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A widely circulated graph derived from the 2018 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) reveals a stark asymmetry in interracial violent crime: Black offenders were perceived by victims to commit violence against Whites at a per capita rate dramatically higher than the reverse. Adjusted for population sizes—Blacks comprising roughly 13% of the U.S. population and Whites about 60%—the offending rate shows Black-on-White violence occurring at approximately 40 times the rate of White-on-Black violence per 100,000 offenders in each group.
This raw per capita disparity explodes the “woke” narrative that portrays racial dynamics in crime as symmetric or driven primarily by White aggression toward minorities. Instead, victim reports indicate that interracial violence flows overwhelmingly in one direction, undermining claims of equivalent racial bias or systemic White-on-Black targeting in everyday criminal acts.Critics often attempt to downplay this by noting that most violent crime is intraracial and that random opportunity—Whites being far more numerous—should lead to more Black-on-White incidents even without disproportionate offending. Adjusting for the larger White victim pool reduces the ratio to around 7:1, which still represents a significant elevation beyond what pure chance would predict.
This adjusted figure accounts for contact opportunities but does not erase the evidence of disproportionate involvement; it simply contextualizes it. The NCVS, based on direct victim perceptions rather than police reports, bypasses potential biases in arrests and provides a clearer picture of actual experiences, further challenging narratives that attribute disparities solely to law enforcement racism.
Ultimately, these statistics dismantle the oversimplified “woke” framing of crime as a tool of White supremacy oppressing minorities. While socioeconomic factors, segregation, and historical inequities contribute to crime patterns, the data show no equivalence in interracial harm—Whites are disproportionately victimized in cross-racial incidents relative to their offending rates. Ignoring per capita realities or dismissing them as misleading sustains a politicized myth that distorts public understanding and policy. Honest engagement with victim-survey evidence demands rejecting narratives that equate vastly unequal patterns, focusing instead on addressing root causes without excusing directional disparities.
For context, a related BJS report comparing NCVS offender data to arrests is here: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/race-and-ethnicity-violent-crime-offenders-and-arrestees-2018 (and its PDF: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf).
Skate Canada’s decision to boycott national and international events in Alberta is a masterclass in self-sabotage. By refusing to host competitions in the province over the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act—which restricts female categories to biological females—Skate Canada has effectively admitted that its commitment to “inclusion” means prioritizing the feelings of transgender-identifying males over the safety, fairness, and privacy of girls and women in sport. This isn’t progressive; it’s predatory, as it signals that the organization is willing to endanger female athletes rather than enforce categories based on biological reality.
The irony is staggering: Skate Canada claims to uphold “safe and inclusive sport,” yet by punishing an entire province, it excludes thousands of Alberta skaters from convenient high-level opportunities while virtue-signaling about inclusion. Alberta’s law, in effect since September 2025, protects female competitors from inherent physical advantages retained by biological males, a concern backed by basic physiology and echoed in growing international restrictions. Instead of adapting or advocating for open/mixed categories, Skate Canada chooses exclusion in the name of inclusion—revealing a captured institution more concerned with ideological purity than the integrity of women’s figure skating.
This move should serve as a wake-up call. Taxpayer-funded organizations like Skate Canada that actively harm women’s sports by boycotting provinces protecting female athletes deserve immediate defunding and reform. If they can’t support fair competition without discriminating against biological reality, they have no business governing Canadian skating. Alberta girls deserve better than an organization that treats their safety as optional.
A recently published paper by Jonathan Cohler in the winter 2025 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS) argues that the global mean surface temperature (GMST)—the key metric underpinning international climate agreements like the Paris Accord—is thermodynamically and mathematically meaningless.
Cohler revives and highlights a 2007 analysis by Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, and Bjarne Andresen (published in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics), which demonstrated through physical and mathematical proofs that no single “global temperature” has physical meaning in the context of global warming. Different averaging methods applied to the same temperature data can produce arbitrarily different trends, rendering GMST an invalid intensive property (like averaging the temperature of boiling water and bathwater, or points on Mount Everest and the Sahara).The author contends that trillions in climate policy spending hinge on this “fiction,” with bodies like the International Standards Organization declining to define GMST and the IPCC offering only circular definitions.
