On Saturday last week, 600 doctors and practice staff from the city and region of Hanover should have been vaccinated. In fact, only 200 “vaccinated people” turned up, reports the NDR.

The others let the appointment pass without cancellation, as the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung (HAZ) reported on Saturday. According to the Hanover region, the appointments had been agreed in writing between the individual practices and the vaccination centre. However, the medical staff on hand in the vaccination centre on the exhibition grounds waited in vain for their medical colleagues.

Cordula Drautz, who is responsible for the vaccination centre’s finance department, told the HAZ that two thirds did not come to the vaccination, and it was a “worrying number and a terrifying signal – we would have liked to give the appointments to others”. It is normally accepted that ten percent of those registered do not come to the vaccination appointment.

According to the Lower Saxony Medical Association, fear of the vaccine from the British-Swedish manufacturer AstraZeneca are the reason for the low vaccination rate among doctors. A week ago, complications from the vaccine became known. Therefore, President Monika Wenker told the HAZ that said she could understand the reluctance.

However, the vaccine has now been declared safe again, but trust in AstraZeneca has yet to be rebuilt. Some 700 doctors and staff from the practices were registered for vaccination this past Saturday. Information on how many of them actually came to the appointment this time is not yet available.

https://freewestmedia.com/2021/03/29/hundreds-of-doctors-fail-to-show-up-for-astrazeneca-vaccination-appointment-in-hanover/

Thomas Morf is back. For ten years, he was CEO of the Bucherer watch brand, then of the Hanhart brand, which belonged to Philippe Gaydoul’s group of companies, and later, until the end of 2018, he was head of the traditional Favre-Leuba for the Indian conglomerate Tata.

Now the patent number 712725 has been granted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IGE) as of December 30, 2020, about four and a half years after the application: “Module for incorporation into a wristwatch, comprising a direction indicating means for a mechanical direction indicator”: Under the brand name Aramedes, Morf and two partners want to sell wristwatches to Muslims that provide central information for the practice of Islam; when fully equipped, there are three of them.

The small dial at “3” shows the most important information, the respective direction to Mecca, where the believers are directed to pray. The one at “9” shows the next prayer time, which depends on the position of the sun and thus the location, and the totaliser at “6” shows when it is allowed to eat and when it is necessary to fast during Ramadan.

The information is provided by software on an integrated circuit board that uses mobile phone triangulation to calculate the wearer’s location and control the hands of the mechanical movement – an absolute innovation in the watch market. The watch is produced in Switzerland and the movements are made by Sellita and Vaucher.

Morf estimates the market potential to be very large, “after all, there are 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide, with around 15 million pilgrims in Mecca alone every year”; Saudi Arabia wants to increase this number further. Target customers are “global urban Muslims” à la London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, religious and modern, but who enjoy classic “Made in Switzerland”. Of course, there are apps that display such information, but the watch is “clearly a lifestyle product”. Steel or platinum are the materials of choice for the case, with prices starting at 5,000 Swiss francs and going up to 80,000 at the highest level, including a tourbillon.

https://www.handelszeitung.ch/bilanz/drei-schweizer-entwickeln-eine-uhr-fur-muslime

By Andrea Widburg

One of the things about living in a totalitarian society is that, once something has been identified as problematic, everyone ends up competing to attack in the most aggressive way. Fail to do so, and you may find yourself being the next person identified as problematic. Perhaps that explains why the University of Oxford, founded in 1096, is contemplating ending sheet music because it’s part of white supremacy.

To be honest, it’s a little bit hard to make sense of the story because it’s so screamingly stupid. Apparently, music professors are claiming that all Western classical music has “complicity in white supremacy.” This seems to include such composers as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Handel, all of whom were living in continental Europe in the 17th through 19th centuries and none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with Blacks, Africa, or the slave trade.

The problem is that they and their musical notations existed at the same time as the African slave trade. And that’s not a typo:

University staff have argued that the current curriculum focuses on ‘white European music from the slave period’, according to The Telegraph.  

