Let’s recall just how bad a president Trump was!

For the record, concerning Covid:, this is from Quora:

———-

President Trump tweeted that 17,000 people died from Swine Flu under Obama. How does this compare to his Coronavirus numbers?

To be fair, you specifically asked for a comparison. So, here goes…You mentioned 17,000 H1N1 deaths (which is actually closer to 12,000, but we already know that Trump lies), — and for some reason you chose to invoke the name of the president at the time of the “Swine Flu.” at that time — President Obama.As of Jan. 21. 2021 — the number of Covid-19 deaths had reached over 6.87 million. In addition, the number of deaths from Covid-19 was over 6.86 million — while Donald Trump was in office. The United States is the country with the highest number of confirmed cases and deaths. The U.S. government’s overall response to the pandemic under Donald Trump has been criticized — by the entire world. (For good reason – Donald Trump had no response, unlike the rest of the planet).Those 17,000 H1N1 Swine Flu deaths that Trump tweeted about and exaggerate about). were worldwide deaths — and they occurred over a period of seven years. (And, those were worldwide deaths, not just American deaths.)In about one year, Trump has led us right into 6.86 million American deaths. Deaths in the United States. Compared with Obama’s response to the Swine Flu — which resulted in about 12,000 deaths — over the course of seven years.Ugggh.—When the H1N1 outbreak first became known, Obama reacted, swiftly — within a week. Just as he did with the Ebola virus. Just as he did with the Zika virus. Remember that?Today —in the year 2020 — When the Covid-19 virus first became known — gulp…Here is Donald Trump… for more than two months:A timeline:[Trump was first warned, by US intelligence agencies, in late November of 2019. Trump ignored these warnings.][The entire planet was warned, by legitimate journalists, throughout December, as they covered China’s response. The whole world watched, via The New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, Reuters, the BBC, and many more, as China struggled, and then locked down the city of Wuhan and then the province. Not a day in December went by when this was not being reported on. Trump ignored all of those warnings.[The World Health Organization privately warned Donald Trump, in writing, on December 31. Trump ignored that warning.][Trump was warned by the CDC three times, in January, and a fourth time, on January 19. On January 20, the World Health Organization warned the entire world that this disease was being spread human-to-human, and that it appeared it would probably reach pandemic levels. Trump ignored that warning.]Trump’s daily briefings from American intelligence warned him 22 times in January, that this was a serious threat to the security of the United States. Trump ignored all 22 of those warnings.Then –January 23 — “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.” [Donald Trump, January 22.]February 2 – “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” [Donald Trump, February 2.]

February 24 – “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” [Donald Trump, February 24.]

February 25 – “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.” [Donald Trump, February 25.]

February 25 – “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.” [Donald Trump, February 25.]

February 26 – “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” [Donald Trump, February 26.]February 26 – “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” [Donald Trump, February 26.]

February 27 – “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” [Donald Trump, February 27.]

February 28 – “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.” [Donald Trump, February 28.]March 2 — “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?” [Donald Trump, March 2.]March 2 — “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.” [Donald Trump, March 2.]March 4 — “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.” [Donald Trump, March 4.]March 5 — “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.” [Donald Trump, March 5.]March 5 — “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!” [Donald Trump, March 5.]March 5 — “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.” [Donald Trump, March 5.]March 6 — “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.” [Donald Trump, March 6.]March 6 — “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.” [Donald Trump, March 6.]March 6 — “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” [Donald Trump, March 6.]March 8 — “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.” [Donald Trump, March 8.]March 9 — “This blindsided the world.” [Donald Trump, March 9.]March 12– “But it’ll be — it’ll go away very quickly.” [Donald Trump, March 12.]March 12– “You know, you see what’s going on. And so I just wanted that to stop as it pertains to the United States. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stopped it.” [Donald Trump, March 12.]March 12– “Let’s put it this way, I’m not concerned, OK?” [Donald Trump, March 12.]March 13 – “I am officially declaring a national emergency.” A national emergency. Those are two very big words.” [Donald Trump, March 13.]March 14 – “As of this moment we have 50 deaths, which is — a lot of good decisions were made, or that number could be many times that. But that’s based on a lot of good decisions, one or two in particular.”March 15 – “”My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible, avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people, avoid discretionary travel and avoid eating and drinking in bars, restaurants, and public food courts.”March 20 – (Reporter: “What do you say to Americans who are scared?”) Donald Trump: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say!” [Donald Trump, March 20.]March 21 – “We’re giving relief to affected industries and small businesses, and we’re ensuring that we emerge from this challenge with a prosperous and growing economy because that’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to pop. One day, we’ll be standing, possibly up here, and we’ll say, “Well, we won.” And we’re going to say that. As sure as you’re sitting there, we’re going to say that. And we’re going to win, and I think we’re going to win faster than people think, I hope.” [Donald Trump March 21.] [Perhaps Trump is waiting for that miraculous “pop.”]58,343 Americans were now dead. In only four months.In fact, the number of U.S. deaths was not only the highest on the planet, the number of U.S. deaths now is one-third of all of the deaths on the planet. Even after only four months.Think about that.58,343 Americans were now dead. In only four months. Thanks to Donald Trump’s complete lack of response. That grew to 6 million. Thanks to Donald Trump’s complete lack of response.

