Society's ChildS


Calendar

'Abject incompetence': NYC mayor postpones school opening at last minute AGAIN, triggering parental rage

de Blasio
© Reuters/Jeenah MoonMayor de Blasio tours New Bridges Elementary School ahead of reopening.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has postponed school reopening for most students a second time, just days before kids were set to return. Parents and teachers who already planned their lives around the schedule aren't happy.

Instead of returning to the classroom on Monday, elementary school students will come back on September 29, de Blasio announced in a Thursday press briefing, enraging parents and teachers alike with the eleventh-hour delay. Middle and high school students won't return until October 1 under the new schedule.

It's not the first time de Blasio has pushed school reopening dates forward. City students were initially supposed to return to the classroom on September 10, and the mayor repeatedly affirmed the date was set in stone in the preceding weeks, despite pushback from teachers, before postponing it at the last minute.

This time, he isn't even pretending it's a sure thing, telling reporters "We could always learn something new that might cause additional adjustment." However, he attempted to shift the blame for the delay onto the teachers' unions, which had been complaining that schools weren't ready to reopen for weeks.

Comment: Whether it is de Blasio's 'savior complex', basic incompetence or preoccupation with being sued by the restaurant industry, the education realm and parental units were none too pleased with his inconsistency:



See also:


Dollars

Nothing to see here: Untraceable, 'unemployed' donors somehow provided ActBlue with half of its 2019 donations

ActBlue graphic
© ActBlue
A Take Back Action Fund analysis of $400M in donations to liberal causes raises red flags of possible foreign involvement

Less than two months ahead of the presidential election - with concerns of foreign interference again at the forefront - a conservative political group is raising "serious concerns" about millions of donations reported by a major Democratic fundraising platform.

A preliminary computer analysis by the Take Back Action Fund, obtained exclusively by Fox News, has found that nearly half of all 2019 donations to ActBlue were made by people claiming to be unemployed.

Action Fund President John Pudner questioned the veracity of those donations and called it a loophole that must be closed for the sake of election integrity.

Comment: ActBlue puts on a good politically correct face, but seems pretty sketchy behind the scenes. Watchdog site Open Secrets provides these interesting graphics. Why is the PAC ActBlue apparently holding on to so much cash?
Actblue percentage expenditures
© Open SecretsActBlue percentage of expenditures in 2020 election cycle
ActBlue donation breakdown
© Open SecretsTop Vendors/Recipients of ActBlue donations
Democrat fundraising machine 'ActBlue Texas' paid out small sums to hundreds of individuals for unknown purposes


Stormtrooper

Best of the Web: New rules may allow Australian police to detain 'conspiracy theorists'

australia arrest protester
© James Ross/Herald CourierPolice arresting a protester in Melbourne. Video shows him being hit with a car and stamped on while on the ground.
New rules passing in the Australian state of Victoria could see "conspiracy theorists" and those "suspected by health authorities of being likely to spread the virus" detained in quarantine centres, according to The Age.

The rules are amendments being added to the Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill, which was first passed back in April.

The proposed detention would last "for the period reasonably necessary to eliminate or reduce a serious risk to public health".

To translate that from bureaucrat into English: it means as for long as they want, or can get away with.

Legislation with this kind of vague verbiage is always a red flag, but then Victoria is currently over-flowing with warning signs of this kind.

VICTORIA - THE WORLD'S FASCIST TEST RUN?

Maybe you haven't been following exactly how bad things are getting in Australia - and most especially Victoria - but they have essentially aggressively seized their opportunity to create a fascist micro-state. A social Petri dish, in which to culture some tyranny.

They have declared both a "state of emergency" AND a "state of disaster" for a disease which has killed fewer than a thousand people in 9 months across the entire country.

For a sense of perspective, in 2018 over three times as many people died of influenza, and the same number again committed suicide.

As of right now Australia has just 16 cases of coronavirus classified as "severe".

Binoculars

Big Brother Zuck: Lawsuit accuses Facebook of using phone cams to spy on Instagram users

instagram
© Reuters / Charles Platiau / File
Instagram and its parent company Facebook are being sued for allegedly spying on users with their mobile phone cameras.

The lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco federal court Thursday by a New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi who claimed Facebook accesses mobile cameras while users are on the app "to collect lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to."

"By obtaining extremely private and intimate personal data on their users, including in the privacy of their own homes, [Facebook is] able to increase their advertising revenue by targeting users more than ever before," the lawsuit alleges.

"For example, [Facebook is] able to see in-real time how users respond to advertisements on Instagram, providing extremely valuable information to its advertisers."

The lawsuit comes after reports that emerged this summer that an Instagram bug appeared to have allowed the company to access iPhone cameras even when they weren't actively being used. Facebook at the time said that they were working on addressing the bug.

Handcuffs

FBI raids home of Biden campaign surrogate, Netflix 'Cheer' star, after underage sex allegation - UPDATE: Arrested, charged for child porn

Netflix Cheer Jerry Harris
© Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Netflix Cheer star and former Joe Biden presidential campaign surrogate Jerry Harris is under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for allegedly soliciting sexually explicit images and sex from minors, according to a report.

USA Today stated Monday:
The criminal investigation is based on allegations that were reported separately to police by Varsity Brands, a private company that dominates the cheerleading industry and handles everything from uniform sales to major competitions. In Aug. 1 letters to police in Florida and Texas, Varsity's chief legal officer, Burton Brillhart, said the company learned of "inappropriate sexual conduct" allegations against Harris and reported the information to authorities as required by law.
[...]
Brillhart included two screenshots in his communication with law enforcement. In one - a Snapchat message - a picture of the upper part of what appears to be Harris' face is labeled with the message, "Would you ever want to ****". The other screenshot - which is a series of text messages - indicates an exchange that began on Friday, May 3, 2019, when an individual named "jerry harris" wrote, "Hey btw I found a place for us to do stuff it's actually pretty good haha."

Comment: Harris has now been arrested and charged with producing child pornography.
In an interview with law enforcement officials on Monday, the complaint says, Mr. Harris, 21, admitted to asking for and receiving child pornography from at least 10 to 15 individuals he knew were minors. He also admitted to having sex with a 15-year-old at a cheerleading event in 2019.



Bad Guys

American politics has literally turned cr*p, with fights over November's election descending into slinging matches

no dogs poop
© Getty Images / Maya Ohev Ami/EyeEm
As if the rioting and burning of businesses weren't bad enough, now bowel movements are being used as a symbol of protest. It's a perfect metaphor for today's toxic political discourse.

It seems that anytime I look into politics as a topic for an op-ed, I find more and more ridiculous stories each time. Every once in a while, you hear something being described as a s**t job. Unless you're working on sewer lines or septic tanks, you don't expect that to be literal. And yet, it seems as if politics itself has gone down the crapper.

In the state of Maine, police are looking for a suspect who has been taking fecal matter from a dog and stuffing it into the mailboxes of Trump supporters. Whoever this person is (the suspect is described as a middle-aged woman riding a bicycle), they are so angry at Donald Trump that they are willing to pick up dog feces and carry it to someone's mailbox to deposit it. I don't think that anyone would ever call this the mark of someone who is completely sane.

Attention

COVID-19 emails from Nashville mayor's office show numbers SO LOW they had to be kept secret to enforce continued lockdown

Nashville Tn
© FOX 17 News NashvilleNashville street
The coronavirus cases on lower Broadway may have been so low that the mayor's office and the Metro Health Department decided to keep it secret.

Emails between the mayor's senior advisor and the health department reveal only a partial picture. But what they reveal is disturbing. The discussion involves the low number of coronavirus cases emerging from bars and restaurants and how to handle that. And most disturbingly, how to keep it from the public.

On June 30th, contact tracing was given a small view of coronavirus clusters. Construction and nursing homes were found to be causing problems with more than a thousand cases traced to each category, but bars and restaurants reported just 22 cases.

Leslie Waller from the health department asks, "This isn't going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor's Office?"

"Correct, not for public consumption," writes senior advisor Benjamin Eagles.

Comment: Red State comments:
We're increasingly noticing that the reason for the lockdowns is less about keeping people safe and more about politics. Nashville's Mayor, John Cooper, is a Democrat, and it is Democrats who are keeping areas under their control in a lockdown, while Republican leaders are lifting restrictions left and right.