Documents seen by the publication indicate proposed reforms to target undergraduate courses.
It claimed that teaching musical notation had ‘not shaken off its connection to its colonial past’ and would be ‘a slap in the face’ to some students.
And it added that musical skills should no longer be compulsory because the current repertoire’s focus on ‘white European music’ causes ‘students of colour great distress’. 

A couple of comments. First, this strikes me as being profoundly insulting to “students of colour,” who are presumably so dull-witted and hypersensitive that they are incapable of coping with anything from the past. The reality is that Africans have been enslaving each other since time immemorial because all people enslaved each other.

The only ones to break from this idea were the Jews (think Passover, the celebration of the world’s first slave revolt). It took the Christian world until the late 18th century to catch up with that idea. The Muslim world still hasn’t. The reality is that slavery has always been part of the human condition and it’s only because of White Jews and Christians (with or without musical notation) that it ended in the West.

Second, I think the Oxford music teachers know this is bunkum. They’re raising it only because they feel that, unless they chime in on the Black Lives Matter issue and show themselves to be on board with it, they will be the next target. Under the tyranny that is BLM, if you’re not with them, you’re against them, and if you’re against them, you will be destroyed in the next purge (and there’s always a next purge).

As I watch the endless waves of BLM stupidity in corporations and academic institutions in the English-speaking world, I’m reminded of nothing so much as the mourners at Kim Jong-il’s funeral. They knew that the secret police were watching and that anyone showing insufficient grief was at risk of being carted off to a concentration camp. That’s why you see videos such as the one below showing thousands of people engaged in hysterical weeping. Yes, they were told that their communist godhead had died, but what you’re seeing in these videos isn’t grief, it’s fear:

That same stench of totalitarian fear is, quite disgracefully, oozing out of Oxford. An institution with over a thousand years of solid academics behind it shouldn’t be groveling before the Marxist BLM thugs.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/oxford_university_wants_to_cancel_musical_notation.html

By Monica Showalter

In a case that’s drawing a lot of attention based on the insane level of leniency shown, two 14-year-olds who bullied, murdered, danced on the body of, and filmed a helpless 13-year-old, have been let off with the mother-of-all-slaps-on-the-wrist by a Riverside County Superior Court Justice. 

According to local radio station KTLA:

Two 14-year-old Southern California boys who beat a fellow student in 2019, causing his death, won’t go to jail but must undergo anger management therapy, a judge ruled.

Riverside County Superior Court Judge Roger A. Luebs imposed the therapy as a probation condition before releasing the teenagers to their parents on Thursday, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported Friday.On Sept. 16, 2019, the teenagers were videotaped attacking 13-year-old Diego Stolz outside classrooms at Landmark Middle School in Moreno Valley, east of Los Angeles. One boy struck the teenager in the head from behind and he fell, hitting his head against a pillar. The boys then continued punching the boy, who died nine days later from a brain injury.

Last fall, the boys entered the equivalent of guilty pleas in juvenile court last fall to involuntary manslaughter and assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury. They spent 47 days in juvenile custody.

The helpless 13-year-old orphan had been bullied, brutalized, begged for help from the teachers’ unionized school officials whose fat-salaried job was to protect him, and got nothing. They let him get murdered. And early on, they callously blamed the kid’s family for his killing, instead of themselves. The case makes one’s blood boil.

How can a 13-year-old’s life be worth absolutely nothing? The kid was an orphan, living with his aunt and uncle, who are now suing the school district for its lazy indifference. They’ll get money no doubt, but the kid still lays dead, robbed of absolutely everything as the killers snigger in remorselessness, a fact noted by the judge in this KTLA passage:

At their sentencing, the judge said psychological reports described the boys as lacking empathy and said they blamed the victim for the attack.

All the same, as City News Service reported, the judge ignored Department of Probation recommendations to throw the book at this pair (and like Jimmy Carter with the Iranian hostage-takers) he said he really didn’t think they meant to kill the kid despite their slamming him into a wall, dancing on his head, and videoing their vileness for all their creepy little friends to see.

