-great United States to warring factions unable to stop Red China’s worldwide advance. Biden is promising peace and harmony but he is only a front man for the same forces behind Barack Hussein Obama’s movement for the “fundamental transformation” of America. Obama visited with Chinese President Xi after he left office, in a meeting of “veteran cadres,” or communist officials, discussing current events. “Xi made a positive appraisal of Obama’s efforts in promoting China-U.S. relations during his presidency,” said the Chinse press.

That was ominous, but our media showed no interest. Yet this helps explain why Trump’s anti-China policies were a trigger, not only for the Russia-gate hoax, but coronavirus and the protests and riots.

One thing is clear: Obama and his people are calling the shots, literally, behind the Biden for President campaign. He wants a third term in office, and he may get it, using Biden as his front man. He will then reinstate his China-friendly policies.

Why, President Trump has to ask, did U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers seize a shipment from China that contained over 10,000 assault weapons parts being smuggled into the country? The parts were seized at Express Consignment Operations hub in Louisville, Kentucky, in a parcel described as containing 100 Steel Pin Samples. On a separate occasion, more than 5,000 counterfeit driver’s licenses and 2,909 counterfeit IDs were seized there. They also came from China and were headed to New York.

All of this looks like China is outfitting a communist insurgency on American soil. The Red Chinese are already killing our people through exports of fentanyl.

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Today is the 12th World Chocolate Day

Invented by the Aztecs, they believed Quetzacoatal gave them the cacao plant they made Xocolātl from. The Spanish conquistadors took the seeds back with them and cooks came up with a confection they called Chocolate.

Perhaps our Correspondent at the South American Desk can add to this report.

‘Get me back to Caracas’: desperate Venezuelans leave lockdown Bogotá

Rosa Vera, a 40-year-old from a small town in crisis-ridden Venezuela, thought moving to Colombia would give her the chance to find work. Five months ago, she left her family and began the arduous journey to Bogotá, the Colombian capital, to look for a job.

Instead, as coronavirus shut down economic life in the city, Vera and more than 400 Venezuelans had no choice but to camp out for a month, waiting for help to get them home.

“I left Venezuela because the situation was so bad that I couldn’t feed my family,” Vera says, as cars whizz along the highway that cuts through the impromptu camp. “I never thought that here I wouldn’t be able to feed myself.”

Venezuela, despite having the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, is mired in economic and social ruin. Hyperinflation is rampant, rendering the currency, the bolivar, practically useless, while food shortages are a daily reality.

I can knock on doors but if there’s no work, what can I do? Going home is the only option I have

More than 4 million Venezuelans have now left, with about 5,000 crossing into neighbouring Colombia each day at the end of last year, according to data from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Nearly 2 million live in Colombia.

But now, with lockdown shuttering businesses and keeping customers away, there is little work for Venezuelans such as Vera. Unable to pay rent, she was evicted from the house she shared with other migrants in the south of Bogotá. She has spent the past month camped outside a bus terminal on the northern outskirts of the city. Vera, like the 430 others here, would rather be home in Venezuela, where at least shelter is guaranteed. “I can knock on doors but if there’s no work, what can I do?” Vera asks, as she washes her clothes in a stream. “Going home is the only option I have.

“The dream is to get home and get a roof over my head,” Vera says. “With a little help from God, I’ll get there.”

Last Thursday morning the city began bussing the migrants towards the border. Between rain showers, hundreds of hungry Venezuelans packed up their tents and queued for buses.

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On Facebuk:
All the major media told me that the President’s speech at Mount Rushmore was “dark” and “divisive,” so my assumption was that he probably accurately described the left’s method and agenda. Upon reading the transcript, that assumption turns out to be — totally correct.

“Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies — all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”

Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration | Keystone, South Dakota

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It’s not slavery they oppose, it’s American history.  Otherwise  they wouldn’t destroy  the statue of a former slave who spent the rest of his life fighting slavery.

Frederick Douglass statue vandalized on anniversary of his Rochester speech.

On the same weekend in which famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass 168 years ago delivered one of his most historically resonant speeches, a statue of Douglass was toppled from its base and left near the Genesee River gorge.
Located in Maplewood Park, the statue “had been placed over the fence to the gorge and was leaning against the fence” on the river side, according to a statement from Rochester police. The statue was left about 50 feet from its pedestal.

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Pregnant Woman Shoots Intruder At NW OKC Apartment

The Oklahoma City Police Department said a pregnant woman shot an alleged intruder Friday in northwest Oklahoma City.
Police said it happened in the 6300 block of Danish Dr.

The woman told police a man she didn’t know knocked on her door, but she did not answer. Police said the woman later took her dog out for a walk, when she went back to her apartment the man returned and tried to force his way inside, according to the report.

Police said the woman retrieved a gun and shot the suspect in the shoulder. He was taken into custody.

Authorities said the woman was uninjured.

The figuring is that Kanye will pull most of his votes from demoncraps.

Kanye West declares he will run for US president in 2020

Just when you thought 2020 couldn’t get any weirder, rapper Kanye West declared his candidacy for US president.

The unlikely challenger to Donald Trump – of whom he has been a vocal supporter – and Joe Biden, chose American independence day to make the surprise announcement on Twitter, triggering a social media storm.

