Informed Learning

JUST ANNOUNCED: Hi, How Are You Day 2026 with Nathaniel Rateliff on Friday, January 23rd 🎙️

We’re honored to once again host Hi, How Are You Project at the Paramount – a tradition now eight years strong, celebrating the life and legacy of Daniel Johnston while championing mental health awareness.

This year’s headliner, Nathaniel Rateliff, will lead an unforgettable night of music and reflection in support of open, honest conversations around well-being. Each year, this benefit concert raises essential funds for programs that empower young adults to care for their mental health and connect through creativity.

🎫 On sale Friday, October 31st: https://bit.ly/47wdNpP

Elon Musk, Cards Against Humanity settle lawsuit over South Texas land Cards Against Humanity sued SpaceX alleging Musk’s employees trespassed on a piece of land in South Texas and dumped trash.

This is how I feel

This was written by Chief Dan George, in 1972..

"In the course of my lifetime I have lived in two distinct cultures. I was born into a culture that lived in communal houses. My grandfather’s house was eighty feet long. It was called a smoke house, and it stood down by the beach along the inlet. All my grandfather’s sons and their families lived in this dwelling. Their sleeping apartments were separated by blankets made of bull rush weeds, but one open fire in the middle served the cooking needs of all.

In houses like these, throughout the tribe, people learned to live with one another; learned to respect the rights of one another. And children shared the thoughts of the adult world and found themselves surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins who loved them and did not threaten them. My father was born in such a house and learned from infancy how to love people and be at home with them.

And beyond this acceptance of one another there was a deep respect for everything in Nature that surrounded them. My father loved the Earth and all its creatures. The Earth was his second mother. The Earth and everything it contained was a gift from See-see-am… and the way to thank this Great Spirit was to use his gifts with respect.

This was the culture I was born into and for some years the only one I really knew or tasted. This is why I find it hard to accept many of the things I see around me.

I see people living in smoke houses hundreds of times bigger than the one I knew. But the people in one apartment do not even know the people in the next and care less about them.

It is also difficult for me to understand the deep hate that exists among people. It is hard to understand a culture that justifies the killing of millions in past wars, and it at this very moment preparing bombs to kill even greater numbers. It is hard for me to understand a culture that spends more on wars and weapons to kill, than it does on education and welfare to help and develop.

It is hard for me to understand a culture that not only hates and fights his brothers but even attacks Nature and abuses her. I see my white brothers going about blotting out Nature from his cities. I see him strip the hills bare, leaving ugly wounds on the face of mountains. I see him tearing things from the bosom of Mother Earth as though she were a monster, who refused to share her treasures with him. I see him throw poison in the waters, indifferent to the life he kills there; as he chokes the air with deadly fumes.

My white brother does many things well for he is more clever than my people but I wonder if he has ever really learned to love at all. Perhaps he only loves the things that are his own but never learned to love the things that are outside and beyond him. And this is, of course, not love at all, for man must love all creation or he will love none of it. Man must love fully or he will become the lowest of the animals. It is the power to love that makes him the greatest of them all… for he alone of all animals is capable of [a deeper] love.

Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. Instead we turn inwardly and begin to feed upon our own personalities and little by little we destroy ourselves.

You and I need the strength and joy that comes from knowing that we are loved. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.

I am afraid my culture has little to offer yours. But my culture did prize friendship and companionship. It did not look on privacy as a thing to be clung to, for privacy builds walls and walls promote distrust. My culture lived in big family communities, and from infancy people learned to live with others.

My culture did not prize the hoarding of private possessions, in fact, to hoard was a shameful thing to do among my people. The Indian looked on all things in Nature as belonging to him and he expected to share them with others and to take only what he needed.

Everyone likes to give as well as receive. No one wishes only to receive all the time. We have taken something from your culture… I wish you had taken something from our culture, for there were some beautiful and good things in it.

The only thing that can truly help us is genuine love.."

