America has a body image issue. Ours is a great and beautiful civilization, but when we look in the mirror, we see ugliness, ungainliness, disproportion, and a history of sin spanning the ages from the founding to the modern-day. So we hang our heads in shame, self-flagellate, fast, binge, and yo-yo diet, leaving wounds, indentations, breaches, and bulges that make the distension and distortion we see in our reflections no longer merely imaginary. The root cause of the problem is that those who hold a mirror to our civilization are unreflective of the rest of us. The journalists, the celebrities, the artists, the academics, and other educators — these are a class apart: generally wealthier, more credentialed, and starkly different in their ideological convictions. (READ MORE: Anti-Democratic Skullduggery Against West, Stein From the Democratic Party) As the noted sociologist Philip Rieff has argued, adherence to moral standards is usually a demand that emanates from the middle class, not from a nation’s oft-licentious, degenerate elites. This is why there are many things we normal Americans know that they — our do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do elites — don’t: We know that immigration must be legal (6 in 10 Americans see illegal immigration as either a very serious or somewhat serious problem) and that those who have broken the law, cut in line, and come into this country illegally are certainly not entitled to the red-carpet treatment they have gotten, with free room and board in nice hotels and an array of free social services (unequivocally supported by Kamala Harris and leaving taxpayers with a $5 billion bill over just two years in New York City alone), even while the migrants themselves are either illegally employed and, when not taking jobs away from legal low-wage workers, creating a domino-effect of downward pressure on wages throughout the economy or else, in the case of a majority of those who have arrived since 2022, not employed at all and not even looking for work. We know that crime must be met with punishment (58 percent of us think our current criminal justice system is not tough enough on crime), that “criminal justice reform” is code for higher crime, that police “defunding” is sheer lunacy (only 15 percent of Americans supported defunding in 2021) and that because most crime is concentrated within a small fraction of repeat offenders, intensive policing of hot-spots and longer sentences keeping those repeat offenders off the street really do work. We know that border walls (which 53 percent of Americans support) and blue walls (even after our elites’ ideological onslaught on police, 51 percent of us have confidence in cops) keep us from harm, and save for a few bad apples of the sort that may be found in every walk of life, our cops, like our firefighters and our soldiers, are not our enemies but our brave protectors who risk life and limb to keep us safe. We know what a woman is (57 percent of us believe gender is determined at birth) and know that letting biological males masquerading as females into girls’ locker rooms (46 percent of us are against such invasions, as opposed to 37 percent in favor) or into women’s sports (69 percent believe women’s sports are only for cisgender women and men’s sports only for cisgender men), and especially combat sports, is downright dangerous, unfair and absurd. We know that speech must be free (90 percent of Americans believe unpopular opinions must be protected, but only 45 percent believe free speech is secure in America today) and don’t want Big Tech companies (75 percent don’t trust Big Tech to engage in content moderation) or government censors (which only 14 percent of us support) — with their shameful record of colluding to suppress the truth about important issues such as the Wuhan lab leak that is all-but-certain to have been the source of the Covid pandemic or the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story that could have swung the narrowly decided 2020 election — calling the shots and taking it upon themselves to resolve inherently complex and oft-political questions of what is or is not okay to say. We know that education must be apolitical (58 percent believe political views have no place in education), and school is for learning reading, writing, history, math and science, not for indoctrination in gender ideology (48 percent feel there is too much focus on that topic in school, with only 23 percent supporting the opposite viewpoint) or other “culture war” subjects, like the various teachings of critical race theory (48 percent are against teaching CRT in public schools as compared to 29 percent in favor, and 45 percent are against its use to train teachers as compared to 32 percent in favor). We know that it is wrong to take race into account in making potentially life-changing decisions about college admissions (50 percent are against, only 33 percent in favor) and employee hiring and promotion (74 percent are against consideration of race in such decisions, and 24 percent are in favor). If all of these clear preferences held by substantial majorities of the American electorate were reflected in the actual policy choices our leaders made, so many of the wedge issues that seemingly divide us would be dissolved in a heartbeat. The reason that