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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 23:59:58
News Reports
India Parliament blocks Modi's bid to redraw voting boundaries
Topic: Affirmative Action
Source: Washington times
... alongside seat quota for women A bill to reserve a third of seats for women lawmakers failed to pass in the lower house of India’s Parliament on Friday, along with a separate, linked proposal to expand the national legislature by redrawing voting boundaries. The measure was seen as one of the most significant changes to India’s political system since independence from British colonial rule in 1947, but fell short after two days of debate involving both government and opposition lawmakers. It sought to mandate implementation of 33% representation for women in Parliament and state legislatures, a move aimed at increasing female participation in a system where women remain underrepresented.
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 20:12:04
Federal prosecutor in DC wants to interview alleged Swalwell victims
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: Just the News
... may pierce secret settlements. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the chief federal prosecutor in the nation's capital, says she is seeking to interview any female victims who alleged to have been assaulted by Rep. Eric Swalwell in Washington D.C. and may seek to obtain any secret agreements Congress paid to keep accusers quiet. "You're darn right," Pirro told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday when asked if she was willing to pierce those settlements to reexamine material evidence.
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 14:03:32
California LGBTQ+ organization seeks $25M from state f
Topic: Gay/Lesbian Issues
Source: Just the News
In a letter signed by 87 organizations in Calif. sent to Gov. Newsom and legislative leaders in February, LGBTQ+ advocates urged the state’s leaders to allocate the money. In December, The Center Square reported that federally-funded health care programs would be kept from paying for gender-affirming care for transgender children. Children who identify as transgender who are on Medicare and those under 19 years old on the federally funded Children’s Health Insurance Program would not be able to use federal money to pay for gender-affirming care under the new rules. Opponents to gender-affirming care see that as a good thing. “I just can’t even believe we live in the most beautiful nation in the world and the most beautiful state, arguably, in our nation, and here we are, cutting healthy body parts and asking taxpayers to fund it,” Sonja Shaw, a Republican candidate for California superintendent of public instruction, told The Center Square on Friday afternoon.
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 13:17:40
Yale Admits Self-Censorship and Political Bias Are Eroding Trust in Higher Education
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Reason
The Ivy League school released a self-critical report this week. Last year, Yale University President Maurie McInnis formed a committee of Yale faculty members to "undertake a project of thorough self-examination." She wanted to know: Why is the public losing trust in higher education institutions like Yale? This week, after a year of gathering input from students, faculty, journalists, and critics of higher education, the committee released its findings: The culprits for this erosion of trust, as The New York Times summarized, are "Schools like Yale."
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 10:13:29
Study Undercuts Claim That More School Spending Helps Student Achievement
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Just Facts Daily
In a 2020 statement about public school budgets, “over 500 of the top education experts in the U.S.” declared: 'Research is abundantly clear that money matters for student achievement and other important life outcomes, and this is especially the case for low-income students." Recent research from the Brookings Institution bulldozes that assertion. Conducted by PhD economist Sarah Reber and predoctoral fellow Gabriela Goodman, the research examined the latest data before the steep declines in student achievement since the Covid-19 school closures and found that: “substantial increases in per-pupil spending over time have often been met with stagnant academic achievement.”
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 10:09:28
Will Trump Pardon Ghislaine Maxwell? Her Lawyer Thinks So.
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Forbes
Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorney said she isn’t pushing for a presidential pardon while associate Jeffrey Epstein remains a major news story, Politico reported Friday, but the lawyer is optimistic that President Donald Trump will eventually pardon her—though the president hasn’t given any indication that he will. Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus told Politico that he hasn’t yet spoken to the Trump administration about trying to secure a pardon or commutation for Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in Epstein’s alleged abuse.
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 17:39:32
Clarence Thomas SLAMS progressivism as threat to Americans' natural rights
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Post Millennial
Progressivism "requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights." Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at the University of Texas in Austin on Wednesday night and he lashed out at the horrible political philosophy of progressivism, saying that it's anathema to the Declaration of Independence and the goals set forth in that document. He praised the ethos of the Founding Fathers and urged Americans to not be "passive spectators" in American liberty, but to uphold the Declaration of Independence. He spoke about his career, realizing early on in Washington, DC, that he had to define his principles and their worth. "What are your principles worth to you?" He said he asked himself.
