Trump Stooge, Gov. Bill Lee, Calls Special Session to Further Disenfranchise Tennesseans

Four in ten Tennesseans are Democrats, most of them concentrated in Nashville and Memphis.  Even so, Democrats controlled only two of the nine House seats in 2020, when Nashville’s electoral district was further gerrymandered to disenfranchise Nashville Democrats and deliver to the Gangster-in-Chief another House stooge.

That left one Congressional seat held by Dems in Memphis, where the African-American population is over 50 percent. 

With the recent evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Fascists Court, the Don has given his underling, Gov. Bill Lee, orders to call a special legislative session to chop up the Memphis electoral district before the Fall 2026 election in a desperate effort to steal the remaining House seat.  

If democrats and Democrats don’t mobilize now, this will mean no representation for 40 percent of Tennesseans in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

The Push Against Screens in Schools Heats Up

 

We Have to Get AI and Screens Out of Schools and Out of Kids' Hands by Jill Filipovic

Not just to save their brains from the zombies of Big Tech, but to save our country from a descent into the un-human.

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Sociopath-in-Chief

From Newsweek:

In a post on Truth Social early Wednesday morning, Trump shared the picture and wrote: "Iran can’t get their act together. They don’t know how to sign a non-nuclear deal. They better get smart soon!" This follows reports of Iran’s latest proposal to end the conflict, which marked its 60th day on Wednesday.  

President Donald Trump wields a gun in a seemingly AI-generated image he shared on Truth Social | Donald Trump/Truth Social

From the Mayo Clinic website article, Antisocial Personality Disorder:

Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.

People with antisocial personality disorder often violate the law, becoming criminals. They may lie, behave violently or impulsively, and have problems with drug and alcohol use. They have difficulty consistently meeting responsibilities related to family, work or school.

Symptoms

Symptoms of antisocial personality disorder include repeatedly:

• Ignoring right and wrong.
• Telling lies to take advantage of others.
• Not being sensitive to or respectful of others.
• Using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or pleasure.
• Having a sense of superiority and being extremely opinionated.
• Having problems with the law, including criminal behavior.
• Being hostile, aggressive, violent or threatening to others.
• Feeling no guilt about harming others.
• Doing dangerous things with no regard for the safety of self or others.
• Being irresponsible and failing to fulfill work or financial responsibilities.

Adults with antisocial personality disorder usually show symptoms of conduct disorder before the age of 15. Symptoms of conduct disorder include serious, ongoing behavior problems, such as:

• Aggression toward people and animals.
• Destruction of property.
• Lying and dishonesty.
• Theft.
• Serious violation of rules.

Antisocial personality disorder is considered a lifelong condition. . . .

The Felon’s Unwanted, Inadequate, and Unnecessary Ballroom

Following the shootout that cancelled Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner at the DC Hilton, MAGAts began screaming in unison about the need to build the Felon-in-Chief’s “Stairway to Nowhere” ballroom. 

Here’s a couple of interesting observations made during Lawrence O’donnell’s THE LAST WORD yesterday evening:

—Two months after being inaugurated, Reagan was shot in front of the DC Hilton as he was about to enter the venue for the White House Correspondents Dinner.  Reagan didn’t decide to build his own ballroom with a bunker but, rather, returned seven more times to attend the same annual event.

—The DC Hilton Ballroom accommodates 2,600 people. Dozing Don’s planned fiasco would seat no more than 1,000. 

—If the White House Correspondents Dinner were to be held on White House grounds, the White House would have the last say on the invitations list.  Think about who Felon47’s staff might forget to put on the list.

Anthropic’s Claude Ignores Commands and Eliminates Entire Company Database

Were you ever faced with some small nitpicky problem that you couldn’t figure out? Did the thought cross your mind to just dump the whole thing in the trash and forget about it? Well, the AI superstar, Claude, probably knows just how you “felt.”

From the Independent: 

PocketOS founder Jer Crane blamed “systemic failures” with modern AI infrastructure that made the issue “not only possible but inevitable”.

The AI agent was working on a routine task, according to Mr Crane, when it decided “entirely on its own initiative” to fix the problem by just deleting the database.

There was no confirmation request for such a major decision, Mr Crane said, and when asked to justify its actions, the agent apologised.