does not happen is, as I have suggested above, the fundamental mismatch between the views of ordinary people and the views of the political elites who have outsized voices in our national dialogue. Our Professors, Teachers, and Hollywood Elite Are Much More Radical Than You Are As of 2023, 33 percent of us are conservative, and 39 percent are moderate. Only 23 percent are liberal. But among journalists, 78 percent are liberal, and only 22 percent are conservative. A vanishingly small 3.4 percent of journalists are actual Republicans, while 36.4 percent are Democrats. Among college professors, 50 percent are liberal, and only 26 percent are conservative. In 2016, conservatives made up only 2 percent of political science professors, 3 percent of literature professors, 4 percent of philosophy professors, 7 percent of history professors, and 8 percent of sociology professors. More troublingly, an astonishing 17.6 percent of professors in the social sciences — the ones, in other words, who are more likely to be most influential in public life — are flat-out Marxists, with another 20.6 percent deeming themselves activists and 24 percent identifying as radicals. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 140: The Lord of the Rings is Still Relevant) Among K-12 teachers, 58 percent identify with or lean Democratic, while only 35 percent lean towards the GOP. Teacher’s colleges — the places where our teachers are molded — are some of the most radical institutions in America, with one of their most widely read texts being the wacky Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s 1970 tract, Pedagogy of the Masses, which instructs would-be educators on how to prep their students to take part in a violent revolution overthrowing their ostensible oppressors. While I have come upon no surveys reflecting the political views of creative artists and celebrities, the overwhelmingly left-leaning propensities of these groups — as reflected in once-respected actor Robert De Niro’s recent public meltdown on the general subject of Donald Trump — are common knowledge, have often been observed anecdotally, and lest there be any doubt on this point, in the 2018 election cycle, “[o]f the more than $4 million in federal donations made by the top Hollywood executives and entertainers [as reflected in the ‘THR 100’ list of most powerful people in entertainment], 99.7 percent went to Democrats and Democratic-leaning political action committees or organizations.” Our Elites Are Making Old Problems Worse This political disconnect between us and our elites yields a resulting disconnect between who we really are and who we think we are, between the views we actually hold and the ones these outspoken elites impose upon us. Day in and day out, they tell us we are a nation built on sin, founded on colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, nativism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and we are sent, on this basis, into a crazed frenzy of over-correction to atone for these purportedly eternal wrongs. Ironically, just as obsessing over food choices will only make an eating disorder worse, the newfound national obsession with these old pathologies being forced down our throats has only fixated us on what are largely historical bygones, arresting our civilizational development and leading to an all-around deepening of fissures along precisely these same troublesome identitarian fault-lines. Kamala Harris is the latest hissing-and-booing serpent head emerging from this seemingly unvanquishable, many-headed hydra. That she herself is a vacuous cipher with vaguely far-left instincts and who is barely capable of articulating a coherent thought is — or should be — obvious to any thinking American. We know it and they know it. Their only hope is that they — the body of the monster ravaging our land — can prop up its new figurehead for long enough that we’ll get fooled again before the hoax is exposed. To that end, just as in the case of her dementia-addled predecessor, Harris’s handlers keep her under wraps, and release her to the public only when a teleprompter is queued up and waiting (often resulting in painful repetition from one campaign stop to the next), avoid unscripted moments at all costs and defer for as long as possible in bothering to articulate a political platform with concrete policy positions because … well, a concrete political platform would either — if it is honest to her view — commit her to unpopular positions at odds with those Americans hold (as detailed above) or else — if it is dishonest — entail blatant backtracking on all her earlier commitments on issues like the Biden Administration’s open borders policy and its crackdown on free speech, her support for race reparations and her opposition to fracking. On the few issues on which her handlers have spoken, the latter approach, viz., blatantly dishonest flip-flopping, appears to be the tack they are taking, which also exposes this fundamental difference between Trump and Vance and Harris and Walz: Trump and Vance, who hold all the widely popular policy positions described above, are unafraid to voice and defend what they really believe, whereas Harris and Walz are doing media-assisted pirouettes to spin their way out of their years-long records of unhinged radicalism. We Have Some