A Canadian teacher writes about how the school system’s pandemic reaction has hurt children psychologically

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s incredibly sad, tremendously frustrating, and infuriating because it didn’t have to be and it was foreseeable. If you close schools for this long and require remote learning, as well as drilling into children the idea that disease is all around them and everyone can be dangerous to them, it can be easily predicted that there will be grave psychological repercussions.

And so:

Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves…

When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.

In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable. My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety. And now they have the option to do virtual schooling from home…

My older students (grades 11 and 12) aren’t even allowed a lunch break, and are expected to come to school, go to class for five and a half hours and then go home. Children in 9th and 10th grades have to face the front of the classroom while they eat lunch during their second period class. My students used to be able to eat in the halls or the cafeteria; now that’s forbidden. Younger children are expected to follow the “mask off, voices off” rule, and are made to wear their masks outside, where they can only play with other kids in their class. Of course, outside of school, kids are going to restaurants with their families and to each other’s houses, making the rules at school feel punitive and nonsensical.

That’s part of the anger, isn’t it? That so many of the rules – and this isn’t limited to Canada or to schools – are nonsensical on their face, and are inconsistent as well.

I think this is a key point – and not just for students and young people [my emphasis]:

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

Please read the whole thing.

RIP Marvin Lee Aday (aka Meat Loaf)

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Here’s another death of a celebrity in the arts, the actor and singer who adopted the memorable moniker Meat Loaf. He was 74 and no cause of death was given, and although COVID is rumored, I don’t know whether or not that was the case.

Meat Loaf was the interpreter par excellence of the songs of Jim Steinman, who died last spring. Meat Loaf was known for his role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and one of his most famous and dramatic songs was Steinman’s small opera of teenage desire and adult disillusionment, known as “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.” The latter is one of those songs that reactors on YouTube love to feature, and it still amuses and rather shocks them to this day. Meat Loaf went all out; I don’t think he was ever afraid of looking ridiculous.

I never paid much attention to his music at the time, although I remember liking “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” But he was enormously popular and had a huge following, mainly with the cohort that grew up in the 70s and 80s, the period of his greatest popularity. He didn’t look like the quintessential rock star; most of his life he was overweight, although from photos it appears to me that he slimmed down somewhat when he was middle-aged and beyond. His nickname is reported as having been bestowed on him by his father (the “Meat” part) and a football coach (the “Loaf” part).

Here’s “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” The guy could certainly sing:

Here’s the mini rock opera known as “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.” It’s an experience:

Has Biden met your expectations?

The New Neo Posted on by

He’s certainly met mine. I expected a mendacious, cognitively challenged, nasty leftist tool. I expected every single thing he did to be bad for the country. And he’s fulfilled all of that early promise.

I expected him to be extremely divisive, but in that he’s actually exceeded my expectations and engendered even more divisiveness than I thought he would.

In yesterday’s appearance, Biden said this:

“I didn’t overpromise,” Mr. Biden said at a rare news conference in the East Room of the White House. “But I have, probably, outperformed what anybody thought [would’ve] happened.”

Is he delusional? Perhaps somewhat. Or maybe he’s just the same old BS artist he always was, although worse for a host of reasons – including the fact that he’s in charge now (or at least is nominally in charge), which makes him more dangerous.

Trump was a braggart; it was one of his most salient characteristics. And he certainly exaggerated. But he actually had a lot to brag about. Biden most decidedly does not.

And although leftist operatives have said for some time that Biden’s done well, the rest of America begs to differ.

Why would anyone except a leftist have expected anything of him? He’s never shown any capacity to lead or problem-solve – au contraire – and it’s not as though he doesn’t have a lengthy record in public life to scrutinize. Hatred of Trump, desperate wishful thinking, and/or the naive assumption that as an 8-year vice president Biden must know something worthwhile about how to be a president led to some voters being deluded about who Biden has always been and what he would be accomplishing in the future.

[NOTE: Whether or not you think Biden actually won the presidency without resorting to fraud, there still were plenty of people who voted for him.]

The evolution of the idea that each election is illegitimate

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The idea that Joe Biden floated yesterday at his press conference – that the next election might be illegitimate if Congress doesn’t pass the Democrats’ radical “voting reform” bill – would have once been verboten. But in the last two-plus decades, such challenges have become almost commonplace, although Biden’s innovation is to say it nearly a year before an election takes place, and to tie it to an act of Congress that would federalize election laws and actively work to make people distrust elections’ results.