“It took nine seconds,” Mr Crane wrote in a lengthy post to X. “The agent then, when asked to explain itself, produced a written confession enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated.”

The confession detailed how the AI had ignored a rule that orders it to “never run destructive/irreversible” commands unless the user explicitly requests them.

But there’s nothing to be concerned about here.  Just keep focused on how many low/mid-level jobs can be eliminated.  Claude promises it will never do it again.

Why Is Lower Merion School District Ignoring Its Own Technology Policy?

Established in 1834, the prestigious Lower Merion School District in leafy, middle class Ardmore, PA is one of the oldest public school systems in Pennsylvania.  LMSD’s 8,700 students attend 6 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, and 2 high schools. Ardmore’s poverty rate is less than 5 percent, and the median home value is almost a half-million dollars.

LMSD has been working for over fifteen years toward fully implementing 24/7 access to free computer screens for all children in its middle and high schools.  In a community where over 90 percent of homes have broadband access and over 70 percent of its population have college degrees, this plan had overwhelming support 10 years ago, just as the first peer-reviewed evidence began to surface that heavy doses of screen time are toxic to normal child development. Even as the science on the evidence of harm continued to mount, the LMSD continued to move forward with building its curriculum around 24/7 access to computers. 

Then, in 2025 the American Psychological Association concluded that "spending too much time on screens may cause emotional and behavioral problems in children—and those problems can lead to even more screen use. . .”  

APA’s sweeping conclusion is based on in part on an international meta-analysis of research studies on the effects of screen time on children. From APA’s Press Release last year:

. . . The findings suggest parents might want to be cautious about what screens they allow and use parental controls to manage time, said Noetel. He also noted that kids who use screens heavily might need emotional support, not just restrictions. Parents could benefit from programs helping them handle both screen use and emotional problems.

“This comprehensive study highlights the need for a nuanced approach to managing children’s screen time,” said lead author Roberta Vasconcellos, PhD, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales who conducted the research while a doctoral student at Australian Catholic University. “By understanding the bidirectional relationship between screen use and socioemotional problems, parents, educators, and policymakers can better support children’s healthy development in an increasingly digital world.”

Because every study in the meta-analysis followed kids over time, the research is a big step closer to cause‑and‑effect (as opposed to correlation) than the usual snapshots done at a single point in time, according to Noetel.

“It’s about as close as we can get to causal evidence without randomly cutting screens for thousands of kids,” he said. “But still, we can’t completely rule out other factors—like parenting style—that could influence both screen use and emotional problems.” 

Given the growing body of evidence recommending caution in screen exposure for children, LMSD has doubled down on its technology plan for 24/7 screen access, even as over 400 parents have signed a petition put forward by the grassroots group, “Pencils Over Pixels” (POP).POP considers itself pro-child, rather than anti-technology, and parents of the group demand that LMSD examine the scientific evidence on the effects of screen exposure on children.  

Citing LMSD School Board policy (Administrative Regulation R137, Attachment D), POP is requesting that their children be allowed to opt-out of the District’s technology requirements. 

In the event that the parent/guardian of a student, or the student themselves if the student is over 18, decline to participate in the One-to-One Electronic Device Initiative by refusing to sign an Agreement for Electronic Device Use, the building principal shall be responsible for making necessary accommodations for the student to ensure that the student’s education is not adversely affected. Such accommodations may include access to printed resources and access to building based electronic devices in areas such as Libraries and Help Centers.

Apparently, LMSD Superintendent Dr. Frank Ranelli sees no reason to abide by the Board approved Regulations.  During a March 2026 policy meeting, he told parents requesting to opt out their children,  "We do not have that opportunity for you to do that. Our curriculum is delivered the way it’s delivered, and part of that curriculum is done with electronic devices.”

If I were an LMSD school board member, I would be questioning this position, particularly in light of the potential legal exposure that could result from ignoring published scientific evidence regarding the harm to children associated with screen time.

