"The Hillsdale charter schools are neither owned nor managed by Hillsdale. Instead, the schools enter agreements to use the Hillsdale curriculum..."

"... and the college provides training for faculty and staff, as well as other assistance — all free of charge. By offering these services, Hillsdale seems to be trying to thread a needle — creating a vast K-12 network that embraces its pedagogy and conservative philosophy, in many cases taught by its graduates, while tapping into government money to run the schools.... While many educators applaud the phonics and rigor, they question the infusion of conservative politics into the curriculum, particularly in history. Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum... appears to be partly an outgrowth of President Donald J. Trump’s 1776 Commission.... Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton who was one of the chief critics of The Times’s 1619 Project, also criticized the 1776 Curriculum, calling it overly positive. 'It talks about the enormity of slavery, but in almost every case, everything that’s bad about America will be undone by what is good,' Dr. Wilentz said. 'Almost, literally, that American ideals will overcome whatever evils may be there.' Hillsdale’s history curriculum also appears to take on the modern liberal state. A school curriculum guide posted in one school’s charter lists the book 'New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.'...."

From "A College Fights ‘Leftist Academics’ by Expanding Into Charter Schools/Hillsdale College is building a national charter school network. Tennessee invited the college to start 50 of them, using public funds" (NYT).

Why shouldn't parents have the choice to place their children in either a 1619 or a 1776 school? Is one more truly history than the other? I doubt it. It does seem unfair to the children to feed them propaganda — either way — but if the only choices are propaganda, why not let the parents decide which form of inculcation they want? Vote with your children.

"Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich... took an adolescent girl’s diary and raped it into The Diary of Anne Frank, a sitcom...."

"The Frank family, you will recall, have been hiding from the Nazis and squabbling about 'whose turn it is to feed the cat.' At the end, the Nazis show up to take them all to their (offstage) deaths. The Hacketts’ play ends with Anne’s line: 'I believe people are still good at heart.' I’d always considered this merely loathsome twaddle.... For whether or not the line was scribbled by Anne Frank, the Hacketts adopted it as the punch line for their play, that is, that by which they wished their vision to be remembered. But the line brings to mind that of Joseph Goebbels. Addressing the Gestapo, he said, 'History will note that we did these things while still preserving our essential humanity.' The Hacketts’ line, similarly, can be understood as 'These monsters are basically good at heart, despite what they have done to the Jews.'"

Writes David Mamet, in "Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch."

I don't think Mamet means to question whether those words appear in the diary (as it was published), just the placement of those words at the conclusion of the play. Here's the full text of the diary, and here's the context of the line that the Hacketts chose to put at the end of their play: 

"The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates. It will make you a slave."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, quoted in "A Kennedy’s Crusade Against Covid Vaccines Anguishes Family and Friends/Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has risen to become a major figure in the vaccine resistance movement. Those close to him say it’s 'heartbreaking'" (NYT). 

Five of his eight surviving siblings — two of his brothers have died — have publicly rebuked him over the past two years for his campaign against vaccines....

"A Dutch publisher has dropped a controversial new book that claims a Jewish notary may have betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis."

"Published last month, Rosemary Sullivan’s The Betrayal Of Anne Frank identifies Arnold van den Bergh as the possible informant. He is said to have handed over addresses of Jews hiding in Amsterdam to the Nazis to save his own skin.... Previous research suggested the hideout was possibly found by chance during a raid over ration fraud."

The Jewish Chronicle reports.

The NYT runs the style piece "Face Tattoos Go Mainstream" the day after the obituary for the heavily face-tattooed Zombie Boy.

August 4th: "Face Tattoos Go Mainstream" (noting various characters with an "amazing pop star life" who have things tattooed on their face, such as "Stay Away" on the forehead or a marijuana leaf on the temple or a portrait of Anne Frank on the cheek-to-neck region (and then tattooing a marijuana leaf on Anne Frank's cheek*)):

[In the past] one saw a face tat and thought: Aryan Brotherhood or gang member or sideshow performer. Famous face tattoo wearers of the recent past, like Mike Tyson, Charles Manson and the drug-addled skateboarder Jay Adams, conformed to the stereotype of the rough character....

“A lot of kids are doing it to make themselves bigger on social media,” said Travis Hardy, 30, a creative director in Los Angeles who works with musicians. “It’s kind of corny.” Last month, he a got a lightning bolt tattooed under his left eye. “I don’t need that,” Mr. Hardy said, referring to others’ quest for attention. “This isn’t for followers or comments.... There’s no turning back. There’s no normal job or whatever... I’m going to continue to creative direct or write treatments for music videos or stage design. I’m not going to turn around. This served as a stamp: I believe in myself.”

August 3rd: "Rick Genest, Tattooed Model Known as Zombie Boy, Dies at 32":

When he was a teenager he was told by doctors that he had a brain tumor and that he would need surgery that would leave him disfigured for life. [But instead he received a laser treatment that was not disfiguring.]...