With the 2020 election coming up, there are a few issues for the Democrats — issues that make President Donald Trump too powerful to defeat. The main one is the economy, and the Coronavirus was the perfect excuse to keep America's economy from growing, and returning to the powerhouse it was under Trump's leadership.

With no logical answer as to why Democrats want to keep everyone in lockdown despite information telling us that the lockdowns aren't working and were ultimately unnecessary, what we're left with is political positioning.

To be clear, the Democrats have destroyed millions of lives so they could give themselves a foothold in a presidential election. People's jobs have been wiped out, businesses they built closed, and suicide rates have skyrocketed, all so that they had a better chance of beating Donald Trump.

If this is happening in Nashville, what other cities is this happening in?
Tucker delivers a blistering assessment of Cooper's disgraceful behaviour:




Chalkboard

US lockdown forces parents to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops to open 'learning pods' for children at home

Parent children stress
© Piksel | Dreamstime.com"My daughter can have five friends over for a sleepover without my being fingerprinted and federally background-checked."
Pennsylvania parents thinking of starting a learning pod for their children should prepare to jump through quite a few bureaucratic hoops.

The state Department of Human Services' Office of Child Development and Early Learning announced on August 26 — the day school was set to begin — that families with kids attending public school cannot form a learning pod of six or more unrelated students unless the parents do all of the following:

1. Develop a COVID-19 health and safety plan that aligns with with state and CDC guidelines.

2. Develop an evacuation plan in the event of an emergency.

3. Check with local zoning zoning ordinances in case residential childcare is prohibited.

Clipboard

Survey on Holocaust knowledge among US Millenials, Gen Z 'worrying'

Auschwitz survivors
© Yad VashemCHILD SURVIVORS on the day of their liberation from Auschwitz (Seventh and eighth from left Marta Wise and her sister Eva Slonim)
According to the Claims Conference, the results of the Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study showed a "worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge" among the respondents.

A survey on Holocaust knowledge among US millennials and Gen Z was released by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany on Wednesday. According to the Claims Conference, the results of the Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey showed a "worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge" among the respondents. Some 63% of the sample were unaware that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and 36% thought that number to be "two million or fewer." At least nine states reported more than 60% of respondents were unaware that six million Jews were killed. Eight states had more than 30% of respondents claim they believed less than two million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

"We came to realize that, although a number of states already mandate Holocaust education, which is an excellent first step, for the mandates to have a significant effect in classrooms there must be state funding to support the mandates," said Claims Conference Holocaust task force leader Matthew Bronfman. "The Holocaust is a broad topic. Specialized teacher training and a thoughtfully developed curriculum is needed for students to benefit.

Comment: Students should absolutely be taught about and be informed on the Holocaust - as well as many of the other Holocausts that have been perpetrated against innocents by psychopathic leaders and their pathologized citizens over the span of known history.

However horrific, the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews during WWII, while unique in some ways is, sadly, not a unique 'event' experienced by humanity at large.

It is unfortunate, also, that many Zionists use the great tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust to justify the horrors Israel perpetrates against the Palestinians and other groups in the Middle East. This type of thinking, and the aggression justified by it, is actually a denigration of those who lost their lives and loved ones in the concentration camps and elsewhere.

The true lesson of "never again" is that the evil of genocide should not be perpetrated against any group. But unfortunately, this most important value appears lost on many.


People

Sometimes survival is not about WHAT you know - It's about WHO you know

handshake
Like a lot of frequent travelers, I'd been itching to get back on the road after months of lockdown. A couple of months ago, I drove from the east coast to the west coast and ended up in Mexico, where I rented a condo near some close friends to settle in for the expected second wave of Covid-19.

I'm all about new cultures and new experiences when I travel. As I've written before, traveling has made me a far more adaptable person and I believe has greatly enhanced my resilient mindset. Just like the previous article, this isn't a newsy article filled with deep research or a how-to that will teach you ways to deal with specific threats. It's simply a blog post in which I'm sharing a personal story and philosophy that some folks will find thought-provoking and others will find outlandish. But either way, do share your thoughts in the comments.

I learn a lot by observing others when traveling, and there is one theme that has been consistent throughout the current adventure.