
Searching & sharing insights on: learning, #teaching, #writing, & living. Eric teaches #English & co-authors the Compelling Conversations #books. #FreeSpeech
Los Angeles
Joined March 2008
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Can we re-center authentic learning in our ELT classrooms in the AI era?
youtu.be/Q5-grJOR4hk?si=Lcea…
I shared some personal experiences, reviewed best practices, and distinguished between student-centric and AI-centric approaches. Prioritizing human to human communication matters!
Here’s a taboo thought experiment:
Besides the vibrant secular democracy in #Israel, what other Mideast country has free elections with a free press where Arab women can cast their own votes?
Isn’t #democracy still superior to theocracy, monarchy, and military dictatorship?
Name me one other country in the Middle East, other than #Israel, that has free, fair and open elections, where 40 parties from literally across the political spectrum are running, without a shed of blood being spilled?
You can't, can you?
#IsraelElections #IsraElex22
Can we hear two cheers for #Israel as the only secular democracy in the Mideast?
How many #BBC and #CNN viewers even know that the only “Palestinians” - Arabs- who can freely speak and vote are in Israel? The Palestinian Authority and Hamas have held no #elections in 20 years!
The #israelelections:
Every Israeli can vote. Jew, Muslim, Christian, Druse, Beduin- they all go to the ballot box.
While the antisemites tell lies - #Israel remains the ONLY nation in the area which provides all its citizens with true democratic representation.
#IsraElex4
tabletmag.com/sections/arts-… Remember the western leftists who cheered on Khmer Rouge? Many leftists hated Nixon and America so much that they projected heroism on homocidal zealots who eagerly killed in pursuit of a Cambodian utopia. Today the same logic leds leftists to cheer Hamas.
Why does #LAUSD spend - and waste - so much money to produce a majority of students reading below grade level? Many more students fail to perform at grade level in math.
#Reform Los Angeles #schools; reform Los Angeles! #LA
The Los Angeles Unified School District is broke and is going to have to cut roughly 6,000 jobs
The district authorized $750 million just to pay for settlements sexual misconduct lawsuits
They authorized more than a billion dollars in raises. Now the school district is looking at mass layoffs
$3.565 billion dollars in property tax revenue is taken in to pay for the Los Angeles unified school district, the total funding to the school district is around $15-$18 billion dollars per year and somehow that’s just not enough…
Here are some of the highest paid LAUSD employees
- Devora Navera Reed, General Counsel
makes $509,710
- Pedro Salcido, Deputy Superintendent, Business Services and Operations makes $508,952
- Alberto Carvalho, General Superintendent makes $501,255
- Karla Estrada, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction makes $496,266
- Anahid Tokes, Chief Facilities Executive makes $458,953
(Base pay $345,370)
Compelling Talks retweeted
Stunning admission by California during yesterday’s Ninth Circuit hearing.
California admitted they do nothing to check the citizenship status of voters and will count the illegal ballots of noncitizens who vote. This is why we’re seeking an emergency order. We cannot allow California to dilute legal votes in the upcoming election.
Judge: You agree that if a non-citizen votes and we don’t stop it now, that vote will be counted, correct?
California: That’s absolutely correct.
How can we encourage more Americans to become more resilient?
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts. — Nikki Giovanni
#perseverance #passiton
Compelling Talks retweeted
Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors. — Fred Rogers
#listening #passiton
Are we still supposed to pretend that the Islamist politician running for U.S. Senator from #Michigan isn’t a bigot?
Isn’t delusional #scapegoating a small country for America’s inflation absurd? Why would El Sayed blame the world’s only Jewish state for inflation? #Bigotry?
Some serious economic misinformation to go with the antisemitism in this ad that blames Israel for the rising price of American eggs, bananas, healthcare
- it falsely links American families’ grocery bills and healthcare costs to U.S. aid to Israel.
- Aid to Israel is approximately 0.05% of federal spending
- Most American military assistance to Israel goes to buy goods and services from U.S. defense contractors.
- U.S. assistance is overwhelmingly military, not a direct subsidy for Israeli healthcare
- most American bananas come from Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Honduras and prices are rising because of El Niño.
What’s gone so wrong in California?
Has one party rule, combined with a partisan press that prefers publishing official press releases to asking hard questions, led to widespread mismanagement? Why do we pay the highest state taxes? @SteveHiltonx explains the sad situation!
To the Democrats and Independents who still believe in the promise of California:
The Sacramento machine has made this state unlivable—the highest gas, housing, and electricity prices in the nation. I came to this state because I believed in the ladder of opportunity for working people. That's not what California is today.
This isn't about party. It’s about practical solutions, cutting costs, and restoring that promise.
The corrupt Machine has had its chance. California isn’t working. Time to throw out the insiders.
Compelling Talks retweeted
To the Democrats and Independents who still believe in the promise of California:
The Sacramento machine has made this state unlivable—the highest gas, housing, and electricity prices in the nation. I came to this state because I believed in the ladder of opportunity for working people. That's not what California is today.
This isn't about party. It’s about practical solutions, cutting costs, and restoring that promise.
The corrupt Machine has had its chance. California isn’t working. Time to throw out the insiders.