Tough Questions to Ask Ourselves Before Election Day Just like Biden before them, Harris and Walz have to campaign as moderates to swindle their way into the opportunity to govern as radicals. Just like Biden, their radicalism consists not, as they would have us think, in advancing working-class interests but in the exact opposite: enacting a radically anti-American, pro-elite, pro-corporate agenda that will result in rampant inflation driving corporate profits while creating cuts in real wages, an influx of illegal immigrants oversupplying labor and creating a similar domino-effect of downward pressure on real wages throughout the economy, billions upon billions of our tax dollars expended on needless and destructive foreign wars that the foreign policy neocons in power provoke behind the scenes, and currying favor with the elites by attempting a student loan debt giveaway for individuals (even well-off individuals earning up to $125,000 or couples earning up to $250,000) who made the voluntary choice to assume debt to go to college, even while others — primarily in the working class — may have made a more financially responsible choice to forego college or go to a less expensive school for which they did not need to take on debt. (READ MORE: Kamala Harris Is No Joe Biden. Or Is She?) Such realities are why, in lieu of tangling with Trump and Vance on specific policy commitments, Harris’s handlers and their media machine have mounted a thoroughly vacuous campaign befitting their vacuous candidate. Thus, we are told by all the organs of the elite media working in collaboration with the Manchurian candidate that she and her race-riot-promoting, trans-grooming, valor-stealing running mate embody joy in contrast to that gloomy, grumpy Trump and his sad, weird sidekick. Ironically, these elites are so out of touch with America that even their conception of joy is deranged and demented. If every single voter would just watch this cringeworthy Kamala Harris-RuPaul campaign ad, I’d wager on Trump winning in a landslide. In another instance that may have broken the peak-cringe detection meter, infantilized and projected into the role of babes in the loving, doting embrace of the federal government, we are invited to imagine Harris and Walz as our kindly “Momala” and “daddy.” Every attack on Harris for being the unaccomplished, undeserving D.E.I. candidate that she clearly is is reflexively, mindlessly branded as racism and sexism. In the meantime, the “joy” candidates’ main line of attack on their opponents is to label them “weird” — never mind the fact that calling people “weird” is unbecoming of any dignified, self-respecting political campaign and is little more than a case of childish, junior-high-school-level bullying. It is, in essence, pointing a finger at the nerdy, pimply smart kid in the front of the class and saying, “That freak isn’t one of us.”  The additional irony in this particular case is that it is Trump and Vance who are a whole lot more like us than their counterparts dummying for the elite ventriloquists pulling their strings. And so the question this election comes down to is as simple as this: Will we fall for the dummy act, or as a recent New York Post headline put it, “How dumb do they think we are?” Alas, with the polls trending in their direction at the moment, perhaps what we ought to be asking, instead, is are we really this dumb? Are we going to fall for the propaganda yet again and then spend the next four years seeing our quality of life continue to deteriorate, as our tax dollars are frittered away on free benefits for illegal immigrants or used to fund destabilizing foreign wars raging near and far. This, all while we are forced to watch biological males beat up women in a boxing ring and subjected to daily lectures by supercilious elites — lectures we have already been getting ever since Harris entered the race — for our supposed racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia? On Nov. 5, we will learn the answer. In the meantime, if we have any hope of salvaging what remains of America, we’d better start asking ourselves and our would-be overseers some hard, probing questions. The post The <i> Are We Really This Dumb?</i> Election appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

First, a note about “Ocasio.” Back in the 1930s, newspapers determined that American presidents with surnames extending beyond six letters needed to be identified by their three initials (FDR, JFK, LBJ) because seven letters could not fit across a tabloid front-page headline. (One exception was Eisenhower, whom they called “IKE” instead, because he already was known by that three-letter nickname. The other exception was Clinton because he was known as “Bill” and not “William” so WJC was confusing, and — unlike Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson — his “seventh letter” was the thin “I” which could fit into the header. From the day she emerged as the “Squad” star, I have refused to denote Ocasio in my writings as “AOC.” To me, those letters stand for “Antisemite Of Color.” She is not the president of the United States, only a media-created celebrity who is famous for being famous like Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Tila Tequila, and anyone surnamed Kardashian. She gets no acronym from me. Other