This isn’t going to be more musing about whether America has reached “peak woke.” But that is part of the story. So let’s start there. About a decade ago, many on the left embraced the word “woke,” a term with roots in African American culture and activism. It originally meant staying awake — that is, “woke” — to the dangers facing the Black community. But in the hands of the broader, and whiter, academic and journalistic left, it soon became a kind of cool catchall for progressive politics, alongside other buzzwords like “intersectionality.” The combined effects of th ..read more

“ O never give me over to my own heart’s desires, nor let me follow my own imaginations!”– John Wesley There are many reasons for the modern church’s loss of its prophetic voice, politics being just one of them. As in ancient times, trying to embrace what the rest of the world is doing has diminished the power of the church to address what used to be called “sinful behavior.” The latest, but surely not the last example, is what the United Methodist Church did last week at their convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Delegates voted 523 to 161 to replace the definition of marri ..read more

For two out of the last three years, fire chiefs from eastern Lake County have been honored at a major statewide award ceremony for the firefighting profession. In 2022, Perry Joint Fire District Chief James McDonald received an Ohio Fire Service Distinguished Service Award. That accolade was presented to McDonald at the annual Ohio Fire Service Hall of Fame & Fire Awards ceremony. The awards program is co-sponsored by the Ohio Commerce Department’s State Fire Marshal division and the Ohio Public Safety Department’s Emergency Medical Services division. By earning that award, McDonald also ..read more

There’s a grand and important tradition of anti-war protest in America. And, when peaceful, these can be a useful and impactful mechanism to advocate for change. Sadly, what’s happening on our college campuses right now is making a mockery of that grand tradition and civil right. Over the past few weeks, pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina and others have disrupted classes and campus life, held administrators hostage to impossible and unserious demands, and resulted in the mass arrests of stud ..read more

There is no artificial intelligence without the vast trove of human knowledge. Today’s generative AI applications were built on a foundation of such information, drawn from across the internet and from various databases totaling, according to at least one estimate, somewhere around 300 billion words. That’s a lot of intellectual property, much of it produced by generations of professional writers, honed and polished by editors and sent out into the world by publishers in newspapers, magazines, books and more. Hard to put an exact price on such a thing or even to measure the collective value of ..read more

If history proves anything it shows if civil rights, human rights, equality and even the right to live are to be denied to a class of people, they must first be stripped of their inherent value as human beings. In the case of African Americans, it was slavery and the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 that upheld that evil practice, justifying it by claiming Blacks were not citizens of the United States. An earlier “compromise” in 1787 declared that for purposes of representation in Congress, enslaved Blacks in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the n ..read more

The current campus demonstrations are a reminder that of all the mossy clichés and puffed-up pieties of polite (and impolite) American discourse, the sanctity of protest is the hardest to question. Doubting the loftiness of protest invites elite scorn more than any other skepticism about a constitutional right. Proposing limits on free speech, for example, attracts far less outrage. Indeed, people question free speech all the time: in debates about “hate speech,” campaign finance, social media and more. (Let’s not even get into the fashionableness of questioning Second Amendment rights). But i ..read more

The year was 1966 and Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California. A major part of his platform was to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” and other college campuses throughout the state that were experiencing protests and strikes over issues that included the military draft, civil rights and “women’s issues.” While not on a scale of the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-America and Jewish hatred we are witnessing now on several college campuses, Reagan’s response could instruct current college presidents and admissions officers to quell the unrest. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of America ..read more

It’s not always easy for the general public to gain a complete and clear understanding of a school district’s financial situation. That’s why we believe Richmond Heights Schools is taking the right approach by hosting public information sessions on district funding. Around 30 people attended an April 20 session looking at the March failed tax levy. News-Herald reporter Frank Mecham reported on the program that also examined what Richmond Heights Schools will do in the future to deal with a predicted increase in students from Belle Oaks Marketplace, a new housing and shopping development. Topic ..read more

Imagine your party’s presumptive nominee for president is about to stand trial for paying off a porn star he allegedly slept with just months after his wife gave birth to their son. The allegations alone are seedy enough. Then throw in witnesses like the unfortunately named former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, former Playboy model Karen McDougal, convicted felon Michael Cohen, and the whole sordid affair is a pretty gross but revealing look at the presidential contender’s inner circle and private life. This would ordinarily spell doom for the presidential candidate — and his party ..read more