Cohler concludes that reliance on such a metric indicates climate science has shifted toward political ends rather than physical reality.
Context and Counterpoints: The 2007 Essex et al. paper has been critiqued in mainstream climate science circles (e.g., a 2007 RealClimate response) as philosophically interesting but practically irrelevant. GMST is defended not as a strict thermodynamic temperature but as a statistical index or proxy that effectively tracks planetary heat content changes, particularly from well-mixed greenhouse gases. It correlates strongly with independent measures like ocean heat uptake (in joules) and enhances signal-to-noise ratios for detecting anthropogenic forcing.
The JPANDS, published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), is known for politically conservative viewpoints and has faced criticism for promoting non-mainstream positions on topics like climate change, vaccines, and health policy. It is not indexed in major databases like PubMed and is often described as outside the scientific consensus.This paper adds to ongoing debates about climate metrics but echoes long-standing arguments that have not shifted the broader scientific agreement on warming trends and their causes.
In a captivating episode 0f Wired & Watched 101: EdTech, host Missy Carwowski sits down with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist, former teacher, and leading expert on the science of learning. For two decades, Horvath has studied how humans truly learn—focusing on memory, attention, and brain function—and his findings deliver a sobering message: despite billions spent and endless promises, education technology (laptops, tablets, one-to-one devices, and now AI) is not transforming learning for the better.
In many cases, it is actively harming it. Far from making children smarter, the explosion of screens in classrooms is contributing to the first measured cognitive declines in generations, leaving parents and educators searching for answers.Horvath traces the problem to three fundamental ways technology clashes with how the human brain learns.
First, screens destroy focused attention through constant multitasking—something the brain cannot actually do. Students now spend over 2,500 hours a year switching between tabs, messages, and videos, training them to task-switch rather than concentrate. Second, learning relies heavily on empathy—the biological synchrony that happens when humans interact face-to-face—which machines simply cannot provide. Without that human connection, students lack the motivation to push through difficulty and often quit at the first sign of struggle. Third, “transfer” fails: knowledge learned on screens in an easy, narrow context rarely moves to the varied, complex real world, because computers remove the very effort and contextual cues that make learning stick.
The evidence is stark and growing. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the first generations to show declines in memory, attention, and general intelligence compared to their parents—the reversal of the Flynn effect that had been climbing for a century. Raw scores on international tests like PISA and the SAT have been dropping 15–30 points per decade, hidden only by constant renorming and grade inflation. Meanwhile, handwriting boosts memory through spatial context and forces deeper processing, while typing often produces shallow, verbatim notes that students barely remember. Even binge-watching studies (which helped shape Netflix’s release strategy) show that spaced practice beats massed screen exposure for both understanding and enjoyment.
Horvath dismantles the common defenses of edtech with clarity. Claims of “potential” admit that promised benefits aren’t happening yet—hardly a reason to double down. Arguments that children must master today’s tools to be “work-ready” ignore the fact that K–12 education has always been about teaching adaptable thinking, not specific software that will soon be obsolete. And the excuse that teachers or students are simply “using it wrong” falls flat: real-world use, not inventors’ intentions, determines a tool’s impact. After sixty years of waiting for the edtech revolution, the data remains underwhelming at best and damaging at worst.
So what should classrooms look like? Horvath envisions a return to pre-2000 norms: computer labs used intentionally for specific lessons, not ubiquitous devices in every hand. Teachers and parents should demand true opt-out policies, forcing schools to maintain analog alternatives. When educators must prepare both digital and paper versions of assignments, most quickly discover that analog methods produce deeper understanding with greater flexibility. Above all, Horvath reminds us that learning has always happened best through human relationships—between teachers and students, students and students—not through screens. As cell-phone bans spread across schools, the next frontier is reclaiming classrooms from compulsory edtech, giving children back the focused, empathetic, effortful environment their brains need to thrive.
