Nothing says let’s all get along like a gang of Muslime yutes (Yooouths) beating up a guy dressed as Santa on his way to be Santa for some local kids.

Half a dozen migrant youths attacked the 54-year-old victim whilst others watched and laughed.

 

The 54-year-old victim was due to perform at the Königsalm on Königsplatz in the city of Kassel on Dec. 6 when he was approached by a gang of youths who crossed the street and confronted him.

According to the victim, Rainer B., the gang comprised several teenagers of a migrant background around 15 years of age. He told police they insulted him, calling him a “son of a bitch” and a “fat man” and ordered him to remove his Santa Claus costume.

They said they were Muslim and that Germany was “their country,” the victim said, as reported by the Hessische Allgemeine newspaper.

When he refused, the gang turned violent and struck him, resulting in injuries to his neck and tearing his costume. In self-defense, the man hit one of his attackers in the face, causing them to flee towards Martinsplatz.

 

The Muslims are teaching the kids that Germany is their country. Is that the sort of thing that could rile up the Fatherland, or have the once proud German people been diversity whipped into submission?

One positive note. Santa did his gig. He showed up all tussled up and torn and talked to the kids. No pictures were allowed, which is a bit of a bummer. Given the cultural arc of Germany, it might have been useful to have that one on hand for the grandkids. Here I am with Santa after a group of adherents of the Religion of Peace roughed him up a bit.

Not that the caliphate would allow you to keep something like that.

Oh, and in keeping with my intermittent habit of messing with song lyrics.

 

I saw Muslims kicking Santa Claus.
On his way to Kessel Town last night
To scratch some angry itch
They knocked him down into the  ditch
Tore his suit did those Muslim Yutes
Then called him a son of a bitch.

 

I couldn’t help myself. Ans yes, it could be better.

 

The post Diversity: Muslim Teens Beat Up Santa – Call him Fat and Tear His Red Suit appeared first on Granite Grok.

For the first time in the state’s history, a lawsuit by disgruntled parents may have caused at least a temporary school closure. Windham Elementary School was voted to be temporarily closed on Thursday by their school board. The students will now attend Townsend Elementary School.

A lawsuit brought by parents led by Attorney Deborah Bucknam alleges the school is failing to provide basic educational services as required by the State Constitution. In an emailed message to VDC, Bucknam shared some more details about what transpired at the school board meeting.

“At the Board meeting, there were several references to our lawsuit as at least part of the reason for closing (I think it was the entire reason). So, for the first time in Vermont history, parents have held an entire school district to account,” she wrote.

She continued to suggest that it was largely the lawsuit that prompted this action.

“If my clients had not been there pushing the District, in my opinion, this school would still be open—and the teaching principal, Jenna Cramer, would likely still be employed. We shone the light on what was going on at Windham, and they were forced to make major changes,” she wrote.

The message includes that this development may help school choice advocates. School choice is when a community is allowed to send its students to other schools of each family’s choice, and their tuition money follows the students accordingly.

“The State will likely fight very hard to keep control, but I think this victory helps our school choice campaign,” she wrote. “If we get past the motion to dismiss–and I am hopeful that we will—we can engage in discovery, which will force them to provide information to parents about the operation of the school—and that can be a template for other parents in other districts—which will shine the light on the sorry state of Vermont’s schools.”

State trying to get the case dismissed

The state had argued to dismiss the lawsuit, prompting Bucknam to write an argument to the Windham Superior Court last week stating why it should not be dismissed. In it, she describes some of the shortcomings regarding Cramer’s job performance.

It states, “Ms. Cramer and Mr. [Marco] Lazin did not prepare curriculum or lesson plans for the children. By the middle of October, they told the parents that they had not started teaching the children from a curriculum because they had not received all their ‘supplies.’”

It continues, “Ms. Cramer was frequently late for school, and the children, instead of learning lessons, spent their days watching animal and PG-13 music videos, including one where a llama used the f—word, and, as indicated above, included showing a violent video [including a decapitation and a person being lit on fire] shown to first and second graders.”

Cramer was fired in November, leaving Lazin as the only teacher.

Also, in Bucknam’s written argument, she notes earlier this month, the school chose not to hire either of the two candidates that they had for teachers.