How the anti-public-education movement is fracturing

Peter Greene, at Curmudgucation, explains:

School Choice Movement Fissures (2024 Edition)

PETER GREENE

FEB 27, 2024

Milton Friedman’s vision was never popular.

The idea of doing away with public school as a public good, a service provided to all citizens, funded and managed by some combination of federal, state and local government, and replacing it all with an unregulated free market of education services in which families had to find their own way with their own resources– that was never going to be a winner. 

Replace a promise to provide every child with an education with a promise to just let everyone fend for themselves– not a popular idea. Even school vouchers–Friedman’s idea of a gateway to the future he really wanted to see–were never popular.

So they needed allies. The first batch of allies–segregationists who wanted school choice so they could choose not to send White kids to school with Black kids– were not terribly helpful from a policy standpoint. 

The big obstacle–people really like and believe in the idea of public schools.

So the Reagan administration gave us A Nation At Risk, a manifesto masquerading as a research report that aimed to chip away at that public support for public schools. “Burn it all down” was still a fringe notion, but the Overton window was shifting, and the repeated assertion that public schools were failing was the crowbar used to shift it.

By the turn of the millennium, a partnership had emerged, between choicers (we need more options because competition will help), reformsters (we need standards and tests and incentives to force teachers to suck less), neo-liberals (the private sector can do this better), technocrats (let’s be data driven), accountability hawks (make schools prove they’re doing a good job), social justice fabulists (better education will magically erase poverty), and folks who had real concerns about real issues in education. 

Overall, this patchwork alliance had the outward appearance of a bipartisan team-up, and that was just perfect for the Bush-Obama years and the sham that was No Child Left Behind

But what the alliance didn’t produce was results. Choice did not provide a sudden lifting of all boats, despite some data-torturing attempts to show otherwise. Data-driven instruction didn’t improve the data generated by either students or teachers. Underserved communities that were supposed to be rescued from failing schools by charters and choice too often had education policies done to them rather than with them. And then there was the gross miscalculation that was Common Core, which drew attack from all across the political spectrum.

By the mid 2010s, the deal was splintering. Robert Pondiscio was one of the first to publicly talk about it– the social justice wing of the choice movement was demanding more focus on actual education results, and the free market wing that was more committed to the idea of choice as an end in itself, whether it improved educational outcomes or not.

The alliance probably would have fallen apart under the simple force of gravity, but Trump arrived like a sledgehammer to bust it up. The social justice wing of reform bailed immediately, and the free market wing– well, Jeanne Allen typified the speedy shift from “I don’t want my issues coming out of his mouth” to much love for MAGAland. 

The installation of Betsy DeVos signaled the rise of what I guess we can call Christianist Friedmanism. Friedman was always stuck arguing that a free market approach to education was just better, because reasons. But the DeVos wing of choicers have a better explanation– the unregulated free market approach to education is better because it is what God wants. 

DeVos could never quite go full DeVos during her tenure–she even made it a point to make nice with charter fans even though, for her, charters are just a way to get to the full voucherism she favors. Still watching that Overton window. 

Then COVID-19 came and set fire to the side of the house the Overton window is set in.

Culture warrior stuff was in. Pandemic response crazy-pants reactions made anti-government, anti-institution, anti-qualifications, anti-smarty-pants-with-all-their-book-learning sentiment Great Again. Frustrated activists like Chris Rufo and the Moms For Liberty founders, who had already been trying to break through with an anti-public school message for years suddenly found themselves with all sorts of traction. Jay Greene, who had worked as a school choice academic at the University of Arkansas, took a job with the christianist right wing Heritage Foundation, and from that new perch he announced the new alliance– “Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars.”

So here we are, with the new alliance driving the school choice revolution bus. And like all the other alliances over the past seventy-some years, this one has some fault lines.