Parts of his sentencing were obnoxious, too:

Luebs directed that each offender enroll in character development and anger management classes, as well as perform 150 hours community service, not play violent video games, avoid social media and write letters of apology to the Stolz family. They were additionally ordered to permanently steer clear of one another.

Luebs warned the pair that any probation violation could land them in deep trouble, possibly resulting in time behind bars.

Why, exactly, are they getting ‘one last warning’ to behave themselves, when they’ve already done the worst they could possibly do?  These killers should have had their one-last-warning before they moved up to killing people. This didn’t happen out of the blue — one of these plagues-on-society was already on probation when he tried his hand at killing. How seriously are they going to take this latest ‘one-last-warning’? The message they’ve gotten so far is that if they get caught violating probation, all they will get is another one-last-warning. But remember, one more chance.

In the past, killers of this stripe went to juvenile detention up until the age of 26. A few went to real jails with the adults, given the callous nature of their crimes and their demonstrated incorrigibility.

These killers get anger management “therapy,” character building courses (what, Upward Bound-style romping on rocks in a Kidz Kamp vacay?), and 150 hours of community service (where they are likely to be a plague again meaning they will get signed off without the hours by the community groups just to get them away from them). No video games, no contact with each other, no cell phones(which they used to plan the killing) and merely ‘avoiding’ social media, all of which are going to be impossible for authorities to monitor. As for apologies to the family, ugh. Forced apologies are phony and insulting, and rest assured, theirs will have something insulting in it. 

What these killers need is actual punishment, not free social services. They got those earlier and look what happened.

The aunt and uncle of the murdered orphan, who pleaded and pleaded with authorities to help him, leaving a trail of evidence of it, are rightly suing the school district for its pattern of indifference to the plight of the kid, who had no choice but to be in that stinking school, like it or not. Yes, they have a case, and if I were on that jury, I’d give them everything they asked for.

The broader problem is that this is criminal justice “reform” in action — coddling and protecting the killers, and ignoring the victims of murder who can’t, after all, vote, lobby, or go to the press — kind of like unborn babies now. For a helpless orphan, what chance at all did he have against such  killers?

Yes, the judge bears some blame for ignoring probation department recommendations and handing out this slap on the wrist. Why he did it is very hard to parse.

Was he a crazy leftist who takes money from Soros? Apparently not. His record shows him to be an apparently moderate Democrat or moderate Republican, donating money to the likes of then-moderate Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republicans Rep. Ken Calvert and now-former Sen. John F. Seymour during his money-donating days in the 1990s as an attorney. He was appointed judge by then-Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, who is a decent man, not a crazy, and quite moderate compared to the lunacy out there now. He’s located in the Inland Empire, which is historically one of the more conservative parts of California. He’s run unopposed in recent elections according to Ballotpedia and not answered questions about his political views on the same forum. I looked for controversial rulings from him and didn’t find any thus far. It’s hard to say what happened, but the judge did note that his decision was going to be unpopular. According to KTLA:

“I know that my decision will not make everyone happy. In fact, it will probably make some people in the community angry,” the judge said.

“I’m sorry there isn’t more I could do to address your loss,” he told members of Stolz’s family.

No kidding. But the judge isn’t the main problem here.

A much bigger and better-defined culprit is one-party all-blue legislative California, which did indeed pass some terrible “criminal justice reforms” to effecively nullify all punishment for under-18 killers of orphans. One law, possibly the one cited by the judge, appears to be here, mandating ‘least restrictive environment’ all to give the felonious youngsters more of a normal childhood, you see, as if that was going to happen given how they responded to such an environment before they went out killing people.

The other thing is, these “reforms” have literally emptied out California’s juvenile detention centers.