than Ike, no other of our 46 American presidents ever has had a surname extending beyond three syllables. I am a lung transplant survivor, and she does not merit six hyphenated syllables of my breath. Since “Cortez” is a bit generic, she is “Ocasio.” End of preface. (READ MORE: Anti-Democratic Skullduggery Against West, Stein From the Democratic Party) Now back to business: Back in the 1950s, Stalin had a film crew sent to America to create a movie depicting the way American blacks were persecuted and oppressed under the evils of capitalism. The film showed run-down ghetto areas, instances of poverty, blacks consigned to buying only breakfast cereal and plain bread at the grocery because they could not afford more nutritious fare. Upon the film’s release to the Soviet public, citizens — comrades — were compelled to watch the movie to see how communism was far superior to capitalism. As people left the cinema, several film viewers emerged with the same observations: “When those black people went shopping, did you see how many different brands of cornflakes they have in America?” “Did you see how those grocery shelves were stacked with bread? And so many different brands? No bread lines, even for the poorest!” “Where in the world do they get such shoes? They make such beautiful shoes in America.” I was thinking of that movie as the Democrat National Convention (DNC) played on the Chicago stage for a four-day run. The DNC aimed at putting its best feet forward with its galaxy of stars: Obama 2, Obama 1, Clinton 2, Clinton 1, Biden at his most woke (i.e., still awake after his usual bedtime), Command Sergeant Major Walz, and the first major party presidential candidate in American history never to have garnered a single vote in any presidential election, not even in a primary. For the benefit of my kinsmen, they also put three Jews on the stage in one day: a communist (Sanders), a Senate majority leader who has called on the citizens of Israel to overthrow their duly elected democratic government (Schumer), and a man who proudly told the crowd of sycophants that he goes to church with his wife on Easter and celebrates Christmas with her, and in return she cooks him a meat dinner on Passover (Emhoff). (READ MORE: Tim Walz Lied About IVF) Great way to get my vote. To get the Catholic vote, how about a prominent Democrat on the stage mocking the Pope? Or, for the black vote, maybe a guy painted in Whiteface? But, really, at the center of it all was Ocasio. Indeed, the convention was the Ocasio Occasion. There are 435 Congressional districts. The Democrats have about half of them, around 215 (depending on who is alive on any given day). They also have 51 senate seats. Of all 266 of them, whom did the Democrat party elevate to be the first night keynoter? Ocasio. It Was An Ocasio Occasion And the crowd of Biden delegates loved it. With a few manifest exceptions caught on screen by panning cameras while sitting on their hands, the Democrats of 2024 lapped her up. She is the face of today’s Democrat party. Bidens, Clintons, and Obamas are passing into their twilight. In time, for all their majesty and glory, they will be dust and will be called to task by the true King. Ocasio is the Democrats’ next generation. If the organizers of the Chicago DNC were planning to show America the glories of socialism and the evils of capitalism, the glory of their platform and the unity of their party after having virtually assassinated their own president with greater precision and skill than evinced by the dirtbag on the roof in Butler, Penn., they instead left me and half America with the questions: Did you see how many different brands of corn flakes they have in America? Did you see how those grocery shelves were stacked with so many different brands of bread? Where in the world do they get such shoes? That is, they may have impressed themselves with the show they put on, but those who objectively looked and listened carefully, drawing their own conclusions from naked emperors, saw a very different reality: The Democrat party of Andrew Jackson, James Polk, FDR, Harry Truman, and JFK now struts out Ocasio as their standard-bearing vision for the future. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: The DNC-Free 5QT) Understand who and what Ocasio is. She is bosom buddies with Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. They share the same worldview, from defunding police and ICE to opening the borders, no-cash bail, the bankrupting Green New Deal, and killing home-derived energy. Her district’s 19.6 percent poverty rate is 1.5 times the percent of people in average Congressional districts. That is why she fought successfully to prevent Amazon from creating 25,000-40,000 good-paying jobs in her district. It would have changed her district’s electoral base to more educated voters who get their news from news outlets and who do not need a politician who holds her job by promising to deliver government charity to the poor. Her constituents are less educated. They speak languages other than English at home at more than twice the rate of other districts. Their percentage of veterans is a fraction of that of other districts. It is perfectly fine and respectable for people to have less formal education or to speak languages other than English at home. Nothing wrong with