R Bertani

Husband, Dad, Higher Ed LMS Admin, freelance camera operator for TV sports & entertainment. SE Tennessee, USA. Retweets ≠ endorsement.

[R Bertani @r_bertani]

@PMacCoon @TimesFreePress The 1Q ?

[Times Free Press @TimesFreePress]

The corporate owner of Local 3 News is suing the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice, alleging the agencies unlawfully withheld records related to the 2015 Chattanooga terrorist attack in which five service members died. https://t.co/7StRel4GiH

[Reverend Jordan Wells @WellsJorda89710]

🚨 THIS SHOULD TERRIFY EVERY PARENT IN AMERICA. 🚨

A high school teacher became emotional while talking about the literacy levels of his students, saying some students “couldn’t fill in four words.” 😢📚

Let that sink in.

These are HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS—and basic literacy skills are still a major struggle.

This isn’t just an education problem. It’s a crisis that affects our children’s entire future.

We have to stop normalizing academic failure and start asking the hard questions:

❓ Where did we go wrong?
❓ Why are students being promoted without mastering basic skills?
❓ What role do parents, teachers, schools, and education policy all play?

Our kids deserve better.

#EducationCrisis #LiteracyCrisis #Teachers #Education #TeachersSpeakOut #Parents #Parenting #Students #Kids #Reading #Literacy #Schools #AmericanEducation #EducationReform #SchoolChoice #Classroom #TeacherLife

[the Sports ON Tap @thesportsontap]

In 2003, the most hated team in the NBA did the kindest thing anyone has ever done on a basketball court.

April 25, 2003. Rose Garden, Portland. Game 3 of the first round against Dallas. The Blazers are down 2-0 and facing elimination from the moment they wake up.

That Blazers team had a nickname. The Jail Blazers.

They were, at the time, maybe the least likable team in professional sports. Arrests. Suspensions. A roster full of guys the national media treated as villains. Portland fans were exhausted by them.

Before the game, a 13 year old girl named Natalie Gilbert walks to center court to sing the national anthem in front of 19,980 people.

What nobody in the building knew is that she was sick. She had the flu. She later said she just didn't feel like herself at all that day.

She gets a few lines in.

And then her brain goes blank.

She sings "star's last gleaming" instead of "twilight's last gleaming," realizes it instantly, and stops. She looks around. She puts her hand to her face.

Thirteen years old. Twenty thousand people. National television. Frozen.

There is no worse feeling available to a human being.

And then a man walks out of the Portland huddle.

Maurice Cheeks, the head coach, minutes away from a playoff elimination game, leaves his team, walks across the floor, puts his arm around her shoulder and says, "C'mon."

Then he starts singing with her.

Now understand something. Maurice Cheeks cannot sing. At all. He is not remotely trying to rescue the performance.

He's just refusing to let a kid stand there alone.

He keeps his arm around her the whole way. He feeds her the next words. And within a few seconds, all 19,980 people in that building stand up and sing it with them.

A moment that was going to define a little girl's life in the worst possible way became the exact opposite.

Dan Patrick wrote at the time that Cheeks' simple actions had become the defining moment of the entire playoffs.

They went on Jay Leno together. CNN. Good Morning America. It became one of the first truly viral NBA moments, years before that word meant anything.

Portland lost the game. They lost the series. Cheeks finished his Blazers tenure with a fairly ordinary record and was eventually let go.

Now here's the ending.

In March 2025, almost 22 years later, Maurice Cheeks came back to Portland as an assistant coach with the New York Knicks.

The Blazers found Natalie Gilbert.

She's 35 now. Married. Goes by Natalie Zito. She's also, as it turns out, a Blazers season ticket holder.

They brought her back to sing the anthem again.

She nailed it. The whole building erupted. And the camera cut to Cheeks on the sideline, beaming like a proud father.

The two of them met before the game and hugged.

What she said afterward is why this story matters. She explained that she'd been made fun of a lot as a kid, and that in the moment she felt most helpless and hopeless, a stranger walked right over with no hesitation.

"This moment changed my life."

And then she said something even better. That she wouldn't go back and change any of it. That seeing him again and finding out he's still the same standup guy proved it was all real.

Twenty two years. One arm around a shoulder.

Follow @thesportsontap, we post a story like this every day.

[Stephen Miller @StephenM]

Nearly 40% of children in New York State are foreign-born or the children of migrants. Of that group, about 85% are migrants from the third world. The education debate (like so many others) often disguises the real debate.

[JoeyTuccio @joey_tuccio]

Skid Row. Today. Every LA city leader needs to be in jail. The @WhiteHouse needs to intervene immediately.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

There are now nearly 2,000 different majors for American undergraduates to choose from.

This has been a disaster for higher education (and, ultimately, for civilization itself)

Students graduate with highly specialized knowledge in some narrow field, often one that may be obsolete within a generation, while possessing an impoverished understanding of the civilization they are inheriting, the ideas that built it, and how we arrived at the world we inhabit today.

Places like St. John’s College in Annapolis and Thomas Aquinas College in California offer a radically different vision. There are no majors. Instead, students take a deep dive into the Western intellectual tradition (philosophy, mathematics, literature, theology, science, and the Great Books)

And the great irony is that graduates of these supposedly “impractical” programs are among the most capable employees coming out of American higher education. They were not narrowly trained for a particular job. They were educated to think and that prepares them for almost anything.