He then began getting tattoos. His first was of a skull and crossbones on his left shoulder. Then he had his face tattooed to resemble a skull. He decided to shave off his mohawk and had his head tattooed to resemble a brain....

Lady Gaga approached him in 2011 to participate in the “Born This Way” video,** in which she wore makeup that resembled his tattoos....

Mr. Genest wrote in The Mirror that he was proud of achieving his boyhood dream of becoming “a freak.” “And yes,” he wrote, “Please do stare, I like it.”

_____________________

* For real.

** Here's that video, and, obviously, he was not born that way. It was a later, intentional imposition on his physical being... as was the death, if Lady Gaga's initial tweet is to be believed.




(My screenshots from "Born This Way." To see the Zombie Boy part of the very long "Born This Way" video, begin at 4:11.)

ADDED: Here's the ad Genest did for a tattoo-covering product:

Liberal websites absorb/process the Al Franken news, part 2: The New Yorker.

The New Yorker, Disappointment....



(Click to enlarge.)

The New Yorker front page has an especially minimal look right now, and the headline on Franken — "Al Franken, Disappointment/The Democratic senator’s straight shooting contained other, darker secrets" — is accompanied by a harshly lit black and white photo (showing a tragic man so different from the smiling, breast-groping Franken we saw everywhere else). The key word is "disappointment." We had such hopes for you, Al, the New Yorker says.

The Roy Moore story is allowed to drop to the second row, paired with a story about a comedian who isn't Al Franken. And you have to go down to the third row — not pictured — to get the first mention of Trump, and that's in a story about the new café in the Tiffany store on 5th Avenue that's hard to access because it's next to Trump Tower.

Let's read "Al Franken, Disappointment." It's by Eric Lach, who's written about Al Franken in The New Yorker before, in "Can Al Franken Be a Funny Senator?" — a question that must have been intriguing last June, when it was published. That piece also contains obsolete material like:

Franken notes... how, during the Presidential campaign, Trump’s words—unfunny, offensive, untrue—didn’t hurt him with voters the way they would have hurt most politicians. It’s not a new observation, but the book begs the reader to consider that, while Trump was elected President even after the release of a recording in which he talked about grabbing women “by the pussy,” Franken’s own Senate campaign worried about whether an old “Saturday Night Live” joke about Anne Frank—“I think a bad Hanukkah gift for Anne Frank would have been a drum set”—might be a real issue with voters.

The new article, which went up yesterday, is quite short. From the title, we expect it to express love for Al Franken, because you need a foundation of love before you can experience disappointment. "Disappointment" is the feeling a parent cites when giving a child a talking-to. Eric Lach begins with a discussion of Franken's penchant for "eviscerating"* witnesses at Senate hearing, then wonders how Franken would attack an apology as lame as the one Franken put out yesterday.

Franken, the comedian, had joked about his human flaws...

... “I only did cocaine so I could stay up late enough to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine,” Franken joked in his book—but if we acknowledge those flaws, and accept them, can’t we then go about the business of being good to one another? And yet for Franken, like Louis C.K. before him, it turns out that the public confessional routine was incomplete....

And that smile — which had seemed so "generous, winning, and wry" — became so "different" when he was mocking his easy access to the sleeping Leeann Tweeden.**

Lach moves on to Franken's second apology, the apology that "seemed to be trying to make amends*** for the first." It was too late to avert the "damage," Lach informs us, even as he nudges us to appreciate the second-apology junk about the need for a "national conversation":

“There’s more I want to say, but the first and most important thing—and if it’s the only thing you care to hear, that’s fine—is: I’m sorry.” In the “national conversation” about gender and power, the art of the male apology is still being perfected.

Did Franken say "national conversation" or are those scare quotes? I'd have to leave the New Yorker website to find out. That's pretty annoying. (And I've long been annoyed by the word "conversation" in political speech.)
_______________________

* "Eviscerating" is Franken's word, and in its nonfigurative original meaning, it is a violent intrusion on the body of another person — the tearing out of the internal organs. "I can’t help it,” Franken wrote. "I love getting these guys." Aggression, loved, enjoyed. I doubt if Franken was ever much good at physical fights with other men, but with the power of his elected office, he had the ability to "get these guys" and he exults in the pleasure. I mistrust everyone who seeks political power because I suspect they might have a psyche like that, but Franken delights in it — like a man smiling for the camera as he gropes for an incapacitated woman's breasts, something most men would only do furtively or not at all. The New Yorker author, in the first paragraph of the article, pats Franken on the back for his "show-business charisma and his passion for straight talk." (I wonder if Lach thought about how you could say the same thing about Trump's "grab them by the pussy" remark.)