Here’s a list of measures from ten years ago from one of the Soros-style criminal justice reform outfits:

State Drastically Reduces Youth Prison Population

Over the past several years, litigation and concern about dangerous conditions in California youth prisons resulted in media attention, stakeholder education about the problematic conditions, advocacy by a broad spectrum of organizations, and increased costs to the state for the confinement of youth. These developments have led to higher numbers of youth being treated by community-based programs in some counties, legislation restricting the types of offenses that can lead to state imprisonment, and budget realignment that redirects funds from state juvenile justice to the counties. These practice and policy changes—along with an unfortunate increase in direct files to adult court—have contributed to a dramatic drop in the population sent to California’s state youth facilities over the past fifteen years. On February 22, 2010, the California Division of Juvenile Justice closed the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, the state’s largest juvenile prison. The state now has only three youth prisons, down from 11 in 2003. The overall population of California’s youth prisons has declined from a staggering 9,572 in 1996 to 1,082 at the end of 2011, an 89 percent decrease.

In San Diego County alone, which abuts Riverside County, pretty much nobody juvenile goes to jail anymore, no matter how many classmates they kill. Here’s a left-slanted 2018 report touting the empty jails in the local Voice of San Diego:

San Diego County’s four detention facilities can hold 855 young people. But on a recent Wednesday, just 311 youths were housed inside the county’s prisons and camps, said Chief Probation Officer Adolfo Gonzales. At least five to six wings of the county’s juvenile detention space are totally empty at present, he said. Just eight years ago, the number of incarcerated kids was three times as high: The average daily population in lockup stood at 1,008 for January 2010.

The report has a doozy of a graph showing plummeting juvenile detention numbers in multiple California counties, including Riverside. Apparently, nobody goes to jail, no matter what they do and word has gotten out in the thug-American community that the killins’ are easy now.

It goes to show that so-called criminal justice reform is a total fraud. Nobody gets punished. And for helpless, 13-year-old orphans like Diego Stolz, nobody gets justice. This is vile, and cries out for reform. The little kid got zero justice. His life was essentially declared worthless by the leftists in power in California. One can only hope that this finally is what it takes to wake up California’s voters and make this ‘criminal reform’ legislation an issue. The only people who benefit here are actual criminals.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/california_judge_sentences_two_killers_of_a_13yearold_to_anger_management_courses.html

For the time being, the Council for German Spelling has spoken out against the inclusion of the gender asterisk, the underscore, the colon or other abbreviated forms to identify so-called multi-gender names.

The Spelling Council, which met on Friday in Mannheim online, continues to adhere to the criteria it adopted in 2018 on gender-sensitive language despite enormous pressure from gender activists, but it may change.

Texts have to be factually correct, understandable, legible and also readable. They must also guarantee legal certainty and clarity, and be transferable into German minority languages ​​outside of Germany. Furthermore, gender-equitable formulations should not distract the reader or listener from the core information and should not make it difficult to learn the language.

Ultimately, however, the decision on this is not just one that “can be solved with orthographic rules and changes to the spelling”, the interim report stated.

The editor-in-chief of Deutsche Sprachwelt, Thomas Paulwitz, criticized the decision: “Ultimately, the Spelling Council tries to free itself from responsibility so as not to get in the way of the gender advocates.” It offers no argument in the statements for a “gender sensitive” spelling, but there are also no concrete observations against it.

The Spelling Council does not have to present its finished report to the conference of ministers of education until 2022. That is how long the council wants to monitor developments.

On March 10, 2020, in Mannheim on the sidelines of the annual conference of the Institute for German Language (IDS), its director Henning Lobin and gender activist Kathrin Kunkel-Razum, head of the Duden editorial team, agreed that Lobin should write a book for the Duden publishing house to denounce its critics. The Duden is a dictionary of the German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880, and updated regularly with new editions appearing every four or five years. The book Language battle – How the New Right Instrumentalizes the German Language was published just in time for this year’s IDS conference.

The theme of the annual conference, “Language in Politics and Society”, naturally helped with marketing. The book is divisive, with a clear friend-foe scheme. In addition, it is brimming with war metaphors. Lobin describes various “language battles”, particularly addressing the “battlefield of gender-equitable German”, describes the German Language Association (VDS) as a “combat organization” and the German Bundestag as a “deployment area”.