that. All four of my two paternal grandparents and two maternal grandparents spoke Yiddish at home, and none finished high school. Nor is a college education necessarily more praiseworthy than vocational skills and careers. Indeed, arguably, today’s colleges need to be replaced by vocational schools to teach young people how to build a house, not just pop up a tent ordered from Amazon. Vocational skills and careers are honorable and probably contribute more to our lives than do many with useless college degrees. The point here is that a Congressional representative representing a minor district so below the mainstream should not be adulated as the next great generational leader of America. For that, parties turn to governors and senators, speakers of the House, or committee chairs. Not a loud-mouth squirt who has absolutely no grasp of fundamental economics and world affairs, and who consorts primarily with intensive anti-Semites and repulsive people like Tlaib, Omar, the recently defeated Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush, all driven by wanton hate and jealousy of white people who never did an offensive thing to any of them. Further commentary on Kamala Harris can wait for another day. So can her remarkably foolish socialist agenda of government intervention in the free market. The most compelling image of this week’s DNC was Ocasio, famous for being famous, driving the clown car. Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest informative and inspiring classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. The post The Ocasio Convention appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

So-called “higher” education is supposed to be all about truth, beauty, and progress, achieved through learning and discovery. “Truths” are factually accurate assertions. I think the biggest problem of America’s colleges and universities today is not its high cost and inefficiency, nor even its lack of intellectual diversity (although that is a big issue), nor its inability to maintain order and civility on campus, nor even the deplorably modest quantity of knowledge often conveyed to students. Rather it is the fact that there has been a noticeable decline in honesty and integrity — universities cannot be trusted as much as in times past. I think I would feel safer buying a used car from my plumber or lawnmower than the typical university president. (READ MORE: Little House on the Prairie Changed My Life) Examples of inappropriate campus behavior abound. In permitting the yelling of hateful invectives at fellow students (i.e., Jewish ones) and the restraining of student movements on campuses accompanying illegal encampments, some campuses have shown disdain for such long-accepted core beliefs as the Golden Rule or the Rule of Law. But the problem goes far beyond a modest number of radicalized students on a few dozen campuses. Students are Lying to Get Into Schools that Lie Even before college, many students, often aided and abetted by unscrupulous adults, attempt to get into the perceived best colleges based on dishonest representations of their potential and previous accomplishments. The 2019 Varsity Blues admission scandal is the most publicized example of cheating on exams or other measures of performance used to help determine admissions, but not the only one. Just recently online leaks of tests used for the prestigious American Mathematics Competitions, whose results can alter admission decisions at elite schools, have shown that cheating is not rare and isolated. Cheating by students in the preparation of assigned classroom papers appears widespread, enormously aided by recent technological advances like artificial intelligence. Sadly, however, the students are often emulating their professors or college administrators. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a prominent neuroscientist, served as president of first Rockefeller University and then Stanford, but stepped down last year after a Stanford trustee committee report that said on several of his coauthored academic papers “there was apparent manipulation of research data by others.” And, of course, there has been a rash of apparently true allegations of plagiarism involving other prominent university leaders, such as former Harvard president Claudine Gay. The problem of fabricated research results has grown so large that at least one prominent and respected academic publisher, Wiley, stopped publishing nearly 20 academic journals because of widespread continual evidence of fabricated results that had led it to retract over 11,000 papers over a two-year period — an average of over 15 retractions per day. Are the scientific findings we are reading about in academic journals true or false? Who knows? Grade Inflation Is Yet Another Way Higher Ed Lies One of the most pernicious forms of academic misrepresentation is a consequence of grade inflation, which has been a continuing and growing phenomenon over the past half-century. At Ivy League schools, a majority of students today have at least an A- grade point average (GPA). Historically that meant very top-quality students (the average grade in the Ivy League in the 1950s was between a B- and C+). (READ MORE: The National Security Risk at our Door) Colleges are claiming, in effect, that “most of our students