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‘America is not a racist country’: Sen. Tim Scott delivers GOP response

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The South Carolina Republican delivered the GOP response to Biden’s first joint address to Congress.

Sen. Tim Scott on Wednesday offered up a GOP alternative to President Joe Biden’s vision for the country, pushing back on Biden’s agenda in a wide-ranging speech that propelled the South Carolina Republican further into the national spotlight.

In the official GOP response to Biden’s first joint address to Congress, Scott, the only Black Republican in the upper chamber, drew on his own personal experiences to push back on the drastic expansion of government that has defined Biden’s first 100 days in office — from his pandemic relief package to the president’s proposals on jobs and infrastructure.

“We should be expanding options and opportunities for all families — not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best,” Scott said.

Scott’s racial identity and conservative politics have made him a rarity in Congress, where he hasn’t been afraid to lean into both. And Wednesday was no exception. During his speech, Scott reiterated that he has “experienced the pain of discrimination.” But he also emphasized that “America is not a racist country” and cautioned that “race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants,” citing voting rights as an example.

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Grade Inflation Is Ruining Education

Grade Inflation Is Ruining Education

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“When people lose the connection between their actions and their consequences, they lose their hold on reality and the further this goes the more it looks like madness.”

~ Robert Greene

A recent study conducted at the Naval Academy showed that students learn less from easy teachers. As the researchers state, “Instructors who tend to give out easier subjective grades… dramatically hurt subsequent student performance.” While a generalization, these claims support the intuitions of anyone who has ever been to school or met a human. When students can give less effort, they do. So, why have schools been moving toward easier grading?

In a decade working in high schools, I’ve seen a consistent push to reduce writing, reading, and note-taking, expand late work windows, lighten workloads, dilute the weight of assessments, and, most fundamentally, to eliminate failures. The same can be seen at the university level. According to an article in the 2020 Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology, the amount of time college students have spent on academic work has gone from 40 hours per week in 1960, to 27 in 2003, to just 15 hours in 2008. During that time, the average grade has risen in both public and private universities, while national SAT scores continue to decline. Today’s graduates are not smarter or more prepared for their future, but at least they think they are.

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Portland Mayor Calls for ‘Unmasking’ Violent Protesters, Antifa Riot Follows

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Black Lives Matter and Antifa spoke out against Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s call to ‘unmask’ violent protesters. Hours after the mayor’s comments, another riot broke out in the city.

“We must stand together as a community against this ongoing criminal intimidation and violence,” Mayor Wheeler said on Friday. “Our job is to unmask them, arrest them, and prosecute them.”

“People know who these criminals are,” Wheeler continued.

A few hours later, violence broke out again in Portland following a social media post calling for demonstrators to “Bloc Up,” — a reference to the Antifa “uniform” of all black clothing, masks, and helmets, Breitbart News reported.

As demonstrators began blocking roadways, smashing windows, painting graffiti, and forcing their way into at least one occupied restaurant, police declared the incident to be a riot and ordered protesters to leave, Fox 12 Portland’s Drew Marine tweeted.

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Can VR Help Formerly Incarcerated Individuals Return to the Job Force?

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Goodwill and Accenture have teamed up to create “Project Overcome,” a VR experience that simulates the job-seeking process in hopes of curtailing recidivism.

Every year, more than 650,000 individuals are released from prison in the United States and two-thirds of them will be rearrested within three years. A crucial factor in determining whether an individual will return to prison is their ability to find stable employment. Unfortunately, while the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted employment for many people, it has been particularly detrimental to vulnerable populations, including the formerly incarcerated.

A new VR experience might offer one inroad for addressing this complex problem.

The project, called “Project Overcome,” was created as a collaboration between Accenture and Goodwill. It provides individuals transitioning back to the workforce a simulation of the interview process with an HR manager and a coaching session with a career counselor. It’s based on scenarios that formerly incarcerated individuals often encounter, like having to explain their criminal record.

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WATCH: Marcellus Wiley Blasts ‘Billionaire’ LeBron James for Saying the ‘System’ is Broken

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FS1’s Marcellus Wiley ripped LeBron James for his attacks on America’s “broken system” while pointing out the same “system” allowed James to become a billionaire.

The Fox Sports 1 analyst and one-time all-pro NFL defensive end spoke out to condemn James after the L.A. Lakers star tweeted and then deleted an attack on an Ohio police officer with the caption “you’re next.”

The Speak For Yourself analyst began by criticizing James for jumping to judgment on the police-involved shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio.

“Who in the hell is looking at this situation any different?” Wiley said of the Ohio shooting. “The cop has an impossible choice, which is to save a life I’m going have to take a life. And it’s just that simple. Like I get where we want to say, but this happened over here, but that ain’t this. I’m talking about right here.”

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Anti-Colonialism’s Bad History

Anti-Colonialism’s Bad History

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Prevailing academic theories of race relations hold that wealth and power differences between groups of people arose from social, economic, and legal systems created to benefit one group of people over another. One of those systems, we are told, was colonialism. Hence the renewed interest in European imperialism and calls to “decolonize” everything from education and beauty to music and health. “Renewed” because this is, of course, not the first time that colonialism has been blamed for the vast wealth and power differences readily observable in the world today.

The story starts with Karl Marx. Marx admired capitalism, which he credited with destroying feudalism and the “idiocy” of rural life. The fly in the capitalist ointment, as Marx saw it, was competition, which he thought would drive down profits. To remain profitable, he averred, capitalists would be compelled to squeeze laborers’ wages, thus “immiserating” the working class. The more rational economic system Marx envisaged would do away with competition and replace it with central planning. That was a big mistake, but not the only one.

Between the time that Marx was born (1818) and the time he died (1883), British wages rose by 83 percent. There is some debate about the magnitude of the rise in working-class wages, but the improvement was visible enough to create a dilemma for Marx’s followers—how to reconcile the theory with what was actually happening in the real world. In 1917, Lenin updated Marx’s theory in his pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he argued that colonial exploitation created super-profits that allowed Western capitalists to “bribe” Western governments, bureaucrats, and even workers. The improving living standards in the West, in other words, were a direct result of Europe’s imperial adventures.

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The USPS Has Been Secretly Capturing Your Social Media Posts As Part of a Federal ‘Covert Operations Program’

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“Big Brother is Watching You.” – George Orwell, 1984

According to Yahoo News, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has been collecting data on Americans’ social media posts, secretly of course.

A March 16 government bulletin that was obtained by Yahoo News reveals that the USPS’s law enforcement wing has been tracking American citizens’ social media posts and activities, and they gather data on a whole range of topics from inflammatory posts and planned protests. It goes on to share their data across federal departments and agencies as part of a program called the Internet Covert Operations Program, or iCOP. Isn’t that a cute name?

The document marked “law enforcement sensitive,” noted an analysis of planned activity for March 20, and was delivered through Homeland Security’s Fusion Centers, which are “state-owned and operated centers that serve as focal points in states and major urban areas for the receipt, analysis, gathering and sharing of threat-related information between State, Local, Tribal and Territorial (SLTT), federal and private sector partners.”

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NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Just Flew on Mars

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NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter just became the first craft of any kind to fly on another planet.

“Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said in a news release.

Making space history: The Ingenuity helicopter landed on Mars on February 18 after hitching a ride aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover.

The chopper’s first flight was delayed a couple of times so that NASA could address a testing anomaly and install a software update, but on April 19, Ingenuity finally lifted off.

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