Students at St. John Catholic High School in Perth have organized a planned walkout for Tuesday following reports of a party held for a now-convicted former teacher at the school.
The former teacher, Jeff Peters, pleaded guilty on April 29 to sexual assault of one student and sexual exploitation of a second student. Peters, who was charged in 2019 and was still a teacher at the time of the offences, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
Reports have been circulating on social media of a party hosted by two teachers at St. John’s prior to Peters pleading guilty. The alleged party was billed as a “going away party,” according to multiple people who have spoken to The Recorder and Times.
The alleged party, held at a cottage in April, is alleged to have had around eight to 10 people in attendance, said one source. None of the sources who spoke to The Recorder and Times claimed to have first-hand knowledge of the alleged party.
Because of the reported teacher-hosted party, students attending the Perth school began circulating posts online about a walkout – or “logout” due to the nature of classes being virtual – in protest of alleged teacher involvement. (more...)
The conditions now being experienced by the people of Detroit, as described vividly in this presentation, herald the future for the rest of the American people — unless Glass-Steagall is immediately restored and the true enemies of the United States recognized, and defeated.
Children’s Health Defense (Canada), Educators for Human Rights, Teachers and Children File Against Ontario Government, School Boards & Public Health Officers.
The spark of genius in the pre-school child, if it has not been destroyed already, is often typified by the Socratic manner in which the child asks "Why?" Sadly, in the United States in our times, that spark of genius is usually soon quenched by the old dishwater of what Riesman termed "other-directedness," by that peculiar turn of the sadistic screw sometimes named euphemistically empiricism and pragmatism. A child's spark of genius, the wont to find out how and why past or current opinions and events came into existence, is replaced by brutish faith in the fruits of mere inductive generalization from individual and collective experience, a form of moral self-degradation often termed "practical common sense," or with credit given appropriately to bestiality, "horse sense."
All of the truly great philosophers and teachers of the known history of European civilization, beginning with the best of the Ionian Greeks, and associated famously with Plato's Academy at Athens, or Nicolaus of Cusa and Gottfried Leibniz, have evoked true genius from within young people by recapturing that innate spark of potential, using what is most fairly described as Socratic method. Formalism, by contrast, kills the soul, as this was recognized by the most famous of the modern formalists, Venice's Pietro Pomponazzi, who searched for his own soul, and, poor schlemiel that he had become, reported that he had none.
Thus, since it is that innate spark of potential for genius in every human child which sets all mankind absolutely apart from and above the beasts, we are able to recognize, as Philo of Alexandria shows this the necessary reading of Moses' first chapter of Genesis, that that quality of genius is the human soul, is the aspect of the individual person which is, in the Latin of Nicolaus of Cusa, both imago Dei (the image of God) and capax Dei (the potential to participate in God) . Thus, the formalism which caused the loss of Pomponazzi's soul is intrinsically the adversary of the Good, is evil.
Fortunately, in most cases it is possible to requicken the spark of genius innate to the new child. All the great teachers did this. Every good teacher attempts to do that in some degree, in his or her approximation of the Socratic method employed by Plato, Eudoxus, Theaetetus, Archimedes, Cusa, and Leibniz. One need but reawaken the genius of the child, by citing the password to genius, "Why?"
Begin by choosing an important single event from history. Choose any such event in which there is evidence that the event was motivated by aid of some widely accepted, but fraudulent pretext. Seek to discover what motivated that fraud, and seek to uncover also the reasons that fraud was tolerated by its dupes. Keep asking "Why"? Peel the onion, layer by layer, until the history embedded in that single act is brought to the surface. The result of that sort of Socratic exercise is a referent for the proper definition of the word "knowledge."
Thalidomide - known as Contergan in Germany - is still being used as a drug. This, even after the medication caused thousands of birth defects six decades ago.