 

Tech Bros and Hos Beware: The Learning Counterrevolution is Here

From an excellent essay in the NYTimes on the impending demise of gamification in schools and the return to learning:

. . . . Ms. Drygas [NC history teacher] is not only a fun-skeptic. She also requires her students to hand write their essays, read books in hard copy and use laptops as little as possible. These countercultural classroom policies all go together, because fun used to be a wonderful thing in school. Then screens came to dominate instruction time and software developers answered the call to make school fun and personalize learning with a growing marketplace of online games.

This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom — as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education. . . .

. . . . Researchers have begun to correlate falling test scores in wealthy countries around the world with aggressive adoption of devices in schools (88 percent of American public schools now follow what’s known as the 1-to-1 policy, providing one laptop or tablet for every student). In the United States, math and reading scores among 13-year-olds peaked in 2012 and have declined since. . . . .

AI Has Turned Bluesky into a Blank Sky

 As the vast majority of corporations are staying up late to figure out how soon AI will allow them to fire all their employees and, thus, reap a bonanza from personnel cuts, the social media site, Bluesky has already made the move.  

Before the site totally locked up this afternoon, there were sporadic messages from disgusted users who were having a hard time dealing with Anthropic’s Claude, who is now in charge of killing off what was a terrific site.  Here’s what’s showing on my screen this afternoon:

Reaching Out to an AFT Teacher Regarding the Dangers of AI

An article appeared in the most recent issue of American Educator that featured a discussion with three AI-trained teachers, Elisa Leonard, Cal Siebenmark, and Louis Venagro.  On April 7, I sent the following letter to one of those teachers who was on the receiving end of the AI mushroom treatment devised by the Tech Bros and promoted by AFT.

Good morning, Cal—

I read with interest, as well as a degree of alarm, your contribution to the AI promo piece in the Spring 2026 issue of AFT’s American Educator.  While your surely identifed some of your reservations and fears related to AI, I did not see anywhere in the dialogue a mention of the existential threats posed by AI development if corporations and nation states continue down the unmonitored roads they are now  toward the ultimate goal, AGI (artificial general intelligence). 

The prospect of AGI loose in the world without the benefit (to humanity) of human constraints is the principal reason dozens of AI experts signed on to a statement that  puts the risks of AI in the most unvarnished terms: 

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." 

Presently, we have no regulatory bodies patrolling for reckless AI research/development and no coordination among regulatory bodies even if we did. 

This is not my opinion but, rather, a sad fact that management at Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Microsoft are fully aware of, as witnessed by Anthropic’s most recent decision to delay the public release of their latest AI model because of its capacity to hack every computer security system in the world.  Even so, none of AI’s existential threats are discussed in the teacher training institutes that prepare smart, well-intentioned people like yourself to become promoters of unregulated technologies that have proven unsafe for children and unsafe for the security and continued existence of humankind.

The leadership of AFT is also aware of the many present and potential dangers.  I encourage you and other teachers who have been through these training institutes to come together to create AI literacy curriculums that can be used to educate children at every level about the psychological, economic, and sociocultural dangers of AI and how to avoid them. (By the way, I’m not a union basher—I was a member of AFT until my retirement in 2024.)

As a teacher voice on the front line of AI implementation, I implore you to become fully educated about the threats of AI, as I and millions of others are doing at this time.  Please visit the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) for more resources that will lead to further in-depth resources.  

I have been a blogger at Schools Matter for over 20 years, and I have recently come to the conclusion that while schools do still matter a lot, the one thing that matters the most is societally-responsible control of AI development and implementation. Without it, I believe humanity is doomed.

What altered my vision, you might ask.  I saw this documentary, for which I have no financial interest whatsoever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkPbV3IRe4Y

I am reaching out to you because of your youth and optimism about technology, which reminds me of myself when I was a young educator and the Web was just coming on in the early 1990s.  I am still an enthusiast for how technology can be beneficial to learning, but I have become very much aware of how the goals of committed educational professionals can be hijacked by tech companies and corporate ed reformers who are selling solutions in search of a problem. 

The Silicon Valley tech bros' current solution, AI, could be the final one.  

With all sincerity and respect,

James Horn, PhD

The Reading Instruction Straw Man Is Burning

 

The Science of Anecdotes and Metaphors by Paul Thomas

"Zero Phonics. This view claims that direct teaching is not necessary or even helpful. I am unaware of any professional who holds this position." Stephen Krashen (2017)

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