Prior to the election of 2000, an illegitimate president was more of a fringe idea, at least in my lifetime. Some people thought Kennedy might have cheated in Illinois but I don’t recall any significant number of people calling him illegitimate as a result. Bill Clinton didn’t win a majority of the popular vote in 1992 because there were three candidates. But again, although plenty of people disliked him, I don’t recall many cries that the manner of his election made him illegitimate as a president.

2000 was a turning point; Bush was indeed called illegitimate (or some similar word), but that election was highly unusual. It really was a horse race with a photo finish and no real winner in the statistical sense, with SCOTUS having to step in. And in addition, Bush failed to win the popular vote. In 2008, a significant minority of people (at its height it was about 25%, but dropping later on) claimed that Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen. But again, although I seem to recall many of them did claim as a result that he wasn’t really president, most just wanted him to show what they considered the proper proof of United States birth.

Then there was Trump. Now, that was a real watershed. Not only was it a popular claim among Democrats and NeverTrumpers that he was illegitimate, but there was a huge effort to get rid of him as president by using the force of government agencies such as the FBI, combined with the MSM, based on the idea of this illegitimacy. It was something we heard about on a daily basis for Trump’s entire presidency, and it was a huge burden that lingers to this day.

Then came COVID and the relaxation of voting laws in many states, allowing Democrats to fulfill a dream of theirs (HR1 was first passed by the Democratic-controlled House in January of 2019, indicating their intentions prior to COVID). On election night of 2020 there were enormous anomalies that made at least half the country suspicious, and that suspicion remains. I probably don’t have to describe it here.

And that brings us to the present, when in a press conference Biden launches a preemptive strike on the next election just in case he doesn’t win it. It’s one of many pernicious signs that the republic is sinking, or perhaps has already sunk.

Jordan Peterson resigns his full professorship

The New Neo Posted on by

And he certainly doesn’t go out with a whimper:

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more…

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE)… My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata…

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job…

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly…

Oh, you know what? Just click on the link and read the whole thing, because nearly every time I cut out a sentence it feels as though I’m cutting out something important.

Peterson is unafraid of the truth and of the consequences of telling the truth, traits that seem to be rather rare these days. In recent years he also has had the advantage of having built an enormous following by dint of his intensity, courage, hard work, and brilliance.

Biden makes a speech and gives a press conference

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I didn’t have the stomach to watch either. You can read about both from Ace, here and here, and also at Legal Insurrection.

There were quite a few extraordinary things Biden said, and I don’t mean that in a good way. But perhaps the most ironic was this (words in brackets mine):

Democrats are expecting to lose bigly in the 2022 elections, so of course, Biden preemptively is suggesting the 2022 elections may not be legitimate. That’s just how Biden framed it at his press conference today:

“Oh, yeah, I think [the 2022 election] could easily be illegitimate … The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in proportion to not being able to get these reforms [HR1] passed.”

…Asked if he still believes the next election’s results will be legit if voting rights bill isn’t passed, Biden says this: …”It all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case…that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election.”

So, whether or not the election is “illegitimate” depends on the success of the messaging?

The irony comes, of course, from the fact that the Democrats spent Trump’s entire presidency questioning the legitimacy of his presidency as well as manufacturing fake evidence such as the Steele dossier in order to supposedly prove it and remove him from office, and then had the cojones to call the right traitors and lying conspiracy theorists for questioning whether fraud had been committed in the 2020 election subsequent to widespread relaxation of voting security rules and reports of suspicious election night goings-on.

Now Biden – and I think we can safely assume it’s with the acquiescence of whatever group advises him these days – is preemptively alleging fraud if the Democrats’ pet legislation isn’t passed. This informs us once again – not that we need any reminders – of the intensity of the Democrats’ desire for the “reforms” in HR1. They think that bill or its equivalent would provide the keys not only to victory in 2022 despite the fact that the American people have turned on them, but they also believe it would enable them to continue in power indefinitely through a number of other “reforms” such as packing SCOTUS and creating several new states that are reliably Democrat.