“At the December 5, 2023 meeting, the Windham School Board decided not to hire any of the candidates, leaving the school to continue with one inexperienced teacher and unlicensed substitutes,” it states.

In conclusion, her argument states, “Plaintiffs have sufficiently plead both a violation of the Education Clause and the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution, and have requested relief which this Court has the power and authority to grant. Thus the State’s motion to dismiss must be denied.”

In a phone call on Friday, she further emphasized that this case could provide a legal template for other communities in Vermont to force changes at their schools if they feel that their kids are also being denied basic education rights.

 

Michael Bielawski | Vermont Daily Chronicle

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How big is the federal government? Two measures are the number of civilian employees (nearly two million) and the number of agencies (now exceeding 440). These numbers barely hint at their massive meddling into business activities and the personal lives of Americans.

While government was relatively small and less intrusive during its first hundred years, the Constitution held defects. In part, they resulted from the unavoidable compromises of consensus. The founders knew this, and some had anticipated civil war decades before the first shots were fired. Many other problems emerged during the great expansion of the nineteenth century due to the industrial revolution, the growth of America’s land area, and several political factors, mostly unanticipated. As population grew from about five million in 1800 to more than seventy-six million in 1900, government gained accordingly.

It was during the early twentieth century that the government acquired many extraconstitutional powers to intervene in our lives. This was accompanied by a great expansion of its jurisdiction and cost: new agencies, more government workers, more taxes. To give you a hint of this growth, here is an excerpt from the Congressional testimony of Doctor Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute in 2005:

We come, then, to the nub of the matter. Search the Constitution as you will, you will find no authority for Congress to appropriate and spend federal funds on education, agriculture, disaster relief, retirement programs, housing, healthcare, day care, the arts, public broadcasting—the list is endless. That is what I meant at the outset when I said that most of what the federal government is doing today is unconstitutional because it is done without constitutional authority. Reducing that point to its essence, the Constitution says, in effect, that everything that is not authorized—to the government, by the people, through the Constitution—is forbidden. Progressives turned that on its head: Everything that is not forbidden is authorized.

Almost 19 years have elapsed since Doctor Pilon’s testimony. Today, the federal government is far larger and more intrusive, having enlisted the support of Big Tech, Big Pharma, academia, the legacy media, and others. But still, how did the government grow so large?

A Fateful Error

It actually began during America’s founding, according to Professor Randy Barnett of George Mason University. In his most recent book, Our Republican Constitution, he cites the principal-agent dilemma that arose after the 1787 constitution was ratified: The adoption effectively dissolved the Articles of Confederation and the Continental Congress. In turn, this deprived the states of an active forum to oversee the new government. Furthermore, there was no provision in the Constitution for an independent plenary tribunal to adjudicate disputes concerning federalism. No wonder then that several delegates refused to sign the final draft. In his last work, The Rise and Fall of Society, Frank Chodorov wrote this about the charter’s signers: “The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before its authors, now in position of authority, began to rewrite it by interpretation, to the end that its bonds would loosen . . . to extend the power of the central government.”

Some readers might respond that the states now had the Senate as their forum for overseeing legislation. Although members of the Senate were to be appointed by their respective state legislatures, and the Senate body held veto power over bills, the small states were outnumbered. Importantly, Senate bills were subject to defeat by the House of Representatives, in which a few densely populated commercial states reigned supreme.

Exploiting the Stealth Clauses

Federalist delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention openly stated their desire for a strong central government. In private communications with these colleagues, Alexander Hamilton expressed hope that the new government would eventually consolidate, with the states losing power and importance over time.

It should not be surprising then that the final draft Constitution held expressions that were capable of more than one interpretation. I shall refer to these as stealth clauses because they have been employed by federal courts to produce outcomes that were clearly unintended using customary meanings at the time of founding. Let us examine a few cases and consider their consequences.

How the Courts Boost Federal Power

First of all, courts do not base their decisions exclusively on the text of the Constitution with its amendments. No, instead they refer to the Constitution Annotated, a publication weighing many pounds. The Constitution Annotated is comprised of an amended Constitution annotated with analyses of all federal Court decisions since the federal judiciary opened for business. Constitutional lawyers depend on this publication to employ the rule of stare decisis, which serves to honor judicial precedents of like cases.