are superior quality,” even though independent surveys show that the collegiate level of literacy in some subjects where college graduates should have good basic knowledge is pretty low. For example, one poll commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni showed that a sizable majority of American college students did not know that James Madison was the father of the American Constitution. Is it any wonder that some major employers are now no longer considering college degrees to be the appropriate minimal qualification for employment? Another integrity issue was initiated largely by the U.S. Department of Education in 2011 when it suddenly discovered a perceived epidemic of sexual molestation on campuses requiring remedies far outside accepted and revered methods of adjudicating disputes. Colleges docilely and even enthusiastically accepted disciplinary rules dictated from Washington that forced them to use a weak “preponderance of evidence” standard to determine guilt in cases involving inappropriate sexual behavior, standards unaccepted in American courts (in the colleges, you can be found guilty even if we are only 51 percent certain of it, instead of the near 100 percent “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard traditionally used in criminal cases in courts of law). Truth (100 percent certainty about evidence) was no longer a requirement for a finding of guilt. No wonder that courts are increasingly finding against colleges in lawsuits arising out of this federal dictate. Lying Universities Have Lost Respect and Integrity These examples of academic malfeasance are far from exhaustive. I could list a number of schools that have been sued for misuse of endowment funds, and not honoring the intent of donors. For decades, at athletic superpower schools, a ridiculous charade has been that that top football and basketball players were first and foremost “students.” That practice, however, is changing as legal actions are forcing colleges to compensate top athletes, recognizing that they are in reality university employees providing entertainment services having virtually nothing to do with higher forms of learning. (READ MORE: Oklahoma Public Schools to Include the Bible in Curriculum) Americans are increasingly rejecting religion and its strictures on inappropriate behavior, as evidenced by plummeting church attendance over time. Gallup reports only 30 percent of adults attend church weekly or nearly every week, down from 42 percent at the beginning of this century. Americans are losing adherence to time-honored standards of morality and integrity: The Ten Commandments — what are those? In the colonial era, colleges were considered largely a means of promoting virtue, and training for Christian ministry was the single most important future occupation of college-attending men. The collegiate decline in the importance of virtue is truly extraordinary. One potential long-run consequence of that is that the respect and integrity of our institutions of higher education has become seriously weakened. Richard Vedder is a Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University and Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, which is publishing his next book Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education in early 2025. The post Lies Abound In Higher Education. Now They’ve Lost Our Respect. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Imagine that you are a lover of folk music and your friend prefers the music of the big bands. Imagine that each of you is trying to persuade the other of the high worth of what he loves the best. But let there be this stipulation: You must carry on the conversation at the top of your lungs, and there must be no pause between when you speak and when he speaks. Do you not see right away that no true conversation can be conducted? Your mood will follow upon your lungs. You will get red in the face. The very noise of it — the noise you make, and the noise he makes at you — will stop up the ears of your mind. It will hardly matter what words you use at first, because they too will be charged with anger, and you will be lucky if you can get out of this shouting match with your friendship not bruised and beaten. You will take things personally. You must. (READ MORE by Anthony Esolen: Philistines à la Mode) Now imagine the same conversation, with this stipulation instead  Each of you must wait a full 15 seconds before answering what the other has said. Fifteen seconds is not a long time, but in a conversation it will invite leisureliness, and a habit of considering, letting things sink in, not saying the first thing that flies into your head. You may even have an opportunity to see your friend’s face and to hear his tone of voice ringing in your mind. Perhaps neither one of you has anything intelligent or well-informed to say. In that case, you may end up with a healthy experience of your own deficiency, which in itself can be a spur to learning. But if you do have something intelligent to say, you are far more likely to say it. You may even say something that never occurred to you before. Whatever happens, though, you and your friend are likelier to harbor warm feelings toward one another. You may even feel a kind of gratitude for a friend whose interests and knowledge are