Schools are Becoming More Dangerous

 From American Greatness:

Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) vented his frustration with the appointment, tweeting that Weingarten “is the last person who should be advising anyone on school safety.”

Scott is right, of course. Coming on the heels of the utterly disastrous teacher union-mandated school shutdowns, where Weingarten was a prime influence, she is indeed the last person to give advice on school safety. In fact, a House subcommittee is currently threatening to subpoena Weingarten for her failure to disclose communications between her and the CDC on reopening schools in early 2021. If she is called in to answer questions, perhaps she can detail how deeply she was involved in affecting CDC decisions. Perhaps she could also explain why Sweden never closed their schools and not one child died from the disease, and teacher cases were rare. Students have been affected in many ways by the shutdowns. The widely publicized learning loss is a huge problem, and violence in our public schools has escalated exponentially in the last few years.

According to EducationWeek, 44 % of school and district leaders say they are receiving more threats of violence by students now than they did in the fall of 2019. Also, two out of three teachers, principals, and district leaders say students are misbehaving more these days than they did in the fall of 2019. On a similar note, a nationwide American Psychological Association survey of nearly 15,000 teachers and staff from July 2020 to June 2021 reveals that school staff (paraprofessionals, school counselors, instructional aides, school resource officers, etc.) reported high rates of student physical violence, with 22% of staff reporting at least one incident of physical violence during COVID. Additionally, the Institute of Education Sciences found that 36% of schools report increased student verbal abuse of teachers since COVID, and 48% reported increased acts of disrespect. (Read more.)

Also from American Greatness:

In May, an appeals court ruled against Texas’s Rice University and in favor of a student athlete in a case about Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools, but now used for dating mishaps on the theory that they represent sex bias. The case shows what’s wrong with this law and also what’s wrong on campus. And, unfortunately, the Biden Administration is making matters worse by giving more power to Title IX personnel – the very people causing all the problems.

In the fall of 2017, “Doe” was a male student at Rice University on a football scholarship. He began dating “Roe,” a female student. They eventually entered a sexual relationship, after having discussed their sexual histories. Doe explained that he’d had a “run in” with herpes in high school. The two broke up in early December and shortly thereafter Roe texted Doe saying she had herpes and “most likely got it” from Doe. On December 15, Roe contacted the school’s Title IX office to complain of contracting herpes from a student who failed to inform her of his infection – which was false – and on December 18, she called university police to press criminal charges. The police declined, saying it could not prove Doe’s intent to spread infection.

In January, Roe saw the Director of Rice’s Student Judicial Program (SJP), Emily Garza, who filed a formal disciplinary complaint against Doe on February 12. On February 13, Garza emailed Doe a “no contact order” with respect to Roe and also requested an in-person meeting the next day. Doe asked to postpone the meeting so he could get legal advice. Rice University apparently viewed this request as a lack of cooperation because it then suspended Doe from school and banned him from campus.


Garza informed Doe that SJP was investigating whether Doe had “intentionally inflicted, or attempted to inflict, mental or bodily harm on a person” or if he had acted with “reckless disregard from which mental or bodily harm could result.” Garza also viewed the case as “dating violence” under Title IX and the school’s sexual misconduct policy. (Read more.) 

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White House Cocaine Mystery

 From American Greatness:

The Secret Service said Wednesday they are continuing to investigate “CocaineGate,” but an official familiar with the investigation told Politico the “culprit” is “unlikely” to be determined given that it was discovered in a highly trafficked area of the West Wing. Asked what the chances were of cracking the case, an official said “it’s gonna be very difficult for us to do that because of where it was.”

“Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught” by the cameras, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given that it’s an ongoing investigation. “It’s a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time.”

The Hazmat team initially reported that the “dime sized baggie” of cocaine was discovered in the White House library, “which is part of the executive residence two floors below the first family’s living quarters, but is also a room open to public tours,” the Daily Mail reported. The discovery led to emergency services shutting down 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (Read more.)

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Attack on Mozart and Gluck in 'Chevalier'

 Ironic that it takes a Socialist to point this out. From WSWS:

The first scene sets the tone. At a concert in Paris, following the completion of his scheduled pieces, a youthful and arrogant Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen) turns to the audience for “requests.” His “Violin Concerto No. 5” is called out. Beginning to play the piece, Mozart is interrupted by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who comes out of the audience and asks if he can join the composer on the violin. Mozart agrees, sneeringly, (“Well, I hope this won’t be embarrassing for you”) and proceeds to be outplayed by this “dark stranger.”