Murray Rothbard discussed the issue at length in his work Anatomy of the State. In the chapter “How the State Transcends Its Limits,” he quotes from The People and the Court by Professor Charles L. Black Jr.:

The prime and most necessary function of the [Supreme] Court has been that of validation, not that of invalidation. What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. This is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life. The court, through its history, has acted as the legitimation of the government.

It should be noted that the court is biased to favor Congress (the justices call it deference) in these cases. This is common knowledge and is openly conceded by judicial appointees and by justices in their official opinions. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the key defense for the Affordable Care Act, even though that law was opposed by twenty-six attorneys general during a court challenge.

The earliest event that my research uncovered was not a court case but a dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton was promoting his ambitious plan to improve the new nation’s financial condition; it would require Congress to charter a bank modeled after the Bank of England. Jefferson believed this was unconstitutional; the Constitution did not even mention banks.

But Hamilton convinced President George Washington that the Constitution was not meant to cover everything the nation might need in the future, and to meet this need, Article I, Section 8 ended by granting power to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” (emphasis mine) the enumerated federal powers granted by the Constitution. So, the “bank law” was passed by Congress and signed into law, creating the First Bank of the United States.

Of all stealth clauses, the commerce clause was almost the last to be exploited. Article I, Section 8 states that “Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce among the several states.”

In the case Wickard v. Filburn, a poor Ohio farmer was fined $117 for planting more wheat than his allotted 111 acres under a New Deal law. The government claimed his infraction “affected” market prices of wheat, even though he planted it just for family use. The false principal established after the Supreme Court upheld this case had a profound outcome. Almost all federal agencies could be disbanded if the case were overturned.

In a case under the New Deal’s National Recovery Act, a poor immigrant operated his dry-cleaning shop in New Jersey. He was fined one hundred dollars for charging five cents less than was allowed by the National Recovery Act to dry-clean a garment. He was jailed for a second infraction, while his family struggled to pay the fine.

In both of these cases, the government claimed that the violations affected interstate commerce, even though that was patently false. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court upheld both cases. Clearly, government inspectors chose to prosecute the innocent citizens to serve as examples and create fear in others.

The Constitution refers to general welfare in two places, the preamble and the taxing and spending clause. These references have been used as justification for a number of measures that were surely not envisioned by the framers. One example was adoption of the prohibition amendment. Another was the Social Security Act and countless other measures passed for the “general welfare.”

 

Formerly an IT worker, John Carroll is now retired and makes his home in Texas. He is currently developing plans for what he calls “A Well-Tempered Federalism.”

John Carroll | Mises Wire

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Elon has announced his new University. You heard right. The world’s richest man is getting into public education. He’s got a plan to create a STEM-focused primary and secondary school in Austin.

 

Elon Musk, who moved to Texas during the pandemic, is planning to start a university in Austin, according to tax filings for the billionaire’s latest charity called The Foundation.

The new institution, seeded with a roughly $100 million gift from Musk, will start with a STEM-focused primary and secondary school. Once that’s operating, it “intends ultimately to expand its operations to create a university dedicated to education at the highest levels,” according to an application to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status obtained by Bloomberg.

The university will employ “experienced faculty” and feature a traditional curriculum “alongside hands-on learning experience including simulations, case studies, fabrication/design projects and labs,” according to the application, which was filed in October 2022 and approved in March. It will seek accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.

Is any of that CRT or diversity voodoo at Musk U? No clue, but given his interest in advancing free speech, it would be counter-productive to consider any of that. The Culture War has been flanking the sciences for a while, making several successful incursions. But you can’t have #woke science. And you can’t make people with no interest in it apply or succeed in these fields; not that success was ever the goal of anything having to do with CRT or DEI – unless by success you mean making them killing fields for the budding intellect of America’s youth.

They’ve done a fine job of that.

Let’s hope Musk U (my name, not his) and his primary and secondary education efforts steer clear of anything that is not academic.

 

Tuition is in Dogecoin & u get a discount if u have a dog

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2021

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