In this one ballet, we gain a picture of a prosperous world that emerged in the late 19th century, was shortly shattered by war and revolution, and then was nearly killed off by the political and ideological experimentation of the 20th century. This ballet debuted in 1892. The generation of Russians living in St. Petersburg that saw it for the first time was experiencing a level of prosperity never before seen in history. It was the same all over Europe, of which Russia was considered a part. 
 
This was a time of the full maturation of the Industrial Revolution. Income was growing and dramatically. Lives were longer. Infant mortality was plummeting. The middle class could live in security and in comfortable homes, and the practical arts—electricity, lighting, telephones, universal medicine, indoor plumbing—were in a boom phase. We see these themes in the opening scenes of The Nutcracker. We’re in a home with a beautifully lit Christmas tree, and several generations of an extended family are celebrating the great season with abundant gifts. Gifts, that great symbol of abundance.
 
The person of the nutcracker character himself; is a soldier - but not a killer, not a person destined for being maimed and killed or slaughtering others. A soldier in those days was a symbol of the nation, a protector and a well-dressed person of discipline and dignity who made the peace possible. He was an extension of regular society, someone performing a light duty deserving of extra respect. [..]
 
This was a world that celebrated cross-cultural exchange. It was an age before the creation of passports, and traveling the world and seeing it all was first becoming possible for many people. You could ride on ships and not die of scurvy. Trains could take people from place to place in safety. Goods crossed borders as never before, and multicultural chic invaded arts and literature of all sorts. There was no managerial state, no one screaming about “cultural appropriation,” and no dominance of cursing whole groups for their identity.
 
In The Nutcracker we gain a vision of an emerging world ethos a vision of a time and a place – it wasn’t just Russia. The ballet not only celebrated the sugar plum fairies, but also Arabian coffee dancers, Chinese tea dancers, Danish shepherdesses, and of course Russian candy cane dancers along with a beautiful array of fantasy figures.
The composers and writers in Tchaikovsky’s era could not have imagined the horror that was unleashed by the Great War. The killing fields — 38 million dead, wounded, or missing – it was inconceivable. 

The concept of a “total war” that did not exclude the civilian population, but rather made everyone part of the army. [..]
What they could not imagine was the much vaster injustice that was just around the historical corner: mass use of poison gas, universal enslavement of the wartime draft, famine as a war tactic, the gulag, the Holocaust and slaughter of millions of Jewish people and their mass incineration. The Japan war when the USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
The features of society of the Russian people’s lives in the Nutcracker ballet was of faith, property, family, security. In 1917 following Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War I — resulting in horrible death and economic ruin — there was a revolution, one designed to overthrow despots and replace them with something completely new. The party that took control ruled under the pretext of ideological communism. And of what did that consist? Opposition to faith, property, family, and the very bourgeois life that is so celebrated in this ballet.
 
If you look at the demographic data following the October 1917 revolution, you see calamity. Income fell by half. Life expectancy became static and fell. It was total wreckage, exactly what you would expect if you tried to get rid of property and attack the voluntary society at its core. Many decades of communist rule in Russia gutted the country of the life and joy that this ballet puts on display.
 
Historians and those old enough; told the stories of terrible things. It was a wholesale looting of all the progress that Russia had experienced until that point in its history.
The experience also unleashed a dominance of munitions manufacturers in the UK and US, the beginnings of the modern military-industrial complex, in addition to previously unthinkable controls on the civilian population, including censorship and witch hunts over political affiliation. This coincided in the US with what amounted to a revolution against liberty: the income tax, the 17th Amendment that abolished the bicameral Congress, and the Federal Reserve that was deployed to fund the murderous war.  What’s beautiful about The Nutcracker is that we see none of it.
This ballet was created in that great time of innocence when all the world foresaw a beautiful future of unstoppable and unending peace, prosperity, and justice. It portrays a culture of free association, gift giving, personal and material growth, spiritual reflection and artistic excellence, dancing and dreaming — it can and should be our future in the USA.

Harvard president to stay on after anti-Semitism probe backlash
​Dr. Claudine Gay will retain her position at Harvard, following comments and questions from NY Congresswoman ​Elise Stefanik. She asked Ms Gay: 'does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?' at her university.  Gay said: 'It can be, depending on the context.'

Gay and the presidents of UPenn and MIT have been eviscerated for telling congress yesterday that calls for the genocide of Jews do not violate their codes of conduct. 

​THE APOLOGY: She now says her antisemitism comments were misunderstood and insists school WILL take action against students calling for the genocide of Jews.

2. pandemics are impossible because these acute respiratory illnesses are not contagious, 
and we’ve been lied to about that for decades; 
3. it is evident that the deception, based on worthless PCR test diagnostics, 
That was created to justify lockdowns and more ... & finally ...
4. to persuade people to roll up their sleeves accepting the shots -  which my skill set allows me to determine with great degree of confidence - were intentionally designed to cause injury, death and to impair fertility in survivors."

"If we used to govern our dreams that way, we would have never gone to the moon, and when the planet had been in peril in the past, who came forward to save earth from the scourge of Nazi totalitarian regimes? We came forward." ​

The Dutch government is among those investing heavily in lab-grown meat, using technologies made to develop drugs … pharmaceuticals. While fake meat is touted as the solution to save the planet and end world hunger, Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports on the “tsunami of fake foods.” Fake meats are not about your health or the environment’s; they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers replacing them with an ultra-processed food products that can be controlled by patents.[..]
 
To make fake meat, cell lines are taken from a living organism; they’re manipulated to grow quickly and consistently. What are cells that proliferate quickly? Either cancers or fetuses [babies in the womb]. The cell lines being grown in bioreactors in labs. They’re grown in a thin film or growth medium; In the body the growth medium is blood, a complex substance that laboratories try to replicate using fetal bovine [unborn cows] serum (FBS) — blood taken from living calf fetuses. [..]

Ivy League University Announces Year of ‘Free Expression" [here]
Learning to engage with difficult and challenging ideas is a core part of a university education,[It is] essential to our students’ intellectual growth, and to their future ability to lead and thrive in a diverse society. [..] Harvard used to pride itself on attracting the best. Now it’s settling for the worst, not only morally, but intellectually and effectually.  Wokeness destroys standards. And no place demonstrates that half as well as Harvard.

THE BLAZE: Students at Cornell unanimously voted to require "trigger warnings" for class topics that some students might find unsettling. Such as domestic violence, rape, suicide, transphobia, abortion, Antisemitism and religion. Pollack and university provost Michael Kotlikoff swiftly overrode that vote, claiming that a mandated trigger warning for professors "violates our faculty’s fundamental right to determine what and how to teach" and could even undermine the "academic distinction of a Cornell degree."