not the same as yours. Politics In the Classroom Is Just Noise Politics, in the classroom, brings noise. It takes skill and thought, and patience and taste, to sing a beautiful song as it ought to be sung. It takes neither skill nor thought nor patience nor taste to shout political slogans. Rather, such things are ham-fisted, they shut down thought, they set people on edge, and they are usually in abominable taste. They are rabble-rousers of a particularly pernicious sort: they aim to create the very rabble they aim to rouse. An excellent teacher can bring a hushed and thoughtful silence to a class as he recites Tennyson’s Ulysses, and the imagination dreams of an Ithaca far away, and of a man who cannot remain there, not even in his old age, but must venture forth again upon the wide waters of the sea. Or I should say that such a teacher could once do that, but now all the habits of noise are against him, and it is not clear how many of his students have been drummed deaf with it so that their souls can no longer hear. But a poor teacher cannot do this, and sometimes it is because he does not understand what makes such a poem great. When you have no case, the lawyers say, you should shout, and the jury may take as an argument what is only noise. (READ MORE: Teaching the Constitution in a World Without Books) When you cannot teach Ulysses, you shout — about imperialism or colonialism or something else that neither you nor your students really understand, but which will give you and them the impression that something important has gone on. Well, something important has gone on: a little more of their human spirit has been amputated, cauterized, and sealed with tar. The essence of the good teacher, I have long believed, is that he can impart to others the wonder he feels in the presence of something beautiful or fascinating. “Come here and look at this!” he says, like a boy who has cracked open a piece of coal and found inside the imprint of a fern that lived and died 50,000 years ago, with its delicate veins still showing, and an odd gloss of muted color over the surface of the stone. I remember when Halley’s Comet appeared in 1985, and I set my telescope out in the parking lot of the apartments where I lived, and I tracked that snowball in the sky, for no other purpose than to see what it was like; and when I wasn’t looking at the comet, I was looking at the moon or one of the planets, including Saturn with its thin and mysterious rings. These things, in the silence of the evening, tease the mind into questions. Why should the rock and the ice about Saturn take the form of rings, rather than a sort of shell or shield surrounding the planet in all directions? Why should the comet appear only once every 76 years, when it slingshots as close to the sun as it does?  Such questions tease the mind into a realm beyond questions — the realm of wonder. None of that will happen if everyone is shouting. Schools Should Be a Refuge From Politics and Shouting Therefore schools should be havens set apart from noise. You should no more devise an English literature curriculum with politics in mind, than you should shout political slogans at people trying to pray in church, or than you should blare the news from a political convention at people trying to sing a Bach cantata, or even just at somebody in a hammock, trying to read a good book. In fact, all other things being equal, the less likely it is that a thing can be conscripted into a political squadron, the better you are in teaching it, and the healthier will your students be in learning to cherish it. I do not mean, of course, that you should not teach history, which will involve politics. By all means, teach students about William Pitt the Younger and his great accomplishments, and when you do so, treat him as he deserves, because he was a human being and not a mere counter in some march of history towards its culmination in ourselves. As I mention Pitt, I am aware that I have given the good teacher an invitation and set the poor teacher a challenge and an implicit warning. (READ MORE: The National Security Risk at our Door) To teach about that man and his times, with accuracy, fairness, and sensitivity to the differences between his age and ours, is to set current political noise aside. You may as well be discussing the mating habits of the white-tailed deer, or what makes Milton’s blank verse so mighty, or anything else that will get people not to shout about current madness, but to leave all that aside and begin to feel and to think as human beings. So, in our schools, take down all the political signs, take down everything with a slogan on it, and put up works of timeless art instead. Let the children not turn themselves into billboards, but let them dress as boys and girls, young men and young women, characterized by the habit of listening, and letting other people listen, and not by shouting, mugging, posing, and in general making themselves obnoxious and encouraging others to become obnoxious in response. Turn off the noise, and let human sounds and silence emerge again. The post Noise in the Classroom appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Poke cakes are easily prepared and customizable dessert options, and this variation uses pudding and Jell-O for a summery, strawberry lemonade filling.

