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Wednesday, January 25, 2017

A STAR IS BORED: Keep It Clean...It's Another Acton Institute Production!

What does a fundamentalist religious zealot who hopes to undermine public education do for fun?

If she's Betsy DeVos, she goes to the movies!

And she doesn't have to go far: take a gander at a screen grab from a seven-episode film series produced in 2014 by the Acton Institute of Grand Rapids, Michigan—starring Neurocore's founder, Dr. Timothy Royer.

Don't laugh (yet), the dude's listed in the IMDb database.



This perfect horror trifecta—Betsy DeVos, Neurocore and the Acton Institute—makes me want to reach for a theater-sized box of Sno-Caps. 

Here's how the Acton Institute described the movie:

“The 2-hour film series explores the majesty and wonder of God’s economy of all things. We'll rediscover the impact of his gracious gifts on our lives and in our families, for our work and in our governments, in our education—in all our endeavors.”

Produced by the Acton Institute, FLOW (for those in the know!) offers a big picture of salvation, helping us to see how we fit into God's plan to reclaim all of creational life. As its title suggests, the series argues that salvation is for our personal redemption and also “for the life of the world”. 

Wait, the Acton Institute, that name sounds familiar.

Hmmm? 

The Acton Institute is a Christian free-market think-tank on whose board DeVos served for ten years. 

In one blog post by Joseph Sunde that made waves November 3, 2016, Sunde appeared to exalt early-twentieth-century child labor, praising photos showing one-legged and hunchbacked children and children smoking cigarettes and finishing midnight shifts as representing “the faces of those who are actively building enterprises and cities, using their gifts to serve their communities.”

The resulting kerfuffle caused Sunde to later clarify that he did not “endorse replacing education with paid labor, nor do I support sending our children back into the coal mines or other high-risk jobs, nor do I support getting rid of mandatory education at elementary and middle-school ages.” 

Well, I can relax now...almost. 

Sunde did leave this passage intact: 

“Let us not just teach our children to play hard and study well, shuffling them through a long line of hobbies and electives and educational activities. A long day’s work and a load of sweat have plenty to teach as well.” 

Betsy DeVos is arguably the single most prolific campaigner for charter schools and school privatization, pouring her enormous wealth into a vast network of organizations—PACs, think tanks, pressure groups—that seek to separate government from education.

And tomorrow, I'll reveal her plans for your kid's brain with Neurocore! 

Neurocore measures the electrical current that drives the brain and shows it on a screen in brain waves. 

It not only assesses the brain waves or electricity of the ADHD mind, but it also controls it. 

The electrical current of the ADHD brain is amplified and sent to a computer that plays a DVD. 

As children watch a DVD that they want to watch, if their brain waves go higher, the DVD will stop -- telling the ADHD kid, “stop doing that.” 

The goal is to achieve a “perfect pattern of focus.” 

Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, and Winston Churchill would most likely have all said the same thing: of course our brain waves and neurons have to work faster.

(How else would they have been able to accomplish what they did during their respective lifetimes?)

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