The German pharmaceutical company Grünenthal marketed thalidomide world-wide starting in 1957. Pregnant women used the sleeping pill, which had been deemed so harmless it was available over the counter in Germany. Yet the drug proved damaging to embryos and caused serious birth defects. Estimates are that the drug caused thousands of deformities and an unknown number of stillbirths, until it was taken off the market at the end of 1961 when the links became clear.
Filmmaker John Zaritsky has been following thalidomide victims for more than 25 years. He speaks to parents, who tell of the birth of their children and their search for a cause for what had happened. The thalidomide babies have become adults in the meantime. Their stories tell of a double blow - dealing both with their birth defects and how society copes with them. And the nightmare is far from over. Thalidomide, the effective ingredient, is used today to treat leprosy, cancer and AIDS. Zaritsky shows that above all in Brazil, a lack of information about the drug continues to result in birth defects.
The end of World War II was much more complicated for Poles than for the majority of Western Europe which could happily celebrate the defeat of the Germans. The eastern territories of Poland had been taken over by the Soviets and millions of Poles had to prepare for another occupation. The film "The Day After" talks about the distinct Polish perspective on the end of World War II.
It comprises witness interviews recorded as part of the Pilecki Institute's "Witnesses to the Age" project and archival materials from the Polish National Audiovisual Institute – the co-producer of the film.
During the last dozen years, our philosophical association has advanced the thesis that many of the disasters of modern history have been rooted in the heritage of the former Venetian Republic. This includes the central role of the Venetians in cutting short the Golden Renaissance of Italy, in precipitating the Protestant reformation and the wars of religion, and in creating the pseudo-scientific, irrationalist currents of thought that are called the Enlightenment. I would like to return to some of these themes today in order to explore them in greater detail.
Our interest in exposing the Venetian war against the Italian renaissance of the Quattrocento is coherent with our commitment to the Renaissance as an ideal, and with our efforts to launch a new Renaissance today. As has just been stressed, the benchmark for civilization, culture, religion and morality in the last half millennium is constituted by the work of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa, the founder of modern science, and of his associate Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II. Through their cooperation with the best representatives of Medici Florence in the time of the Council of Florence of 1439, Nicolaus and Aeneas Silvius saved western civilization from the Dark Age that had begun with the defeat of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen at the hands of the Black Guelph oligarchs. During that Dark Age, the Roman Catholic Church had been substantially destroyed by the Avignon captivity and the Great Schism, both against the backdrop of such events as the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and the advance of the Ottoman Empire. Without Nicolaus and Aeneas Silvius, there would have been no Europe and no church by 1500; Venice opposed both through the Morosini agent Gregory von Heimburg [Gilbert, 191]. Paolo Morosini dedicated to Heimburg one of the landmark propaganda pieces on the Venetian oligarchical system to be published during the fifteenth century, “Concerning the affairs and structure of the Venetian Republic, dedicated to Gregory of Heimburg, the most eminent doctor of the Germans.” Gregory was the thug and agent provocateur who attempted to sabotage the work of Pius II, Cusanus, and Bessarion, and who is thus a prominent and typical representative of the anti-papal, anti- imperial current among the electors and other princes (Fuersten) of the Holy Roman Empire. This was the stratum of oligarchs played by the Venetians during the conciliar movement, mobilized by Venice against Pius II’s proposed crusade, and which would form the basis of Luther’s support during the “Reformation.”
The essence of Venice is oligarchism, usury, slavery, and the cult of Aristotle. The traditional rate of interest was above 20% – a Volcker prime rate. The Venetians were the first in western Europe to read Aristotle directly in the Greek text – first at the School of the Rialto, where leading patricians lectured on Aristotle, and later, after about 1400, at the University of Padova, where the Venetian nobles studied. We must remember that Venice was a branch of the Byzantine Empire which became powerful enough to capture Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, shortly after 1200. Venice, like Byzantium, saw religion as a tool of state power, with new cults to be concocted as the need arose. (more...)