No such incident ever took place. Saint-Georges may have attended a performance by Mozart, a 10-year-old child prodigy, during the Mozart family’s visit to Paris in 1766. When Mozart was in Paris again in 1778, his father urged him to approach the Le Concert des Amateurs, the orchestra where Saint-Georges served as conductor, for a possible commission. In his biography of Saint-Georges (The Chevalier de Saint-Georges—Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow), Gabriel Banat points out that Mozart followed Leopold’s advice and sought out Saint-Georges. Banat goes on, “They met at a difficult time in Mozart’s life, for on July 3, 1778, Wolfgang’s mother died in their tiny, dank apartment on rue du Gros Chenet.” Wolfgang, “alone and helpless,” found lodging through an admirer. “It is a matter of record that from July 5 to September 11, 1778,” writes the biographer, “Mozart and Saint-Georges lived—and dined—under the same roof.”

Referring to the initial sequence in Chevalier, the Guardian reviewer comments that this “is the moment that Amadeus finally knows how Salieri felt. Strutting with arrogance, Mozart is challenged to a violin duel and upstaged by a precocious rival. … Whether this showdown ever took place is doubtful but it makes for a playful opening.” People who take comfort in such ethno-historical wishful thinking are driven by something other than an interest in truth and reality.

Chevalier generally plays fast and loose with Saint-Georges’ life and times. It suggests that Joseph is roughly taken from his mother, Nanon, at a tender age, by his father George (Jim High) and kept from her as long as the latter is alive, until Joseph is an adult. In the film, Nanon tells her son, once she has arrived in Paris, over images of her distraught self: “After he took you from me, I ran to find you nearly every day. … I fought anyone who tried to stop me. … I did not care if I died. I chose to fight for you, my son. And now, I am here.” None of this is true.

In reality, mother and son were separated for only 20 months. Nanon came to live in Paris in 1755, and Banat writes that it is clear that “George Bologne was not ashamed of their relationship, either at home or in France. As for Joseph, there is no question that he was and remained deeply devoted to his mother.”

As for Nanon’s economic situation in Paris, “she certainly did not need to work because he [George] left her and Joseph an annuity more than adequate for a comfortable lifestyle.” George “was always generous to a fault, seeing that Joseph had the best of everything,” and “Nanon was well taken care of … She had a nice apartment where the boy could feel at home—whether his father was sharing it with her or not.”

Mozart is hardly in need of a defense, but the lesser-known Christoph Gluck perhaps could use one. Why the malicious, entirely gratuitous assault on an important, revolutionary figure in the history of opera? Have the filmmakers looked into the history at all? Nearly all the facts presented in the film surrounding Gluck are fictional.

Each time Saint-Georges refers to Gluck, his comments are dipped in spite and jealousy. Told that the composer has “hopped over from Vienna” and that he is “putting on a concert for someone,” Saint-Georges snidely responds, “Someone without ears or taste, probably.”

American violinist Rachel Barton Pine, an admirer and performer of Saint-Georges’ music, replying to the question, “Did he [Saint-Georges] disparage other composers and musicians on a regular basis?,” writes that “Such a characterization contradicts what we know of Bologne’s character from contemporary reports. For example, in La Borde’s entry on Bologne in his Esssay sur la musique (1780), he writes: ‘In addition to his multiple talents … M. de Saint-Georges possesses the uncommon virtues of great modesty and gentleness.’”

In any event, Christoph Willibald Gluck never sought the Paris Opera position and Saint-Georges had been rejected for the job well before Gluck arrived in Paris. They were never asked to write competing operas, nor did Saint-Georges ever attack Gluck in public. All of this is fanciful, and stupid. (Read more.)

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Ottomania

The Turkish production Muhteşem Yüzyıl is based upon the sixteenth century life of Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and his marriage to the Russian Christian captive Alexandra, called Hurrem, who became his co-ruler. On one level the drama can be seen as a Turkish soap opera, and an extremely soapy one at that. However, it depicts the thriving slave trade of fair-skinned women that endured for hundreds of years in Central Europe and Asia in order to fill the harems of wealthy Turks with white girls. The story of Hurrem is the tale of a woman who through intelligence and determination overcame the life of slavery to which she had been condemned. Not only through brains and grit, but through the love she shares with Suleiman, she manages to become his legal wife and the mother of five of his children. In the meantime, every attempt is made by other members of the Sultan's household to destroy Hurrem. Most of the episodes deal with her ongoing power struggles with the Sultan's mother Hafsa and with Mahidevran, the mother of the Sultan's oldest son. The Sultan's grand vizier and brother-in-law Ibrahim Pargali also tries many times to ruin Hurrem and her influence with Suleiman but by doing so brings about his own destruction. Muhteşem Yüzyıl was a run-away success in the Middle East, but for some reason only Season 1 was available on Netflix. The entire series can be watched on YouTube but the later episodes are without subtitles. I found the synopses on Facebook which helped me to follow the drama, HERE.