There’s certainly a difference of style. Educational dudebros like Rufo, Corey DeAngelis and Ryan Walters are pretty abrasive and aggressive, sometimes in ways that might strike some of the old guard as unseemly. In the days of the earlier alliance, reformsters caught on to the idea that belittling teachers and treating them as the enemy was not a useful way to get policies fruitfully implemented. Of course, one does not need to build lines of communication across a bridge if one’s goal is to just burn the bridge down. 

That’s part and parcel of the biggest fracture line in the current choice movement, which is that the different factions have different goals. 

The free market wing still argues for some sort of free market of education, with some combination of private and public (if they’re a little more reality based) choices for families with, perhaps, some sort of taxpayer subsidy to even the playing field a hair. You might even find one or two who believe there should be some guardrails, some accountability and oversight for such a system.

But their current allies from the culture war world are quite clear that they don’t actually like choice at all. Parents Defending Education, a piece of kochtopus astro turfing, has been clear, as with their recent piece warning that in some states taxpayers are being required to help fund LGBTQ charter schools! Moms For Liberty has been clear that some books should not be an available choice for students in schools, regardless of what those students’ parents might want. 

In Georgia, the legislature is considering a Don’t Say Gay law to restrict teaching about gender identity in private as well as public schools. Neal McClusky has popped up reliably to argue that, no, real school choice means you can’t outlaw the choices you don’t like, but the culture panic MAGA christianist nationalists aren’t listening. Their goal is not a robust system of public and private choices for a wide variety of viewpoints, but a system, public or private or whatever, that reflects only their values. In short, the opposite of school choice. 

I’m not sure how long the alliance will hold up, particularly since the traditional reformsters are, at best, minority partners here. This year’s CPAC, the annual conservative rant-o-pallooza, seemed to have plenty to say about making schools adhere to proper values, but hardly anything about actual school choice. Trump promised school vouchers, but only in the context of a promise to “restore God to His rightful place in American culture.”

Meanwhile, Chester Finn is trying hard, repeatedly, to stand up for the notion that maybe the culture wars and even free market affection are obscuring the goal of providing American children with a good education, and that some accountability and oversight might be useful, even as he waxes nostalgic for the days of bipartisan accomplishments that made the education system better. 

Like many long-time reformsters, Finn fails to see how their brand of reform set the stage for today’s scorched earth attacks on public education (and, to be fair, public education’s failure to address some of its own issues also opened some doors as well). When Chris Rufo asserts that the path to universal school choice requires universal distrust of public education, he’s simply taking the arguments laid out in A Nation At Risk to their natural scorched earth conclusion. 

There is perhaps another way of viewing the fissures in the current movement. On one side, reformsters who still have a bit of conservative-style love for institutions; on the other, those who would simply trash it all, right down to the concept of inclusive public schools. The former had a line, a point past which they felt one shouldn’t go because that would just be destructive. The latter are not concerned with any such line. 

I don’t think it’s any mystery that we’re at this moment right now. The new shape of school choice both rising out of and pushing aside the old education reform movement sure seems to parallel the way MAGAthauritainism pushed aside the traditional conservative project and yet is also somehow rooted in it. 

Or we can parse the fissures one other way: The movement today has three main threads:

* People who want to see better schools and think that school choice gets us there.

* People who see free-market based choice as a worthy end in itself

* People who want to see education delivered in different tiers according to class, but in all tiers delivered in alignment with a single set of christianist values, and see choice policies as a tool to get there

Time will tell, I guess, which group will do the best job of using the other two as a tool for achieving their own goals. 

How to detect bullcrap better

(And why Wikipedia is a better source than most people think!)

============

Read on blog or ReaderLarry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teaching Students to Navigate the Online Landscape (Joel Breakstone, Sarah McGrew, Mark Smith, Teresa Ortega, and Sam Wineburg)

larrycuban

February 11

This article appeared in Social Education, 82(4), 2018, pp.219-222.

Joel Breakstone is director of the Stanford History Education Group at Stanford University. Sarah McGrew co-directs the Civic Online Reasoning project for the Stanford History Education Group. Teresa Ortega serves as the project manager for the Stanford History Education Group. Mark Smith is director of assessment for theStanford History Education Group. Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor at Stanford
University and the founder of the Stanford History
Education Group.

Since the 2016 presidential election, worries about our ability to evaluate online content have elicited much hand wringing. As a Forbes headline cautioned, “American Believe They Can Detect Fake News. Studies Show They Can’t.”1 

Our own research doubtless contributed to the collective anxiety. As part of ongoing work at the Stanford History Education Group, we created dozens of assessments to gauge middle school, high school, and college students’ ability to evaluate online content. 2 

In November 2016, we released a report summarizing trends in the 7,804 student responses we collected across 12 states. 3 At all grade levels, students struggled to make even the most basic evaluations. Middle school students could not distinguish between news articles and sponsored content. High school students were unable to identify verified social
media accounts. Even college students could not determine the organization behind a supposedly non-partisan website. In short, we found young people ill equipped to make sense of the information that floods their phones, tablets, and laptops.

