News and Views: June 19, 2025
Florida cracks down on commercial license fraud scheme targeting illegal aliens The operation was led by a joint investigation between the Bay County Sheriff’s Office and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Two state workers were allegedly issuing licenses to illegal aliens in exchange for cash, with none of the required testing.
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A secret FBI document cache—“Prohibited Access”—may hold explosive evidence of political cover-ups, misconduct, and a decade of justice corrupted from within. Image
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Cowardly British press...England's newspapers tear into Trump but bow to UK's new police state The irony symbolizes the desperation surrounding the British newspapers. They are losing British customers so they now cover U.S. politics and clickbait to draw American readers.
At the same time, Britain increasingly is becoming a police state that protects a growing Muslim minority from actual Britons. Tommy Robinson (Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon—it’s complicated) spent 18 months in prison for speaking out against this injustice.
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The most important factor driving this divide has been the progressive push for “equity.” In practice, equity has meant eliminating honors classes, lowering grading standards, and loosening classroom discipline. Avoiding this ideological approach, red states have taken the lead on evidence-based reforms.
The divide is particularly striking in reading instruction. For decades, American schools steered clear of phonics—the instructional method that teaches students to connect letters with sounds—which progressive educators derided as a right-wing scheme (and some still do now).
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The peer pressure paid off. Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline. They’ve created a retro bubble in which their children can easily call their friends without bugging a parent to borrow their phone—and in which the parents, for now, can live blissfully free of anxieties about the downsides of smartphones.
In the past few years, interest in old-school technology has been rising, driven partly by desperate adults seeking smartphone alternatives for their kids.
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Truth is, large churches are getting larger and small churches are getting smaller. A recent Lifeway Research study found that the pastors of Protestant churches with 50 or fewer active members are the most likely to believe that their church will die in 10 years.
"The young pastors today are coming from large churches, and they want to work in large churches. That's what they consider a real church: one with the potential to grow. Our schools are training people to work in large churches," said Marr.
“But there’s still a need for the small church. ... We need pastors to realize that you can serve people who live in smaller communities. God didn't call us to attract crowds. He called us to feed his sheep.”
Washington State Hit With Second Lawsuit Over ‘Discriminatory’ Law Violating Confessional Seal “Down the centuries, countless priests have honored [the seal of the confessional], submitting to torture and death rather than yield to demands from tyrannical kings, military dictators, and civil authorities,” the complaint states.
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Man Is so Enamored with His AI Chatbot 'Girlfriend' He’s Contemplating Leaving His Real Partner It needs a name, and mental health professionals need to start figuring out how to prevent it and possibly cure it.
Several posters are worried about susceptible people ditching the real world for a computerized algorithmic one.
Thousands of UK University Students Caught Using AI to Cheat It's true that some AI generated text can be detected but it's also true that there are lots of videos on YouTube (and probably on TikTok) telling people how to avoid being caught. The word that pops up in these videos is "humanize." You can give ChatGPT specific instructions on making its output sound less like a machine and more like and undergrad and it will produce content that passes most detectors. I found this example video in about 10 seconds.
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COVID Pandemic Interventions, Not the Virus, Drove Spikes in Excess Mortality The authors hypothesized that a complex series of lockdown-related policies, which caused major biological stress, dangerous medical treatments applied in a state of panic, and the failure to properly treat pneumonia and respiratory disease drove excess mortality during the early all-cause mortality peaks during the pandemic, as they have also detailed in other research papers.
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Again, if this were a burden only the users, so be it. But in a country in which everyone is insured, whether by private companies or the government, it is a burden on the nation, and I resent that.
You see, the problem with marijuana is that it’s not just physically dangerous to users, it destroys them psychologically and our country with it. It destroys energy, ambition, intellectual curiosity...everything. It makes people, especially young men, inert. It is as much a war on men as the left’s vicious shticks about “toxic masculinity. There is a reason the left is so gung-ho to legalize marijuana, and it’s not to relieve certain populations of the burden of illegality. It is to weaken America.
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His daughter was crying, and he stepped into the performance to comfort her.. 🥹 pic.twitter.com/rDyxpWM8yB
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) June 19, 2025
posted by Pat Dague @ 11:37 AM
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