An old article from The New Yorker:

“Magnificent Century,” a soap opera set in the court of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, has been breaking Turkish television records since its première, in 2011. Every Wednesday, more than a third of prime-time viewers tune in to watch the latest ninety-minute episode. Süleyman, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, is known in Turkey as the Lawmaker, renowned for his innovative legal code, for the opulence of his court, and for expanding the Ottoman Empire from Transylvania to the Persian Gulf. It was Süleyman’s Army that defeated the Hungarian forces at the Battle of Mohács and launched the first Ottoman siege of Vienna, though the plot of “Magnificent Century” focusses more on the life of the harem, and the intrigues among Süleyman’s wife, concubines, mother, sisters, children, and viziers.

“Magnificent Century” is part of a Turkish trend called Ottomania, manifested in such diverse phenomena as Burger King’s Sultan meal combo (a 2006 TV spot featured a Janissary devouring a Whopper with hummus), a proliferation of Ottoman cookbooks, Ottoman-style bathroom consoles, wedding invitations with Ottoman calligraphy, and graduation gowns and flight-attendant uniform designs inspired by caftans and fezzes. In the past ten years, there have been increasingly elaborate commemorations of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, in 1453, along with the construction of new Ottoman-style mosques and the renovation of old Ottoman buildings, some of which have been repurposed as hotels or shopping malls. Last spring, protests were triggered by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to raze Gezi Park, in central Istanbul, in order to build a shopping mall in the style of an Ottoman barracks. The Gezi protests subsequently escalated into the most widespread civil unrest in Turkey in more than a decade. Five protesters were killed and five thousand detained. Many remain in custody.

On the surface, “Magnificent Century” looks like a quintessential product of the Erdoğan years. Thanks to Erdoğan’s economic policies, Turkey has a thriving television industry, capable of staging elaborate period dramas, and a prosperous family-oriented middle class of observant Muslims eager to watch their own values reflected in a historical imperial setting. And, much as Erdoğan’s foreign policy has promoted relations with former Ottoman lands, the show has conquered large audiences in Balkan, Caucasian, and Arab countries not known for their fond memory of Ottoman rule. Broadcast to more than two hundred million viewers in fifty-two countries, “Magnificent Century” has accomplished one of Erdoğan’s main goals: making a powerful, non-secularist, globally involved version of Turkey seem both plausible and appealing.

And yet Erdoğan is not a fan. In late 2012, at the opening of a new provincial airport, he took a moment to condemn the show’s depiction of Süleyman, as well as its directors and broadcasters, hinting at severe judicial repercussions. Soon afterward, an M.P. from Erdoğan’s party declared that “Magnificent Century” would be discontinued. A bill to protect the Sultan’s memory was submitted to parliament. Turkish Airlines excluded “Magnificent Century” from its in-flight programming. Conservative viewers had already objected to the amount of time Süleyman spent in the harem; to a chalice from which he occasionally drank some unknown, potentially alcoholic beverage; and to the low-cut gowns of the harem women. When “Magnificent Century” first aired, Islamist demonstrators marched to the television-station offices and threw eggs at the building, while a man dressed as Süleyman read out an “imperial edict” denouncing the show. (Read more.)

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SCOTUS Is Now the Thin Red, White, and Blue Line Holding Back Subhumanism and Tyranny

 From The Stream:

The Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and all its illegitimate spawn was of course the most crucial decision, freeing the states to protect preborn life from destruction. Of comparable importance is the courts’ decisions reaffirming the Second Amendment: If man has intrinsic dignity, he has the right to defend himself against both crime and tyranny. More recently, the Court has defended free speech and religious liberty against the LGBTQ bullies. And just last week it rejected the tribalist practice of affirmative action in college admissions.

In each case, the court’s majority reasserted the vision of man that suffuses our founding documents: of man as metaphysically dignified and morally responsible. That’s a far cry from the degraded picture of humanity that pervades the left, which for all its Transhumanist and Transgender fantasies, views us all as trousered apes who need to be organized and subjugated by elites, like ants or termites. 