References for “The Digital Delusion: Why EdTech Is Failing Our Children”
- M forl Academy podcast episode with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath (full transcript basis for the essay):
https://www.mforlacademy.com/ (specific episode featuring Dr. Horvath on education technology – check recent releases or search “Jared Cooney Horvath”) - Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s upcoming book:
Horvath, Jared Cooney. The Digital Delusion: How Technology Is Failing Our Children and What We Can Do About It. (Expected release December 7, 2025) - Horvath’s website and research hub:
https://www.lmeglobal.net/ - Jared Cooney Horvath YouTube channel (features breakdowns of learning science and edtech research):
https://www.youtube.com/@JaredCooneyHorvath - OECD PISA reports (raw score declines and renorming examples):
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/ (see technical reports on score equating and trends since 2000) - Flynn effect reversal studies (cognitive declines in Western countries):
Bratsberg, Bernt & Rogeberg, Ole (2018). “Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused.” PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
Additional meta-analysis: Wongupparaj et al. (2023) on Gen Z/Alpha declines. - Handwriting vs. typing note-taking research (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014 – foundational study):
Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard.” Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581
When they are not running the show versus when they are running the show. Funny how that works.
On December 3, 2025, Calgary pastor Derek Reimer was arrested for breaching the conditions of his conditional sentence order after refusing to write a court-mandated letter of apology to a public library manager and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The apology stemmed from his earlier conviction for criminal harassment related to protests against Drag Queen Story Hour events at Calgary libraries in 2023, where he had confronted organizers and posted videos online.
Reimer, citing his sincerely held religious beliefs, argued that complying would constitute compelled speech in violation of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms; however, the court deemed his refusal a breach, leading to his immediate detention.At a bail hearing on December 5-6, 2025, no decision was reached on Reimer’s release, and he remains in custody awaiting a further hearing on Tuesday, December 9. The case highlights the extraordinary nature of the original sentencing requirement: court-ordered apologies are rare in Canadian criminal law and typically reserved for restorative justice or defamation contexts, not as a tool to enforce ideological conformity. By jailing a citizen for refusing to express remorse that contradicts his conscience, the justice system effectively punishes thought and belief rather than solely actions, raising serious concerns about state overreach.
This incident exemplifies growing authoritarian tendencies in Canada’s legal approach to dissent on cultural issues, where protections for freedom of expression and religion appear subordinated to enforcing compliance with progressive orthodoxies. Forcing individuals to voice insincere apologies—or face imprisonment—echoes compelled speech regimes in totalitarian systems, undermining the Charter’s guarantees and signaling that the government views certain religious convictions as incompatible with public order. As of December 6, 2025, Reimer’s continued detention without resolution further illustrates how such measures can be used to silence opposition through prolonged pre-trial incarceration.
Here are some reliable sources for readers seeking more details on Pastor Derek Reimer’s case, including the original protests, the court-ordered apology, his December 3, 2025 arrest for non-compliance, and the ongoing bail proceedings as of December 6, 2025:
- Original X post highlighting the case: https://x.com/RealMattA_/status/1997166177433321898 (Quotes journalist Chris Dacey’s update on the bail hearing delay.)
- Video update from the December 6 bail hearing (posted by
@chrisdacey
): https://x.com/chrisdacey/status/1997152423396204956 (Confirms no bail decision was reached and Reimer remains in custody until December 9.)
- Western Standard – Arrest coverage: https://www.westernstandard.news/news/watch-calgary-pastor-arrested-after-refusing-to-apologize-to-librarian/69520 (Includes details on the breach and compelled speech concerns.)
- Rebel News – Breaking arrest report: https://www.rebelnews.com/derek_reimer_arrested_after_refusing_court_ordered_apology (Features video of the arrest and background on the conditional sentence order.)
- Caldron Pool – Analysis of compelled speech: https://caldronpool.com/compelled-speech-canadian-pastor-arrested-for-refusing-to-issue-court-ordered-apology/ (Discusses Charter violations and Reimer’s religious objections.)
- LifeSiteNews – Recent developments: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-pastor-arrested-for-refusing-to-write-apology-to-librarian-who-hosted-drag-queen-story-hour/ (Covers the arrest and broader context of protests against drag events for children.)
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