What’s a useful idiot? Sam Harris explains the phrase in this primer.
#UsefulIdiot
Compelling Talks retweeted
California's useless climate policies have driven gas prices to the HIGHEST in America.
Sacramento's idea of “saving the planet” is to shut down oil production here, only to ship it in from halfway around the world.
As governor, I'll increase California oil production, cut the taxes and regulations, and get gas down to $3 a gallon.
Compelling Talks retweeted
Compassion without judgment is not mercy. It is a failure of justice and too often, the innocent pay the ultimate price.
Twelve days before 15-year-old Mia Valentin was murdered in Kandel, her family reported the threats to police. Her killer had claimed to be a child. X-rays later put his age at around twenty.
@Ayaan on the difference between mercy and compassion, and why, when compassion replaces judgment, the innocent pay the price:
URL: ayaan.restoringthewest.com/c…
#RestoringTheWest #Mercy #Justice
Compelling Talks retweeted
Meet the champagne jihadis. These bourgeois leftists have an unshakable conviction that West is pure evil and anyone fighting it must be good. And yes, that includes Islamist head-choppers, writes Heydon Prowse
buff.ly/Qt1gvop
Compelling Talks retweeted
I suspect this level of ignorance is a lot more common in government than people realize. And seemingly, the less they understand, the more authority they want.
Holy shit...this clip is unreal. Nithya Raman has absolutely NO clue about how housing works in LA. Oppenheim explains to her that landlords are losing money over the last decade and she's got ZERO idea what he's saying. This lady was chair of the Homelessness and Housing Committee for years and she's genuinely hearing this for the first time in her life. Unreal that this low IQ buffoon is about to be the Mayor. WTF are we doing.
Are all cultures equally safe, wise, and free for women?
Listen to Ayaan Hirsi Ali reflect on her experiences coming to Western Europe and growing up in Somalia.
Shouldn’t immigrants be expected to adapt to the cultural values and obey the laws of their new homeland?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on growing up in the Africa, where she witnessed a man being lynched in the street, and what happens when Europe takes in third world migrants.
“When I first came to Europe, I was stunned by many things. But one of the things that I found most stunning and astonishing was just how peaceful it was.”
“In these other countries in Africa, violence was so normal.”
Watch my full interview on the riots in France, mass immigration, the small boats and the growing influence of Islam in the West: youtu.be/BIr0-LpMAD4
Compelling Talks retweeted
The Muslim Brotherhood has a very strong foothold in France; in their educational system, in their trade associations, in their politics, and it’s the same parties that are trying to bring that here to the United States.
Mamdani supports, for example, the CURB Act. He wants to dismantle the NYPD’s strategic response group, the very group that’s supposed to be deployed when we have riots, when we have civil unrest on the streets.
They are openly calling to disband that NYPD group, while at the same time justifying this type of violence. Why? Free Palestine. There we go. So we are doing this to ourselves.
This is what we are going to look like if we don’t get this under control!
Thank you for having me on @SchmittNYC @NEWSMAX
Doesn’t he have a point?
Cultures survive by celebrating and teaching their own traditions and values. France has long had, like the United States, waves of vetted immigrants who adapted French culture through assimilation policies. Can France restore those old, successful ways?
There’s no guarantee that French culture and traditions will survive ceaseless attacks from discontents inside the country.
@DouglasKMurray dives into this in his recent column. Read it here: thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-f…
What lessons can Americans learn from France’s widespread riots?
Is it too late to restore the traditional French immigration policy of assimilation and controlled immigration? Or has 40 years of multiculturalism, uncontrolled immigration, and socialism created national decline?
🚨🚨🚨 A warning to Americans, from a Frenchman. 🚨🚨🚨
You are starting to elect people who promise you more state, more redistribution, more "free" things. New York already has a democratic socialist mayor, perhaps the furthest-left since Fiorello La Guardia. I'm not here to tell you how to vote. I'm here to tell you how this story ends, because we lived it. France ran this experiment for 40 years, and we are now living its final chapter.
It starts in May 1981. François Mitterrand wins the presidency with the Communists in government. The program is pure romance. They nationalize the big banks and industrial groups. They lower the retirement age to 60, cut the work week, add a fifth week of paid vacation, create a wealth tax, and hire massively in the public sector. "Changer la vie", change life itself. That was the slogan.
Reality took less than two years to answer. Capital fled. The franc was devalued three times. Inflation stayed in double digits while our neighbors were bringing theirs down. In March 1983, Mitterrand made a U-turn and imposed austerity, "le tournant de la rigueur".
Remember this, because it is the pattern. Socialism doesn't fail once and disappear. It fails, reinvents itself, and changes its electorate.
After 1983 the Socialists had a problem. They had abandoned the economic revolution, so what was left to sell? The answer was identity politics before the term existed. In 1984 SOS Racisme was born, closely tied to the Socialist Party. The moral battle replaced the economic one. Anyone who raised the question of immigration or integration was no longer an opponent. He was a racist.
Then came the first real test. In 1989, three girls showed up to a public school in Creil wearing the Islamic veil. The Socialist government refused to decide, sent the question to the courts, and let it rot for fifteen years. The ban only came in 2004. That was the moment the Republic blinked. The message received was simple: if you push, the state will back down.
