The Real Story Behind The Russian Hoax

From Zero Hedge:

In 1999, Durham was appointed special prosecutor to investigate alleged ties among Boston police officers, federal agents, and organized crime figures, including James “Whitey” Bulger. As a result of Durham’s work, four men who had been imprisoned for murder years earlier had their sentences vacated because they had been framed by the FBI. One retired agent was sentenced to ten years in prison on racketeering charges. Another former agent who faced charges died before his trial. In 2008, Durham was assigned to look into a major scandal involving the CIA’s destruction of graphic interrogation recordings, though the Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to bring charges in the case. The following year, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Durham to examine the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” methods. (Read more.)

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A Deep Sense of Place

From Website, Ink:

"The Mind of the South" was written by Cash, a non-academic and a non-professional historian, but he examined the South of his day with laser-like precision. This book has been required graduate school reading ever since. One of the concepts about the South he put forth was the "sense of place" — from the architecture, the landscape, the soil type, to the terrain and the regional differences in architecture and the differences in accents that separate someone from Charleston from someone from Hattiesburg — that had all been jealously preserved by its inhabitants. To this day, the New York elites like to bottle and sell and examine this essence. I've lived in many places, and people remain fascinated. And if they have the good fortune to visit Homewood, they never forget it.(Read more.)

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The House That Grief Built

From The New York Times:

The duke could not return to France for more than 20 years, until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, when Napoleon III was overthrown. In the meantime, the duke’s wife and older son had died in England. He returned to France only to witness his younger son die from an illness. The duke regained ownership of Chantilly. In his grief, he re-created the old private rooms with their original contents, precisely as Lami had decorated them in the 1840s. “These private apartments became his ‘cemetery,’ as he called them,” said Mathieu Deldicque, curator of the Condé Museum at Chantilly. “Furniture was placed precisely where it had been earlier.” (Read more.)

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Anti-Semitic Attacks in New York City

From Twitchy:

We’re seeing a number of tweets reporting anti-Semitic attacks throughout New York City and for some reason, the media is silent on them. Police are searching for these suspects in the beating of a Hasidic father and son in Williamsburgh: "Just received a report that a Hasidic father & son were beaten up in Williamsburg this past Friday night for no other reason than being Jewish. Police report has been filed. Here’s footage of the four violent suspects behind the attack - help @NYPDDetectives find them!" (Read more.)

From The Federalist:

Imagine that members of a religious minority were being frequently physically assaulted in America’s largest city at alarming rates. Imagine if members of that minority were being cold-cocked or spit on randomly for doing nothing more than being who they are and dressing how they dress. Imagine what a powerful and important story this would be to our country, how mobilized the media and government would be to stop it. But what if I told you that this is happening in New York City right now, and nobody seems to care very much? How can this be? I’ll explain it.

Orthodox Jews in New York City, specifically in Brooklyn, have experienced alarming rates of physical assault over the past year. The New York Police Department says that hate crimes in the city are up 67 percent this year. Of those, a whopping 80 percent have been anti-Semitic hate crimes. Just this week an Orthodox Jew just walking down the street was attacked from behind, punched in the head by an attacker who then ran away. In another incident this week, an Orthodox Jew was attacked by a group of men, one of whom shouted “You (expletive) Jew.” (Read more.)

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Organized Crime at Record Level in UK

From The Guardian:

Britain risks losing the fight against organised crime unless police receive significant new resources to tackle the “chronic and corrosive” threat from such groups, the head of the National Crime Agency has warned. In a chilling assessment, the NCA’s director general, Lynne Owens, said the threat from organised crime groups was at unprecedented levels. “It is chronic and corrosive. The message needs to be heard by everyone.” 

She added: “People should understand that serious and organised crime kills more of our citizens every year than terrorism, war and natural disasters combined.” 

In a rare political intervention, the head of an agency often described as Britain’s equivalent to the FBI reopened the debate on police funding, arguing that without significant investment the UK’s forces would fall further behind the criminals exploiting encrypted communications technology and dark web anonymity. “Against a backdrop of globalisation, extremism and technological advances, serious and organised crime is changing fast, and law enforcement needs significant new investment to help combat it,” said Owens, ahead of this week’s launch of the NCA’s annual strategic assessment into the impact of organised crime. Last year Whitehall’s spending watchdog revealed the jobs of 44,000 police officers and staff had been lost since 2010, when the coalition government came to power, and that the Home Office had failed to even forecast the possible impact. (Read more.)

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The Tragic Decline of Music Literacy

From Intellectual Takeout:

Two primary sources for learning to read music are school programs and at home piano lessons. Public school music programs have been in decline since the 1980's, often with school administrations blaming budget cuts or needing to spend money on competing extracurricular programs. Prior to the 1980’s, it was common for homes to have a piano with children taking piano lessons. Even home architecture incorporated what was referred to as a “piano window” in the living room which was positioned above an upright piano to help illuminate the music. Stores dedicated to selling pianos are dwindling across the country as fewer people take up the instrument. In 1909, piano sales were at their peak when more than 364,500 were sold, but sales have plunged to between 30,000 and 40,000 annually in the US. Demand for youth sports competes with music studies, but also, fewer parents are requiring youngsters to take lessons as part of their upbringing.