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 17:16:47
Taxpayers on the hook for $18 MILLION
Topic: Sexual Harassment
Source: The Post Millennial
...to pay off sexual harassment settlements against congressmen. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said on Wednesday, "A friendly reminder that House Oversight subpoenaed the records of the congressional sexual harassment slush fund and we will be releasing them. Maybe we’ll see more resignations, you never know."
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 12:43:55
The Rape Army:
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: The Dissident
IDF Officially Allows Rape Against Palestinian Detainees. After the IDF rapists were questioned by Israeli military police, “right to rape rallies” took place outside of Sde Teiman, where members of the radicalized Israeli public demanded the IDF militants be freed. In March of this year, the Israeli army dropped the charges against the five IDF militants , a move that was celebrated by Israel’s genocidal Defense Minister, Israel Katz, who said, “The role of the IDF’s legal system is to defend and protect soldiers who are bravely fighting monsters in war – not the rights of Nukhba terrorists”.
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 12:00:33
62-Year-Old Protester Acquitted on All Charges for Wearing Penis Costume
Topic: Individualist Feminism
Source: Reason
The judge felt there was probable cause for an arrest but he declined to go so far as to convict. After three hours of testimony, a judge acquitted her of all charges—a welcome result for her free speech rights. In October 2025, Jeana Renea Gamble wore the offending phallus—holding a "No Dick-Tator" sign—at a "No Kings" protest. Responding to the scene, Cpl. Andrew Babb of the Fairhope Police Department threw Gamble to the ground and arrested her for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 11:23:03
The Case Against Social Media “Addiction”
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Cato Blog
A movement is underway to classify heavy social media use as a form of addiction. Advocacy groups, plaintiffs’ attorneys, and a growing number of lawmakers are treating the proposition as settled science. In a landmark California trial in early 2026, a jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing platforms that allegedly caused mental health harm, awarding $6 million in damages. In Congress, the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media platforms to prevent specified harms to minors, including “compulsive usage,” and to disable addictive product features by default, has advanced out of committee in both chambers.
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Friday 17 April 2026 - 19:41:08
Commentary and Opinion
Medicine, Moral Formation, and the Recovery of Discourse
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: James G. Martin Center
The Hippocratic Society aims to sustain clinicians in the practice of good medicine. In recent years, it has become something of a commonplace to say that American institutions are losing their sense of purpose. Universities, once understood as places for the disciplined pursuit of truth, now struggle to sustain genuine intellectual diversity. Professions that once carried an internal sense of vocation increasingly operate under external pressures—economic, bureaucratic, and ideological—that compete with their traditional ends. Medicine is no exception. By many measures, modern medicine is more powerful than ever, yet both patients and practitioners sense something amiss. Patients often feel managed rather than cared for. Clinicians, for their part, report rising rates of burnout and moral distress. The language of “providers” and “delivery systems” has displaced older notions of the physician as healer. Within academic medicine, serious disagreement about foundational questions (What is medicine for? What does a good physician owe a patient?) is often muted rather than explored.
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 19:14:27
Addressing the Academic Skew
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Quillette
Higher education needs intellectual—not political—conservatives. Anyone following the discourse around today’s higher-education wars may notice a curious paradox. Critics who accuse academia of being politicised point to heavily skewed liberal-to-conservative ratios among the professoriate, estimated at about 4:1 among the professoriate overall. These ratios are even more pronounced at elite schools (Harvard, 14:1) and in the humanities and social sciences (sociology, 50:1) where they matter most. A naïve observer might look at these reports and ask why the universities don’t simply hire more conservatives. But this suggestion is typically dismissed out of hand. Why? Because that would be politicising academia.
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 13:54:01
Where Are They Now?