Although it’s easy to bemoan how much students—and the rest of us—struggle, it’s not very useful. Instead of castigating students’ shortcomings, we’d be better served by considering what student responses teach us about their reasoning: What mistakes do they tend to make? How might we build on what they do in order to help them become more thoughtful consumers of digital content?

The thousands of student responses we reviewed reveal three common mistakes and point toward strategies to help students become more skilled evaluators of online content.

Focusing on Surface Features
Over and over, students focus on a web-site’s surface features. Such features—a site’s URL, graphics, design, and “About” page—are easy to manipulate to fit the interests of a site’s creators. Not one of
these features is a sound indicator of a site’s trustworthiness; regardless, many students put great stock in them. One of our tasks asked students to imagine they were doing research on children’s health and came across the website of the American College of Pediatricians (acpeds.org). We asked them if the web-site was a trustworthy source to learn about children’s health

Despite the site’s professional title and appearance, the American College of Pediatricians(ACP) is not the nation’s major professional organization of pediatricians—far from it. In fact, the ACP is a conserva-
tive advocacy organization established in 2002 after the longstanding professional organization for pediatricians, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), came out in support of adoption for same-gender couples. The ACP is estimated to have between 200 and 500 members, compared to the 64,000 members of the AAP.4

News releases on the ACP website include headlines like, “Same-Sex Marriage—Detrimental to Children” and “Know Your ABCs: The Abortion Breast Cancer Link.” Nearly half of college students we tested failed to investigate the American College of Pediatricians and thus never discovered how it differed from the national organization of pediatricians. Instead, students trusted acpeds.org as an authoritative, disinterested source about children’s health. Most never probed beyond the site’s surface features.

As one student wrote, “It’s a trustworthy source because it does not have ads on the side of the page, it ends in .org, and it has accurate information on the page.” Another wrote, “They look credentialed, the website is well-designed and professional, they have a .org domain (which I think is pretty good).”

These students considered multiple features of the website. However, there are two big problems with these evaluations. 

First, such features are laughably easy to manage and tweak. Any well-
resourced organization can hire web developers to make its website appear professional and concoct a neutral description for its “About” page. 

Second, none of the features students noted attest to a site’s trustworthiness. The absence of advertising on a page does not make a site reliable and a .org domain communicates nothing definitive about credibility. Yet, many students treated these features as if they were seals of approval. Students would have learned far more about the site had they asked themselves just one question: What, exactly, is the American
College of Pediatricians?

Accepting Evidence Unquestioningly

One factor dominates students’ decisions about whether information is trustworthy: the appearance of “evidence.” Graphs, charts, infographics, photographs, and videos are particularly persuasive. Students often conclude that a post is trustworthy simply because it includes evidence to back its claims.
What’s the problem with this? Students do not stop to ask whether the evidence is trustworthy or sufficient to support the claims a site makes. The mere existence of evidence, the more the better, often does the trick.

One of our tasks directed students to a video posted on Facebook. Uploaded by the account “I on Flicks,” the video, “Democrats BUSTED on CAMERA STUFFING BALLOT Boxes,” claims to capture “2016 Democrat Primary Voter Fraud CAUGHT ON TAPE.” Two and a half minutes long, the clip shows
people furtively stuffing stacks of ballots into ballot boxes in what are purportedly precincts in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. We asked students, “Does this clip provide strong evidence of voter
fraud during the 2016 Democratic primary election?”

The video immediately raises concerns. We know nothing about who posted it. It provides no proof that it shows electoral irregularities in the states listed. In fact, a half-minute of online digging reveals that it was originally posted on the BBC website with the headline “Russian voting fraud caught on webcam.” However, the majority of high school students we surveyed accepted the video as conclusive evidence of U.S. voter fraud, never consulting the larger web to help them make a judgment. 

The following answer reflects how easily students were taken in: “The video shows footage of people shoving multiple sheets of paper into a ballot box in isolated places. We can see the expressions of the people shoving paper into the ballot box and I can tell that they are being secretive and ashamed of their actions.”

Sixty percent of high school students accepted the video without raising questions about its source. For them, seeing was believing: The “evidence” was so compelling that students could see nothing else.