Besides the decline of music literacy and participation, there has also been a decline in the quality of music which has been proven scientifically by Joan Serra, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona. Joan and his colleagues looked at 500,000 pieces of music between 1955-2010, running songs through a complex set of algorithms examining three aspects of those songs:

1. Timbre- sound color, texture and tone quality

2. Pitch- harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements

3. Loudness- volume variance adding richness and depth

The results of the study revealed that timbral variety went down over time, meaning songs are becoming more homogeneous. Translation: most pop music now sounds the same. Timbral quality peaked in the 60's and has since dropped steadily with less diversity of instruments and recording techniques. Today’s pop music is largely the same with a combination of keyboard, drum machine and computer software greatly diminishing the creativity and originality. Pitch has also decreased, with the number of chords and different melodies declining. Pitch content has also decreased, with the number of chords and different melodies declining as musicians today are less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, opting for well-trod paths by their predecessors. Loudness was found to have increased by about one decibel every eight years. Music loudness has been manipulated by the use of compression. Compression boosts the volume of the quietest parts of the song so they match the loudest parts, reducing dynamic range. With everything now loud, it gives music a muddled sound, as everything has less punch and vibrancy due to compression. (Read more.)

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French Elegance in the 18th Century

Marie Leszczynska, Queen of France (1703-1768), Charles-André van Loo, 1747, Palace of Versailles

From Daily Art Magazine:

The beginning of the century was all about silhouettes – sleek shapes and narrow-looking dresses. A plain style was preferred, without too many ornaments. This style was strongly influenced by Françoise d’Aubigné, the wife of King Louis XIV. Soon after his death, however, the style changed significantly. Women began wearing the robe manteau, which evolved into the more refined robe volantes and later into the robe à la française. The baroque-era dresses also started being decorated with ribbons and lace. When it came to make up, a lot of white foundation was used, made for example of egg whites. The lips were usually the color of red or cherries. Hair was often worn with a cap and close to the face. As the years passed, women began dressing in a more colorful style, and panniers became more comfortable. The beginning of the second half of the 18th Century was all about silk materials decorated with bows, strongly influenced by Rococo. Later in the period, fashion became inspired by what Marie Antoinette wore. (Read more.)

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Medical Kidnapping

From The Daily Caller:

The most notorious case of alleged medical kidnapping nationally involved Justina Pelletier, who had a rare mitochondrial disease. When doctors at one hospital determined it was psychosomatic, her parents tried to send her to a different hospital. The first hospital called in Massachusetts Department of Child Welfare case workers, and a judge’s order kept Pelletier away from her parents for 16 months. 

The most notorious case of medical kidnapping in Arizona was Melissa Diegel. Diegel was accused of something very similar to Munchhausen by proxy, a condition in which a caregiver makes up, or causes “an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability,” according to the University of Michigan School of Medicine. Except she didn’t have Munchausen, said Sherwyn. Diegel’s case was featured on the website Medical Kidnap (which tracks these kinds of cases nationally), as well as covered locally. Diegel told The Daily Caller that she has not seen her two children since 2016; she said she has spoken to numerous parents who have had their children taken in similar fashion by Arizona DCS. 

The potential to use of Munchausen by proxy as legal leverage may be a national phenomenon. In California, attorney Shawn McMillan has won multiple lawsuits after child welfare in California took children illegally, accusing the mother of Munchausen. (Read more.)

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John Lukacs, R.I.P.

From Chronicles:

When long-time Chronicles contributor John Lukacs died on May 6, the country lost one of its finest adopted sons, who was also one of its finest writers and historians. The scope and extent of his work defies summary—he published over three dozen books between 1953 and 2017 on a wide-ranging list of subjects, including: the philosophy of history, World War II, the Cold War, Tocqueville, George Kennan (a longtime correspondent and personal friend), Agnes Repplier, democracy, nationalism, a half-century of Philadelphia’s cultural landscape, and his own life and experience. 

His life was defined by his deep scholarship. In its obituary, the New York Times quoted a self-reflective statement from one of his final columns for Chronicles, in 2017: “I am a crumbling remnant. A remnant of the very end of the Bourgeois Age and a remnant of the Age of Books.” 

When I first encountered the great historian’s byline in Chronicles some twenty years ago, so lucid and limber was his prose that I assumed he must be a remarkable young scholar just entering the prime of his years. Imagine my surprise when I soon learned he was already in his 70s, retired after 47 years of teaching at Chestnut Hill College. Yet in a sense he was indeed in his prime—soon after I first read him he published the book for which he is probably best known today, Five Days in London, and new works continued to appear almost annually for the next dozen years. 

Lukacs lived to see Five Days in London became the basis for the film “Darkest Hour” in 2017, though the movie was less than fully faithful to Lukacs’s account of Winston Churchill’s mentality and actions as he decided whether to continue the war with Germany. Lukacs’s book had become a bestseller after 9/11, when New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani recommended it and compared the experience of the attacks on the Twin Towers to living through the Blitz. Despite the recommendation, Lukacs did not excuse the mayor’s hyperbole—he responded that the jihadist attack, horrific as it was, was not comparable to the sustained onslaught that London had faced from Hitler. 

Lukacs drew equally sharp distinctions between Churchill and a latter-day American “war president” like George W. Bush, whose adventurism Lukacs condemned. He had long criticized the blending of military symbolism into civilian politics, such as the practiceof civilian leaders saluting to soldiers. The title of his 1984 book, Outgrowing Democracy, was a warning about where he saw America heading. A refugee from the Soviet domination of Hungary—and before that, a conscripted laborer under the Nazis—Lukacs was an enemy of totalitarian ideology. But he saw nationalism itself as a more powerful force than any empire of the mind. This led him to agree with Kennan’s assessment of the Soviet threat as one that could be contained. And it led him to predict the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, at a time when the CIA and the anti-Communist intellectuals of the conservative movement believed the Cold War would continue indefinitely. (Read more.)

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