For the Duden editorial team, this polemic comes at exactly the right time, since the Duden has progressed very far in its “language battle” for gendered language. In the spelling dictionary at www.duden.de, it does everything in its power cancel the generic masculine. In January, the Duden editorial team had to admit that they wanted to change around 12 000 personal and professional titles over the course of the year.

The Duden simply started trampling on linguistic reality, which is also reflected in legal texts, by subordinating it to gender ideology. The bad actors were men and the victims female.

The VDS, in response, then launched the “Save the German language from the Duden” petition, which has now been signed by more than 31 000 people, including a few heavy-weights. They call on “the Duden to rethink its sexualization plans, to use the German language more sensitively and cautiously in the future, and to reflect on its original goals”.

By the end of February the Duden had to row back a little. To the Sprachdienst, the journal of the Society for German Language, Kunkel-Razum explained that she wanted to consider adding the forms which “can also be used across genders” in the gendered entries.

“In certain situations, the masculine form (e.g. doctor, tenant, baker) is used to denote people of all genders. With this usage, however, it is not always clear in linguistic terms whether only male persons are meant or others as well. That is why linguistic alternatives have been discussed for some time.”

However, the editors did not change anything about the misleading entry “male person” for a tenant, that could also be a company or a woman. Meanwhile, ideology-free dictionaries such as the “Digital Dictionary of the German Language” continue to provide the correct linguistic definition. A “tenant” is therefore of course not a “male person”, but simply a “person who has rented something” without explicitly defined biological properties.

The Duden is a long way from such scientific neutrality. Its new “online spell checker” allows for all gender spellings for “tenants”: “Mieter*innen“, Mieter_innen, Mieter:innen, MieterInnen“. Similarly “people” and “guests” have been subjected to these ridiculous forms.

In his “language war”, Lobin blames all conservatives as well as critics. While many citizens are outraged at how the Duden and others instrumentalize the German language, he complains about “how the New Right instrumentalizes the German language”. Thus with the spectre of the “new right”, Lobin obviously wants to discredit any criticism of gender. According to his reading, the resistance to politically correct language and gender German is all part of a “new right agenda”.

And by avoiding the definition of what constitutes this “new right”, Lobin can use it to label all gender opponents in his book. Lobin evidently imagines all of the criticism by publications, parties and associations – left and right – to be part of a “new right” conspiracy. Lobin clearly does not seem to want to get involved in any factual argumentation. Apparently he fears that he would lose his “language battle” in the process – and rightly so.

https://freewestmedia.com/2021/03/28/german-spelling-council-rejects-gender-sensitive-forms/

After massive criticism about the invitation of a Turkish historian, the Rhineland-Palatinate state chairman of the mosque association Ditib has announced his resignation. As state chairman, he bears full responsibility for inviting “a person like Ahmet Simsirgil, who openly incited hatred in his texts and statements”, Yilmaz Yildiz said on Saturday.

The deputy state chairperson, Cihan Sen, told the German Press Agency on Sunday that the state executive board would now discuss a new line-up of representatives. With its resignation, Ditib Rhineland-Palatinate reaffirmed its commitment to continue the dialogue with the state government aimed at reaching a basic agreement with four Islamic associations.

Because of the then cancelled invitation of Simsirgil, who is accused of anti-Zionist and homophobic statements, the state government made the first intervention since the signing of target agreements on April the 1st 2020 with one of the four Islamic associations and demanded a statement. “Public statements are known from the invited guest that are in clear contrast to the agreement reached in the target agreement,” explained a spokesperson for the responsible Ministry of Culture. After Ditib’s statement, the state government will decide “what consequences it will have on the target agreement process because of this incident”.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the AfD have demanded that the negotiations with Ditib be brought to an end.In autumn, the state government wants to check compliance with the agreed principles and then decide whether to continue the negotiations on a basic agreement, which have been interrupted since 2016. This should contain regulations on Islamic holidays, Islamic religious education and new teaching professorships for Islamic religious education.

https://www.welt.de/regionales/rheinland-pfalz-saarland/article229299963/Ditib-Landesvorsitzender-Ruecktritt-nach-Vortragseinladung.html