** I was tempted to write "sleeping beauty," and it made me think of a New Yorker humor piece last week, by Blythe Roberson, "Disney Princes Reimagined as Feminist Allies." What about that prince that kisses Sleeping Beauty? She cannot consent. Here's how the humor was done just days before Franken's enjoyment of his access to a sleeping beauty:

Prince Phillip would never touch a woman without her consent. He knows that a woman in a magically induced coma cannot consent, even if she was flirting with him in the woods earlier, and even if they have been betrothed since birth. (He feels weird about the betrothed-since-birth thing, but doesn’t want to confront his conservative family about it, because it makes him uncomfortable.) Prince Phillip is horrified to hear that there are men in the kingdom who do not wait for a woman’s consent, and he issues a proclamation asking women to relive their traumas on social media, for the sake of “awareness.” He doesn’t talk to any of his bros about it because he knows that they are good dudes.

*** "Amends" sent me looking for Franken's old Stuart Smalley routines, and the one that popped up — "Um... I'd like to start the show... by making an amends" — had that other Al who got into sexual trouble, Al Gore. Speaking about disappointment, Stuart helps Gore talk about the disappointment of the 2000 election: [VIDEO DELETED]

Maybe girls will buy it if it's pink...

That's Penguin's new cover for the Roald Dahl classic "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," as seen at "The five worst book covers ever." The other 4 are so much less bad that it's scarcely worth pretending this is a real listicle (even if writing a listicle were something worth aspiring to).

The worst book covers I ever saw were on display at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, where I traveled in 1993. This was in the days before digital photography when I traveled without a camera in what I consider my "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry" period. On page 33 of what I call my "Amsterdam Notebooks" — at the bottom of the second image — I wrote and sketched about the various copies of the diary, translated into many different languages, with the Spanish version — "Cuentos" — featuring a smiling blonde girl and the French version reproducing an 1877 Renoir portrait of a rosy-skinned blonde woman in the most absurdly comfortable, cossetted circumstances imaginable:

Why we should leave Justin Bieber alone about what he wrote in the guestbook at the Anne Frank Museum.

He wrote: "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."

Writing about this causes him to be the main/first thing millions of young people think of when they hear her name. There are, I'm sure, many kids who are hearing about her for the first time in connection with their pop idol, and it's the only thing they know about her. These 2 characters shouldn't have this bond in the mental space of those who don't know much about history. Don't lock in that link!

ADDED: How outrageous is it for Bieber to imagine her as a fan? Have you been to the Anne Frank house? I have. Preserved behind plexiglas on her bedroom wall are pictures of movie stars. (I remember Greta Garbo and Ray Milland.) Based on seeing her room, it was entirely rational for Bieber to think, if we had been contemporaries, she'd love me. Teenage girls do love their pop idols, and remembering the living, not-yet-captured girl does honor her.

A "dominant face" and a "submissive face."

Composite images:



Actually, I'm offended by the whole notion. It reminds me of an exhibit of Nazi propoganda I saw at the Anne Frank House a while back -- pseudo-scientific explanations of why a particular face was "criminal."

But those pictures are from a BBC report of a study done at Liverpool University:

Researchers in the university's School of Biological Sciences showed their subjects, all of whom were in long-term relationships, a series of 66 pictures of two facial types - dominant and submissive.

They were then asked to rate the pictures for dominance, with a dominant person being defined as someone who "appeared as if they could get what they wanted".

Those with partners in the most fertile stage of their menstrual cycle were more able to spot classic masculine face types - ie men with strong jaw lines, thinner lips and smaller eyes.

But those with partners who were not at risk of getting pregnant at that particular time were not.

The study apparently assumed what constitutes a "dominant face" and a "submissive face," and only inquires into whether having a girlfriend who's ovulating heightens a man's perception of male threats. Count me skeptical... and disgusted.

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 33.

It's Day 33 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.)

I visit the Anne Frank House. The sign says no photography. I ask if it's okay to draw, and the woman selling the tickets doesn't quite understand what I'm saying. I realize that if they don't want people taking photographs, they would probably object even more to someone taking the time to stand there making a drawing. I say never mind. If someone tells me not to draw, I'll stop, I decide, but I'm not going to seek out a ban. There isn't a no drawing sign. I feel guilty and clandestine the whole time I'm there.

But, in fact, it's early in the morning, and it isn't crowded at all. I have a long time alone in Anne Frank's bedroom. I make this drawing of the pictures on her wall. She's a kid interested in pop culture — movies — Greta Garbo. "Ninotchka" is a new movie that she's excited about.



(Enlarge.)

I feel I'm doing something wrong, drawing these things, absorbed in one girl's interest in the pop culture of long ago— ephemera, preserved under plexiglas.

I find myself noticing everything that is incongruent with the suffering of the Holocaust: the ornate toilet, the Shelley Winters Oscar, the misconceived book covers. I collect a variety of things on one page:



(Enlarge.)