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: Twitchy
NY Post Catches Up With Porn Star Stormy Daniels and Ex-Attorney Michael Avenatti. The last few years have not been kind to former Democrat Party darlings Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti. The New York Post recently caught up with the Trump-hating duo, posting pictures showing how far from the spotlight the two have drifted. Porn star Daniels, looking rough and sporting several tattoos, was photographed while on her way to a theater to perform a night of storytelling and comedy. Meanwhile, former lawyer Avenatti was spotted at a halfway house mopping floors while wearing sandals. Avenatti has been serving time for stealing millions from his clients, including Daniels. He was convicted on felony charges that included tax fraud and a failed extortion attempt of Nike.
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 13:23:18
The EU's Digital Gulag Is (Apparently) Ready To Roll
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Naked Capitalism
“It is for parents to raise their children, and not the platforms...” Those were the words of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday as she announced the readiness of the EU’s online age verification, ahem, platform. As we’ve been warning since November 2024, these platforms are ultimately a Trojan Horse for digital identity systems, which are in turn intended to serve as the cornerstone for the digital gulags being quickly assembled around the world. [Ed: how about it is for parents, not for the government?]
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Sunday 19 April 2026 - 12:24:32
What Other States Can Learn from Florida’s School Choice Success
Topic: Children and Family
Source: City-Journal
The Sunshine State’s innovative school-choice programs are setting the standard nationally. School choice is still coming into its own. Only five states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, New Hampshire, and West Virginia—currently provide universal programs that give residents unrestricted use of public funds for any educational option. The biggest state on that list, Florida, also leads in school-choice investment. The Sunshine State allocates 11.2 percent of its total education budget to these programs. Its experience provides valuable insight into how real choice shapes families’ educational decision-making and provides lessons for other states to follow.
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 19:54:04
What (and How) Should Our Students Be Taught Today?
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Brownstone Instiute
Rhetoric is the linguistic art of using language precisely to gain power over one’s audience or interlocutors; by employing various figures of speech – such as metaphor and metonymy – one is able to distract someone with the purpose of subtly getting them to identify with what these tropes represent. The contemporary equivalent of rhetoric, which similarly employs figural tropes, is discourse. Discourse is language, but not in an innocuous, descriptive, or constative form. Rather, it is language, where meaning and power converge, and where meaning actually serves power. Put differently, discourse is the linguistic guise of ideology, which is unavoidably inscribed in language. Such discourses are usually inscribed in the underlying assumptions and contexts which operate tacitly in one’s teaching and learning, and unless teachers are aware of this, they may remain unwitting agents for these discursive interpellations.
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 19:32:34
Agentic AI Comes for Teaching
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: James
Zev van Zanten considers Canvas's new professor bot. Will agentic AI let teachers spend more time teaching, or will it remove even more of the human touch from the academy? This is one of higher education’s most important questions following the release of the now-defunct Einstein and Canvas’s own agentic AI teaching agent. Canvas, an online-learning-management system operated by Instructure Holdings, is used by 50 percent of all students in North America. This market share means that any changes the firm makes reverberate throughout higher education. Canvas’s new AI agent, IgniteAI, lets professors delegate tasks such as rubric generation, grading, and the creation of course-specific Canvas sites. The hope is that this development will free up the time currently wasted by professors on the minutiae of deadlines, web design, and administrative tasks so that teachers can spend their days teaching.
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Saturday 18 April 2026 - 19:11:11
College Graduates Are Losing the Clone War
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Of Two Minds Blog
College grads, it may be time for different approach, not just in getting a job but in life. My own experience is the value lies not in fighting the commoditization war but in bypassing it completely, in effect obsoleting the entire corporate-HR commoditization. Find small businesses, try to meet the boss / owner, find out what they do, and if it's of interest, write them a letter or call them. Don't say, "I want a job." Say "I'm interested in your business and work, I want to learn more, can I come by?" The self-employed entrepreneur you're nurturing within you will observe, ask questions, and if there is some small opportunity to help, offer to help without compensation, just because you find it interesting.
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