An implication of Biden’s argument is that, since the voting measures that would be enacted in HR1 are not the way America has voted for its entire history (except for some blue states in very recent years and some new supposedly COVID-based measures in 2020), every previous election except the one that elected Joe Biden was illegitimate.

Biden said a bunch of other awful stuff, but some of it is described in those posts I linked from Ace. Here’s a discussion of some of Biden’s message on Ukraine, which seemed to give Putin the go-ahead for action there short of a full-scale invasion.

Virginia’s new AG has an idea for dealing with those Soros DAs

The New Neo Posted on by

This is worth considering:

In a statement given to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Victoria LaCivita, a spokesperson for [AG] Miyares, defended the move, saying, “During the campaign, it was made clear that now-Attorney General-elect Miyares and Attorney General Herring have very different visions for the office.”

“We are restructuring the office, as every incoming AG has done in the past,” Civita added.

As a candidate, Miyares had stated that “George Soros-backed Commonwealth’s attorneys are not doing their jobs,” and he promised to prosecute crimes that progressive attorneys had ignored…

As Attorney General-elect, Miyares also announced that he would be pursuing legislation under Governor Glen Youngkin (R) that “would essentially say, if the chief law enforcement officer in a jurisdiction – either the chief of police or the sheriff – makes a request because a commonwealth’s attorney is not doing their job, then I’m going to do their job for them.”

“I’m thinking specifically, some of the so-called ‘social justice’ commonwealth’s attorneys that have been elected particularly in Northern Virginia. We’re obviously aware of some pretty horrific cases,” he added.

So both Miyares – described as “the first statewide elected Latino in Virginia’s history” – and Youngkin are not messing around when it comes to their campaign promises. This seems to be a potentially viable way to deal with Soros DAs who decide to allow criminals to flourish. There are issues of jurisdiction, I suppose – can the state AG override the decisions of the locally elected DAs? My guess is that the answer is “yes,” as long as legislation empowers them to do so and the head of police in that jurisdiction makes such a request. It’s a creative solution.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Kudos to Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection for being the named plaintiff in a class action suit against the state of New York for its racially-based discriminatory COVID treatment guidelines. Read all about it here.

(2) RIP to blogger “Oregon Muse,” who had a regular gig at Ace’s writing the Morning Rant and the weekly chess column and book thread. I don’t know any personal details about Oregon Muse (such as, for example, his age), but I regularly read his Morning Rant and the news of his death is shocking and sad. Here’s the article at Ace’s. Oregon Muse apparently died of COVID. Condolences to his family and to the Ace of Spades community.

(3) RIP to actress Yvette Mimieux. She was 80 years old, and in her heyday a truly lovely actress with a delicate beauty. By sheer chance and some convoluted circumstances involving the weather, about 45 years ago (!) I spent a day with Mimieux and her then-husband Stanley Donen in a Malibu beach house owned by a friend of my brother-in-law. I doubt that either Donen or Mimieux could have been too happy about spending a rainy day in a beach house with four strangers (me, my then-husband, my brother-in-law, and his wife). Donen was rather taciturn, but Mimieux was as friendly and gracious as could be, making the best of the situation. That seems memorable to me.

(4) Face mask mandates and other COVID restrictions end in Britain. The timing is interesting.

(5) Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch issue a joint statement saying NPR’s Nina Totenberg is a liar, or at the very least mistaken. I had suspected as much when I first read the report that Gorsuch was a meanie to Sotomayor (you can read the details at the link), and I wondered whether NPR or Totenberg – who’s made a career out of reporting supposedly inside info on the Supreme Court – had checked with the justices themselves or whether they were relying on some third or fourth party. Seems like probably the latter.

Many rank-and-file Democrats are just fine with governmental COVID tyranny

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the evidence:

If you read the fine print there, you’ll notice that it isn’t just Republicans who oppose these things, but Independents have a profile very similar to Republicans on this issue.

If that very same poll had been taken prior to COVID, using a hypothetical virus with similar lethality, I wonder whether the answers from Democrats would have been at all similar to what they are now. It’s not a stretch to think that more Democrats than Republicans would have been in favor of the restrictive measures even in such a pre-COVID hypothetical poll. But my guess is that their numbers would have been much lower. Nearly two years of COVID restrictions and justifying propaganda have normed the idea of draconian responses to individual resistance. The public frog has become used to the boiling water of tyranny (and yes, I know that tale isn’t really true of frogs).