This is the entire academic program at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This is it. You may not be up-to-date on the latest ideas in gender theory, but you’ll be wise enough to know that doesn’t matter.

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

Just so we are clear,when children are trafficked they are raped over & over every day, often for years. That can mean thousands and thousand of times. Sometimes violently, sometimes to the point of death. These are crimes against humanity. God help us all.

[King Randall, I. @NewEmergingKing]

For my 27th birthday, I'm raising $270,000 to keep The X for Boys & Girls free for every child we serve.

Thank you to Delta Air Lines for leading the way with a $10,000 donation.

We operate 5 days a week, free of charge, with no government assistance, BECAUSE OF YOU! ❤️🔥

[Liza Rosen @LizaRosen0000]

Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist Manar Qassem confessed during interrogation to the crimes he and fellow Gazan terrorists carried out on October 7 for Allah.

He admitted throwing a Jewish girl onto a couch, stripping her, and raping her at gunpoint in front of her horrified mother.

After the rape, the two other terrorists who invaded Israel with him grabbed the girl and her mother and took them away.

Before fleeing to Gaza he described opening fire on Jews and throwing a grenade into a house to kill Jewish people as human sacrifices for Allah.

Share this.

Don’t let the NYC mayor rewrite what happened when Gaza’s Hamas started the war on October 7. Zohran Mamdani wants to gaslight the American public about the satanic nature of Islam, which is why he paints his Hamas brothers from Gaza as the victims and Israel as the war criminal.

The media spent two years amplifying Hamas propaganda. This confession is the opposite of propaganda. It is the perpetrator speaking.

Do not let them bury it.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

BOMBSHELL 🚨 Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge says she found evidence that Joe Biden’s family was being blackmailed by China (and shows the documents) and our mainstream media ignored the evidence

“What we saw in the release of the records, which I'm afraid I think in the media or legacy media there was kind of a willful blindness. They didn't want to look at the records. All you had to do was spend a couple of hours. I found these records which are talking about blackmail by China. It was for President Biden's daily brief. I can conclude, I think, that it was probably about targeting his family”

She explains earlier that all this was ignored and buried by the FBI, CIA and the media in order to keep Democrats in power

[R Bertani @r_bertani]

@Real_Ames @TruBlackPhoenix Looks like he could use some followers. He’s got a story to tell.

[Sara @brightislandusa]

Standard time is still a man-made grid of artificial time zones, but it is structurally designed to MIRROR the NATURAL cycle of the sun (aka solar time).

OTOH Daylight Saving Time deliberately and artificially shifts away from that natural rhythm.

The real anchor of “natural” time is solar noon. That’s the exact moment the sun reaches its highest point in the sky for our specific longitudes.

In Standard Time, time zones are drawn roughly 15 degrees of longitude wide (and that corresponds to about one hour of the Earth's rotation). Standard time is set so that solar noon occurs as close to 12:00 PM on your clock as possible, which means it’s typically striking noon right in the center of a time zone.

With DST, we are shoving the clocks forward an hour, and just totally shifting everything out of alignment. In DST, when the clock strikes 12:00 PM, the sun is actually only at its 11:00 AM position in the sky. Solar noon is doesnt actually happen until around 1:00 PM.

But the worst part about forcing DST on us is that our bodies don't read wristwatches. They read light. Circadian rhythms are need morning sunlight to help shut off melatonin production, wake us up, and set our metabolic timers for the day. When that gets thrown off, it causes a whole cascade of negative health effects.

Standard Time keeps our clocks closer to the sun's actual position, so that helps us ensure we get more morning light. With government time, aka DST, all we are doing is forcing ourselves to wake up in the dark more often to pretend like we’re saving light for the evening. It’s a fool’s errand.

This nonsense is EXACTLY why major medical organizations like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the American Medical Association, are hardcore advocates for permanent STANDARD Time over permanent DST.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 Sec. Marco Rubio just NAILED IT:

"One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it 'sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.'"

"That's actually NOT TRUE. Communism does NOT sound good in theory. The world that envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul."

"The world that envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity, or ambition, a world without heroes, or glory, or great causes to strive towards, without a world without miracles, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things."

"And the world communism envisions is a world without God."

"For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it's an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy." 💯

[R Bertani @r_bertani]

@DschlopesIsBack @FreddyLA7

[R Bertani @r_bertani]

@FreddyLA7 Wow

[Dr. Sheila Nazarian @sheilanazarian]

I want to ask the students screaming “Death to America”, do you have any idea what happens when American values die?

Because I do.

My family fled Iran, a country where freedom died. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

You think America is oppressive because you have never experienced real oppression.

You think silence is violence because you’ve never been silenced.

You think words are dangerous because you have never watched a government drag someone away for speaking them.

You think capitalism is evil because you have never stood in a bread line.

You think borders are immoral because you have never had to flee across one.

You think revolution is romantic because you have never had a revolution take everything from you.

I have.

And that’s why I refuse to be quiet.

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

One day, teachers may use this video to teach students about the mistake that brought down Western civilization. I hope that day never comes.

[Nashville SC @NashvilleSC]

Winning at the Azteca feels nice, doesn’t it 🤝