It’s no accident that the left wants to tear down all our statues, deface our monuments, and pretend that the U.S. began not in 1776 as a new hope for liberty, but in 1619 as a slaveowners’ conspiracy. In part, this effort to airbrush our past and retcon our founding is a simple grab for power. As my friend John Zmirak wrote:

The angry activists and elitists who drive the Democrat agenda … don’t want us to learn from history. Like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, they want to hit the “reset” button. To start the calendar again at Year Zero. To paint the past as a dark and appalling void from which we can learn absolutely nothing, except the pre-cooked and pre-packaged mini-lessons that our new masters distribute to us. They’ve read their George Orwell. They know that to control the past is to dominate the future.

They want to shove the past, the entire past, into the memory hole. To delete it. To leave the pedestals empty, the statues beheaded or wrecked, the inscriptions sandblasted and vacant. In that bleak empty space where history once stood, they’ll scrawl instead the crude and easily memorized slogans they would force us to live by.

But there’s even more to it than that. The left has a radically different anthropology — theory of human nature — than the one our founders treasured, and on which our country was built. Those founders were Christian humanists — most of them members of orthodox Christian churches. They believed that man was created with dignity and freedom. That he was indeed fallen and flawed, but had been redeemed and renewed. Precisely because he was only “a little lower than the angels,” man had by his nature certain fundamental rights. No government could rightly take them away. (Read more.)

 

From The Federalist:

 Thursday morning, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts released a landmark decision, demanding Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill end anti-Asian racism in admissions, Yukong Mike Zhao, an immigrant from China, rushed to the steps of the Supreme Court, off First Street NE, as other Asian American immigrant parents descended on the capital to celebrate.

“Today marks a sweet but long-fought victory for the Asian community,” said Zhao, softly and passionately. All morning, WeChat and WhatsApp channels, popular with Asian Americans, had been exploding with messages in support of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the lawsuits, including a simple exclamation: “!!!”

Before Zhao could get much further, a young activist cupped her hands over her mouth to shout him down, yelling: “Stop trying to be model minorities!”

Behind Zhao, we watched stunned, supporting the retiree with cheers, but that heckling was just the first salvo in an afternoon of taunting, intimidation, and slurs that activists fighting the Supreme Court decision hurled.

Hours later, I left the Supreme Court, drenched in shock and sweat, with a very important revelation from the experience: the aggression we faced is a harbinger of things to come. The Biden administration and Democratic special interest groups and activists are deeply committed to fighting the decision, and I left certain of this: they will put in place a new campaign that will be akin to the “Massive Resistance” of the 1950s when Southern Democrats refused to accept another critical U.S. Supreme Court civil rights decision, Brown v. Board of Education, also upholding the 14^th Amendment and its guarantee of equality under the law, in that case ordering school boards to integrate public schools and end their racism against black students.

Later, I figured out who was behind the harassment we faced: a front group, “Defend Diversity,” whose website says it is “powered” by the NAACP National Legal Defense Fund, which had $174 million in revenue in its 2020 tax filing. The National Legal Defense Fund created the organization, referring to it on its website footer as one of its “LDF microsites,” essentially weaponizing youth to defend affirmative action. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU and other groups moved their press conference indoors to the Friends Committee on National Legislation because of the air quality. 

The Harvard Crimson quoted a Harvard student, Nahla Owens, “of Defend Diversity,” explaining they didn’t want our parents to “speak for people,” saying:  “Originally, this wasn’t supposed to happen because of the air quality, but we knew we just couldn’t stand aside and let SFFA speak for people who are supposed to be students applying and take that narrative.” Thus, they chased after us, most of us immigrants, with their cookie-cutter shirts, chants, and signs, which read, ironically, “We the People,” “Diversity Opportunity Justice” and “#DefendDiversity.” While we supported Students for Fair Admissions, or “SFFA,” we weren’t representing the group. We were immigrant parents and each one of us had become accidental activists, fighting anti-Asian racism. The NAACP’s National Legal Defense Fund didn’t return a request for comment. (Read more.)

From Trending Politics:

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a key injunction against the Biden administration, preventing officials from any further pressuring of Big Tech companies to mute or ban certain accounts in the future, a move that free speech advocates say will protect opinions at odds with government surveillance agencies.