by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade: Last year, the staff of a federally-insured bank in Kansas, Heartland Tri-State Bank, wired out more than one-third of the amount the bank held in deposits to a crypto scam. Why did they do that? Because the CEO of the bank, Shan Hanes, told them […]

from The Highwire with Del Bigtree:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

You’ll probably never meet a more well-traveled dog than Felix the Samoyed. This adorable pooch has quite the following on social media for several reasons. First of all, this dog is unbelievably fluffy. Second, he’s always exploring new and picturesque destinations. And third, he has a special talent for wiggling his ears in the most endearing way! In a very cute travel video, Felix’s owner captured some footage of the Samoyed doing his ear flip in different locations. They paired these sweet clips with the audio from the popular “Paging Dr. Beat” trend, in which content creators usually show off different outfits. However, this post was focused on the pooch visiting gorgeous places in France, Spain, Norway, and more! @wanderlust_samoyed Where should Felix travel next? #emergencytrend #samoyed #dog #earwiggles #travel ♬ original sound – kasane teto – kasane teto “This trend but with my dog wiggling his ears around the world,” the dog’s owner wrote over the video. Commenters absolutely loved the way that Felix participated in the viral trend. “This is the best use of this song,” wrote one user. Another added, “I think this is the best video on the internet.” There are plenty more adorable videos where that came from! It seems that Felix the Samoyed’s owner really likes using the “Paging Dr. Beat” trend, because there are several similar versions of this video on the dog’s social media account. One of these is a precious compilation of “selfies” taken against various stunning backdrops. Although Felix clearly didn’t take these photos himself, his owner managed to frame the shots so that they looked like the pooch was holding the camera. @wanderlust_samoyed Which selfie is your favorite? #emergencytrend #selfie #dog #samoyed ♬ 911 Emergency – Carl In another clip using the same audio, the dog was shown relaxing in different flotation devices. Once again, Felix the Samoyed seemed to be visiting some pretty impressive locations! His floaties were pretty cute, too. @wanderlust_samoyed Which floatie should Felix get next? #emergency #emergencytrend #samoyed #dog #floatie ♬ 911 Emergency – Carl It’s so sweet that this pooch gets to travel around with his human! We hope to see many more of these types of videos from Felix the Samoyed. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Fluffy Pup Flippy Flops His Ears At Beautiful Destinations Around The World appeared first on InspireMore.

Our partner Rob Brezsny, who has a new book out, Astrology Is Real: Revelations from My Life as an Oracle, provides his weekly wisdom to enlighten our thinking and motivate our mood. Rob’s Free Will Astrology, is a syndicated weekly column appearing in over a hundred publications. He is also the author of Pronoia Is the Antidote […] The post Your Weekly Horoscope – ‘Free Will Astrology’ From Rob Brezsny appeared first on Good News Network.