Over the following decades, the left slowly replaced the working class it had lost with a new coalition. In 2011 the Socialist think tank Terra Nova wrote it down in black and white, saying they should stop chasing blue-collar workers and build a coalition of graduates, youth, and minorities. Electoral clientelism became strategy. In certain cities, local politicians traded subsidies, jobs, and silence for votes delivered by community networks, including Islamist ones.
The result today is that in the 2022 presidential election, Muslim voters gave 69% of their first-round votes to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left candidate. A party that once claimed to be secular is now courting religious identity. Let's be precise: this is not about our Muslim fellow citizens, millions of whom are fully French. It is about a political machine that decided a community vote was worth more than the principles of the Republic.
Now the economy, because the two collapses are the same collapse.
In 2000, the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin, with Martine Aubry as labor minister, imposed the 35-hour work week. The theory was that sharing work creates jobs. What it actually did was make French labor more expensive, destroy the culture of effort, disorganize hospitals that still haven't recovered, and teach an entire generation that work is a burden the state should shrink for you.
That is the deep logic of socialism. It doesn't make people richer. It makes them dependent. Every new subsidy creates a voter who fears losing it. Every new public job creates a voter who defends the system. After a while, you no longer have citizens. You have clients.
Look where it ends. France hasn't voted a balanced budget since 1974. Public debt was around 20% of GDP when Mitterrand arrived. It is now around 3,550 billion euros, about 118% of GDP. France is once again Europe's biggest spender, with public spending at 57.3% of GDP. And a report commissioned by the government in July 2026 projects that without budget efforts, debt would reach 130% of GDP by 2030.
And to be completely honest, the right didn't fix any of this. Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron: they all managed the decline instead of reversing it. The left set the direction, and the right lacked the courage to change it. That's how you get 40 years of slow rot, economic and social at the same time. A country that works less, pays more, gets less security, and no longer dares to say what it is.
So today France has two choices, and so will you if you go down this road.
The first choice is to stop lying to ourselves. Multiculturalism, meaning many cultures living side by side with no common rules, does not work. It never has, anywhere. When there is no shared culture on top, one culture eventually takes over the others. That's not hate, it's sociology. What worked in France for 150 years was assimilation. You come, you become French, you take on the language, the laws, the history, the way of life. In exchange, the nation takes you in fully, with no asterisk. Assimilation plus controlled immigration. And the deal is already signed with millions of people. Children of Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Algerian, Moroccan, and Vietnamese immigrants who are as French as I am. They are not the problem. They are the proof that the model works when we have the courage to apply it.
The second choice is to keep pretending. Let the state get bigger, let debt explode, keep buying social peace with money we don't have, and keep handing territory to those who reject the West. In that scenario, it is not impossible that France first elects a hard-left government, a Mélenchon government. Then, when the system can't pay its promises anymore, something else fills the vacuum. Michel Houellebecq wrote that story as fiction in 2015, in a novel called Submission. A lot of French people stopped laughing at it a long time ago.
France is a Western country with Western values. Equality between men and women. Freedom of expression, including the freedom to criticize religion. The law above faith. Work as dignity, not punishment. Some things are simply not acceptable here, and we need to have the courage to say it again.
America, you still have what we're losing: a culture of work, a culture of assimilation, the idea that the state is your servant and not your parent. The people selling you "more state" are making the same promise Mitterrand made in 1981. It sounds generous. It ends in debt, dependence, and fragmentation.
Don't trade the American Dream for the French Disease. We already paid the price. Learn from it for free.
Compelling Talks retweeted
Israel is holding national elections in less than a week, and it’s the perfect opportunity to explain the Israeli democratic system.
Israel is the only Jewish country in the world, and it’s also a liberal democracy. Can a country be Jewish and democratic? The answer is yes, and Israel’s founders answered that question on day one.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion read Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which established a Jewish state and, in the same breath, promised complete equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, or sex. Jewish and democratic were never two separate ideas. They were written into the same document, one highly influenced by the American Declaration of Independence.
A Jewish state doesn’t mean that everyone in Israel is Jewish. It doesn’t even mean that Jewish Israelis are religious. Nearly half of Israeli Jews describe themselves as secular, and yes, you can be an atheist Jew. About 18% of Israelis are Muslim, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is actually growing, and everyone has equal rights.
Jewish culture, history, and tradition shape the country’s calendar and its character. Democracy decides who governs it and how. Israel’s laws are written by an elected parliament, not handed down by religious leaders. That is the difference between a democracy and a theocracy.
Israel is a parliamentary democracy with three branches. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, makes the laws. The prime minister and the cabinet run the country. The Supreme Court interprets the laws.
Next week, Israelis of all backgrounds will vote, because a lot is at stake: the direction of the country, its security, its international relations, and its future. Jews, Muslims, and Christians, religious and secular, right and left, will do what they’ve done for 78 years. Vote democratically.
We’ll be in Israel broadcasting live on election day, and we’ll keep you posted on everything. Stay tuned.
