The move, first reported by the Washington Post, came in response to lawsuits filed by Republican attorneys general who claimed federal officials overstepped their authority by contacting companies like Twitter and Facebook to shut down accounts and chat rooms dedicated to questioning the efficacy of Covid vaccines during the height of the pandemic. While a decision in the case is not yet final, court watchers expect Judge Terry A. Doughty to side with Republicans, ending over a decade of cooperative efforts in place between federal authorities and tech leaders who wield an outside ability to control public dialogue. In the injunction, which can be read here, lists the many limitations likely to be placed to federal authorities during their interactions with tech companies, including:

(1) meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms; (2) specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech; and (3) urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech.

Separately, Judge Doughty clarified that officials will be allowed to communicate with tech companies regarding accounts or posts which may be affiliated with criminal activity such as child pornography. For years the Federal Bureau of Investigation has relied on cooperation from websites and social media companies to identify pedophile networks. In addition, federal officials will be allowed to communicate about issues regarding national security threats, illegal political campaign activities, and cyber attacks.

The White House said the Justice Department is evaluating its options.

“This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”

(Read more.) 

 From Conservative Brief:

The Daily Wire reports that Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an injunction that forbids administration officials from communicating with social media firms in what appears to be a major First Amendment win. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), a former state attorney general, filed the complaint, alleging that government officials made efforts to exert unwarranted influence over these platforms, which he said resulted in the stifling of view that diverged from the administration’s views. (Read more.)

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If the Glorious Fourth Had Not Happened

From Charles Coulombe at Catholicism:

Of course, it was Louis XVI’s economic, governmental, and military reforms that made the French victory over Britain in the Revolution possible — after almost a century of defeats at the hands of the British and their Continental allies. But in the end, it was a pyrrhic victory. Not only were many of the French officers who served in North America infected with the ideas of the Enlightenment and had their Catholicism weakened thereby, the treasury was emptied by the conflict. As a result, when an Icelandic volcano’s aftermath ruined the French crops in 1788, the royal treasuries and granaries from which aid would have flowed to the starving were empty. Thus was born the Great Hunger, which in turn led successively to the convening of the Assembly of Notables, the Estates General, and at last the French Revolution, in which the King, his Queen, Marie Antoinette, his son the “lost Dauphin,” and his sister, Servant of God Madame Elisabeth, all lost their lives; his brothers, the future Louis XVIII and Charles X were forced into exile. The horrors of the Revolution engulfed France and all of Europe, raging on until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

But in our new timeline, none of this happened. No American Revolution meant no French Revolution: no driving of countless Monarchs into death or exiles; no slaughters in places like the Vendee and Tyrol; no Reign of Terror; above all, no assault on the Church, save what the Enlightenment — bereft in this timeline of the United States as a claimed example of their principles made concrete — could eat away at among the literate. Spain was not invaded by Napoleon, and so the bloody wars of Latin American Independence did not occur. Neither the Holy Roman Empire nor the Papal States collapsed; the Miguelist and Carlist Wars, the Mexican War, the 1848 Revolutions, the Crimean War, Italian and German Reunification, American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, the Portuguese and Russian Revolutions, the World Wars, and so many conflicts down to our own time did not occur. Oceans of blood and countless architectural and artistic treasures were spared. Without this heavy historical burden, life to-day in our mythical 2023, where altar and throne remain as powerful as ever they were, is paradise! (Read more.)

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Towns in France to Visit

From Travel Off Path:

The stunning village of Beynac is spread out on the northern bank of the river Dordogne and is topped with an imposing castle that overlooks it all. Take a canoe along the river and marvel at the sights, or wander among the narrow streets with yellow stone buildings around every corner. Visit the Chateau de Beynac or head across the river to see the Chateau de Castelnaud. If the town looks familiar, you might have seen it in the film Chocolat or The Joan of Arc Story. (Read more.)

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Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History

 

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Philadelphia Mass Shooting

 From New York Post:

The rifle-wielding suspect who donned a bulletproof vest before allegedly shooting dead five men and injuring two children in Philadelphia has been identified as a Black Lives Matter supporter who shared gun-toting memes on social media. Kimbrady Carriker, 40, was nabbed shortly after the bloodshed in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood Monday night, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, citing sources...On his Facebook page, Carriker posted two pictures of himself wearing a bra, a women’s top and earrings with his hair braided long in March, three months before the alleged shooting. He also regularly posts about supporting Black Lives Matter, including supporting workers who protested in the Strike For Black Lives in July 2020. (Read more.)

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