“We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future,” West wrote. “I am running for president of the United States.” Continue reading “”

Trump Announces Creation Of New National Monument — Here’s What It Is

President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new national monument during his Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday night, dubbing it the National Garden of American Heroes.

Trump said he had already signed an executive order directing the garden’s construction. The monument will feature statues of great Americans from every walk of life, from music and art to industry, science, and the military, Trump said. The announcement came at the end of his South Dakota speech condemning protesters for tearing down monuments to America’s founding generation.

“Americans must never loose sight of this miraculous story,” Trump said of the American dream. “So today under the authority vested in me as president of the United States, I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past. I am signing an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.”

The White House released text of Trump’s executive order on Friday evening. The order established the Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, which will be chaired by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt

The order says the garden should be open to the public before July 4, 2026.

The Gun Sales of June: When citizens conclude cops won’t protect them, they buy firearms.

Patricia and Mark McCloskey are the couple made instantly famous—or infamous—after a video showed them wielding firearms as they fended off protesters who had trespassed on private property outside their St. Louis home.

The Circuit Attorney for St. Louis, Kimberly Gardner, reacted by issuing a statement saying she planned an investigation, and that her office will not tolerate any effort to chill peaceful protest by the “threat of deadly force.” Never mind that Mr. McCloskey says he and his wife feared they’d be killed. As they told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “the only thing that kept those mobsters, that crowd, away from us is that we were standing there with guns.”

If soaring gun sales are a guide, millions of Americans are with the McCloskeys. This week the FBI announced a record 3.9 million background checks for June, the highest monthly total since the FBI began keeping the statistic in 1998. Adjusting to reflect checks only for gun purchases, the National Shooting Sports Foundation says this works out to 2.2 million, a 136% increase over June 2019. NSSF spokesman Mark Oliva says about 40% of these checks are for first-time gun buyers.

This is a warning to the Defund the Police movement about unintended consequences. The more progressives push policies that mean cops won’t be around when people need them, the more they are inviting Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves.

Take this 4th of July to reject all the America-haters.

On July 4, 1926, in a speech in the City of Brotherly Love, President Calvin Coolidge said: “At the end of 150 years, the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine in grateful acknowledgment of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.”

Nearly a century later, the legacy of those inspired men is in question. On this Independence Day, there must be no apologies for the greatest nation that has ever existed. Today, we celebrate the unabashed glory and goodness of the United States of America.

There are those today, members of a hyper-educated but unwise elite, who consider the American experiment a failure. They believe it was never good to begin with. In our own city, The New York Times has dedicated its vast resources to spreading this pernicious lie.

But you won’t read that in these pages on July 4.

About two months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the founder of this newspaper, Alexander Hamilton, was serving under Gen. George Washington — and badly losing the Battle of Brooklyn.

That time Alexander Hamilton founded America’s oldest daily newspaper
How hopeless must the cause have seemed in their quiet moments, haunted by the foreboding sense that their newborn nation would perish. Many of us have the same fear today.

But they didn’t lose. And neither will we.

This year, as hard-left vandals and their liberal apologists tear down statues of the Founding Fathers in a display of staggering ignorance, we must stand up as Americans and announce with the full-throated harmony of the most diverse nation on earth that the United States is still, and will always be, our beloved homeland.

On Independence Day, my neighbor Bruno, who immigrated here from Italy 50 years ago, will grill sausage and play with his grandkids. On Independence Day, the Chinese family on the other side of my Brooklyn row house, who speak about as much English as I speak Mandarin, will celebrate their new lives as free citizens.

On Independence Day, the sad, broken souls who vent rage against this nation can’t extinguish the joy of ordinary men and women whose daily lives give quiet testament to the enduring promise of 1776.

On Independence Day, there should be no caveats. No self-negating apologies, confessions or Maoist-style struggle sessions. No trigger warnings.

As Donald Rumsfeld once quipped, “Who do we want to provide leadership in the world? Somebody else?” On Independence Day, we remember that freedom wasn’t granted to us — but demanded of us. On Independence Day, we are all full-blooded brothers and sisters in liberty.

This is the nation where, within living memory of slavery, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois climbed the summit of academia and became household names. The land where Jews fleeing pogroms found refuge and opportunity. The land of every creed, every language, every religion. And why does it work? Because, before and after all of our differences, we are all Americans.

The story behind America’s national hymn
Is America just a governmental system, an abstract set of rights and procedures? Is it just a vast and prosperous land? Is it an economic system? No. America is all of those things, to be sure, but America isn’t a mere word, nor a mere abstraction. America is all of us, the great living castle of our freedom that protects even those who foolishly would destroy it. America is a nation.

So be proud on Independence Day, proud of our nation. Don’t let the naysayers get you down.

Sixty years after Coolidge spoke in Philadelphia, another president, Ronald Reagan, gave remarks on Independence Day from New York Harbor.

He said: “My fellow Americans, we’re known around the world as a confident and a happy people.

Tonight, there’s much to celebrate and many blessings to be grateful for. So while it’s good to talk about serious things, it’s just as important and just as American to have some fun. Now, let’s have some fun — let the celebration begin!”