AI in Education

 Top 20 AI Tools for Teachers:

Adobe Express for Education

Brisk Teaching

Canva Education

ChatGPT/ChatGPT for Teachers

Claude//Claude for Teachers

Curipod

Diffit

Eduaide

Education Copilot

Flint

Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM

Google Gemini for Education

Grammarly

Khanmigo for Teachers

MagicSchool

Microsoft Copilot Chat

Parlay

SchoolAI

Snorkl

TeachAid

Wayground, formerly Quizizz

Liberty vs Equality

 In a recent article by S. T. Karnick for Blaze Media titled "The 1776 immigration fight that America Forgot-and why it matters now" the following appears:

"In my view, progressives, socialists, and communists increasingly subordinate freedom of speech, religion, association, and enterprise to an expansive conception of equality enforced by the state.The result is a politics that invokes equality while giving ever more authority to government officials. If America is only an abstract proposition, the meaning of that proposition can be rewritten by whoever captures the institutions that teach and enforce it. Equality can then displace liberty as the nation’s defining value."

It's simple. Do Americans define themselves as believers in liberty and freedom or subject to equality dictated by government? As we've seen in the past decade or so, the two are not compatible. 

Iran and Nuclear Intentions

 I got this from a recent Michael Shermer podcast. The problem discussed was the gross misunderstandings held by Americans opposing the war on Iran. It is not a war against innocent, helpless people led by an evil dictator. Actually, it's a war against the ideals of a religion that honors the death of non-believers; honors the death of believers actively and passively resisting non-believers; and welcomes suicidal death in support of Islam. It is a death cult, a cult wherein the afterlife is the goal of life. Consequently, allowing a people with such beliefs to obtain a weapon that could, conceivably, destroy human life on earth is inconceivable. 

Vietnam

MACV-SOG officially began on January 24, 1964, under MACV/JCS structures. But many earlier missions were CIA-controlled predecessor programs, later transferred or folded into military channels through Operation SWITCHBACK. So historians looking for “MACV-SOG” often start after the period you are talking about.

Why so little is known:

• It was designed for deniability. Operations into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam carried major diplomatic risk because those areas were officially outside the acknowledged U.S. ground war.
• The records are scattered under different names. Early activity may appear as CIA paramilitary programs, CIDG, SWITCHBACK, OPLAN 34A predecessors, agent operations, border surveillance, or Special Forces advisory activity, rather than “SOG.”
• The CIA-to-military transfer blurred the trail. State Department records explicitly describe the decision to transfer training of paramilitary groups, including Montagnards, from CIA to the Army as “Operation Switchback.” See FRUS, 1963.
• The archival record is thin. The National Archives notes that “few records of MACV-SOG are available to researchers” and that many reports likely remained with JCS rather than in normal archival holdings. See NARA Reference Information Paper 90.
• Participants stayed silent. Men who were ordered not to talk generally did not talk. By the time partial declassification occurred, many were gone, unwilling to revisit it, or still unsure what they could legally say.
• Later SOG overshadowed the earlier CIA period. The public story is dominated by 1965-72 recon teams, Shining Brass, Prairie Fire, Daniel Boone/Salem House, and Medal of Honor narratives. The earlier CIA-run or CIA-directed phase was smaller, more compartmented, and less institutionally “owned” by Army historians.

USASOC’s history also notes that early SF in Vietnam was very different from the later 5th SFG/SOG picture, and that CIA controlled the CIDG program before it shifted to MACV/Army channels. See ARSOF History, “A Team Effort”.

So the short answer is: it is little known because it was covert, politically sensitive, poorly labeled in the records, split between CIA and military archives, and later buried under the better-documented MACV-SOG story. Your memory may be exactly from the part of the war the paper trail was built to hide.

Reading & Writing

 In my opinion, reading and writing will become unnecessary within the next ten years. 

The God Concept

 That there is a conscious God it would make sense to believers that she/he exists solely to be worshipped and honored by the only known species with consciousness and that this same God created an entire universe solely to inhabit these same creatures is the height of hubris and is ridiculous. 

The Effects of Combat

 I had a PTSD episode about a week ago in the middle of the night and it scared me into thinking how much physical damage I could unknowingly cause my partner. I started to do a little research. I was surprised to find that the prevalence of PTSD among Vietnam veterans was far above the rate for more recent conflicts: VN=30%; Gulf War=12%' Iraq=11-20%; Afghanistan=11-20%. I am now 84 years old, and it has only been within the last 10 years or so that I have accepted that I have PTSD. It just wasn't something that a tough Special Forces soldier admitted to, either to himself or others. I spent five years fighting the wars in southeast asia, many of those performing clandestine operations into Laos, Cambodia, South Vietnam, Thailand, and yes, even (mostly) North Vietnam. At least three of those years my country still doesn't admit to having had combat troops in the area. The men (boys really) we lost or who were badly injured were officially reported as having been so as a result of training accidents at Fort Bragg, NC, Fort Gulick, CZ or other non-combat training areas. The effects of my PTSD didn't show up until well after my 30-year retirement from the military. It is so strange that the medical community didn't formally recognize PTSD as a thing until 1980. Homer's epic, The Odyssey is exactly about a man cannot return home the same man after his Odysseus. And Sophocles continually emphasized the idea that war changes, even destroys, the men who fought it. Many more recent authors, thinkers, and filmmakers have emphasized the fact that the man who returns from war is not the same man who left. Combat rewires a person. It changes men at a deep psychological level. And the homecoming, more often than not, piles onto war's trauma.