~Chief Dan George was a leader of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation as well as a beloved actor, musician, poet and author. He was born in North Vancouver in 1899 and died in 1981. This essay first appeared in the North Shore Free Press on March 1, 1972.

It happened. The Pentagon press corps walked out. At 4 p.m. sharp on Wednesday, decades of history, and the people who wrote it left the world’s most powerful building.

Dozens of Pentagon reporters turned in their access badges and carried their boxes, chairs, and notebooks out of the building rather than sign away their right to report. Nearly every major outlet, The Atlantic, Reuters, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, ABC, even Fox News, refused to accept Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new “media rules.”

The rules required journalists to promise not to seek or publish any information the Pentagon hadn’t pre-approved. Hegseth called it “common sense.” Trump called the press “disruptive to world peace.”

The journalists called it what it was: censorship.

“To agree to not solicit information is to agree to not be a journalist,” said The Atlantic’s Nancy Youssef, who’s covered the Pentagon since 2007. “Our whole goal is soliciting information.”

By 4 p.m., about 50 reporters walked out together, an image that will likely be remembered as one of the defining press freedom moments of the decade. They left behind their nameplates, maps, photos, and decades of institutional memory. all rather than sign a loyalty pledge to silence.

Some took to social media:

“Today I’ll hand in my badge,” wrote USNI News reporter Heather Mongilio. “The reporting will continue.”

The administration’s move has drawn comparisons to Nixon-era secrecy and McCarthy-style paranoia. Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Trump loyalist, has held just two press briefings in nearly a year, restricted access across the Pentagon, and opened investigations into leaks. Now he’s closed the door completely.

And yet, the journalists didn’t cave.
For once, the press stood as one.

This wasn’t a partisan story. It was about power, and those willing to question it.

In a time when truth itself feels under siege, the sight of reporters walking out of the Pentagon rather than bowing to censorship reminds us of something vital: maybe our institutions aren’t entirely gone.
Maybe, just maybe, we still have people inside them willing to stand up.

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness.
It walks out carrying boxes, and keeps reporting anyway.

Water seems to be the new oil in East Texas, and the fight is only just beginning. Should it like oil, be treated as a commodity sold to the highest bidder and squirreled away by the savviest investors? Or, because every living thing needs it to survive, should it be protected from market forces?

Kyle Bass, co-founder of Conservation Equity Management, sees potential in exporting water from East Texas to drier, fast-growing areas in the west. However, when nearby residents and local politicians got wind of his plan, the opposition was both swift and outspoken. In July, state Representative Cody Harris, the chairman of the Texas House Committee on Natural Resources, convened at a meeting at the Capitol to push back on Bass’s plan. For him, this conflict is inevitable: “In Texas,” he said, “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.”

Read more about this ongoing battle for the state’s most precious resource here: txmnth.ly/4odzEZL

Congratulations, data analysis & data gathering is imperative for our learning. May you always be a purveyor of honest well reasoned opinions.

YouTuber Alena Maze, a mother of seven, made history as the first Black person in the world to earn a Ph.D. in Survey Methodology.– Fueled by a passion for math and health equity, Maze focused her work on improving diversity and inclusivity in survey research. She earned her doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park, after previously completing a master’s degree in mathematics. – Over six years, she juggled the demands of doctoral study with raising a large family, maintaining a marriage, and sharing her journey through vlogs alongside her husband, Joseph Lee, offering a candid look into their blended family’s life.

https://apple.news/A9VqpmmyOQWWFLyUzsfp8Ig

Nice to see the comptroller won.

State shuts down Austin wealth adviser, alleges it stole $1.4M from customers — Austin American-Statesman State regulators have shut down an Austin wealth advisory firm they allege ripped off more than $1.4 million from its customers. Texas Securities Commissioner Travis Iles revoked the registration of Smith Wealth Advisors LLC and its owner and investment adviser Ronald Dewayne Smith on Thursday. The....

I love our town's commitment to open protected spaces in nature.

The Cognitive Cost of AI!