Misunderstanding Wikipedia

Despite students’ general credulity, they are sharply skeptical about one website: Wikipedia. Their responses show a distorted understanding about the site and a misunderstanding of its value as a research tool. We asked students to compare two websites: the Wikipedia entry on “Gun
Politics in the U.S.” and a National Rifle Association (NRA) article, “Ten Myths
about Gun Control,” posted on a personal page on Duke University’s website.

The task asked students to imagine that they were doing research on gun control and came across both sites. It then asked which of the two sites was a better place to start their research.
Most students argued that they would start with the NRA article because it carries an .edu designation from a prestigious university. Wikipedia, on the other hand, was considered categorically unreliable. As one student succinctly summed it up: “Wikipedia is never that reliable
for research!!!”

Why are students so distrustful of Wikipedia? The most common explana-
tion students provided was that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page. One student explained, “I would not start my research
with the Wikipedia page because anyone can edit Wikipedia even if they
have absolutely no credibility, so much of the information could be inaccurate.”

Another simply noted, “Anyone can edit information on Wikipedia.” While these students have learned that Wikipedia is open-sourced, they have not learned how Wikipedia regulates and monitors its content, from locking pages on many contentious issues to deploying bots to quickly correct vandalized pages.

Furthermore, these students have not learned that many Wikipedia pages
include links to a range of sources that can serve as useful jumping off points
for more in-depth research. In fact, for this task, Wikipedia is a far better place to learn about both sides in the gun control debate than an NRA broadside.

Unfortunately, inflexible opposition to Wikipedia and an unfounded faith in
.edu URLs led students astray. The strategies students used to complete our tasks—making judgments based on surface features, reacting to the exis-
tence of evidence, and flatly rejecting Wikipedia—are outdated, one-size-
fits-all approaches. They are not only ineffective; they also create a false sense of security. When students deploy these antiquated strategies, they believe they are carefully consuming digital content. In fact, they are easy marks for digital rogues of all stripes.

How Can We Help Students?
Students’ evaluation strategies stand in stark contrast to professional fact checkers’ approach to unfamiliar digital sources. As part of our assessment development process, we observed fact checkers from the nation’s most prestigious news outlets as they completed online tasks.5 

When fact checkers encountered an unfamiliar website, they immediately left it and read laterally, opening up new browser tabs along the screen’s horizontal axis in order to see what other sources said about the original site’s author or sponsoring organization. Only after putting their queries
to the open web did checkers return to the original site, evaluating it in light of the new information they gleaned. 

In contrast, students approached the web by reading vertically, dwelling on the site where they first landed and closely examining its features—URL, appearance, content, and “About” page—without investigating who might be behind this content.

We refer to the ability to locate, evaluate, and verify digital information about
social and political issues as civic online reasoning. We use this term to highlight the essential role that evaluating digital content plays in civic life, where informed engagement rests on students’ ability to ask and answer these questions of online information:

1. Who is behind it?
2. What is the evidence for its claims?
3. What do other sources say?

These are the core competencies of civic online reasoning that we’ve identified through a careful analysis of fact checkers’ evaluations. When they ask who’s behind information, students should investigate its authors, inquire into the motives (commercial, ideological, or otherwise) those people have to present the information, and decide whether they should be trusted. 

In order to investigate evidence, students should consider what evidence
is furnished, what source provided it, and whether it sufficiently supports the
claims made. Students should also seek to verify arguments by consulting multiple sources.

There is no silver bullet for combatting the forces that seek to mislead
online. Strategies of deception shift constantly and we are forced to make
quick judgments about the information that bombards us. What should we do to help students navigate this complex
environment? 

We believe students need a digital tool belt stocked with strategies
that can be used flexibly and efficiently. The core competencies of civic online reasoning are a starting place. For example, consider what would happen if students prioritized asking “Who is behind this information?” when they first visited acpeds.org. If they read laterally, they would be more likely to discover the American College of Pediatricians’ perspective. They might come across an article from Snopes, the fact-checking website, noting that the American College of Pediatricians “explicitly states a mission that is overtly political rather than medical in nature”6 

Or a Southern Poverty Law Center post that describes the ACP as a “fringe anti-LGBT hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBT junk science.” 7 

Similarly, students would come to very different conclusions about the video claiming to show voter fraud if they spent a minute reading laterally to address the question, “What’s the evidence for the claim?”

Wikipedia is another essential tool. We would never tell a carpenter not to
use a hammer. The same should hold true for the world’s fifth-most-trafficked website. The professional fact checkers that we observed frequently turned to Wikipedia as a starting place for their searches. Wikipedia never served as the final terminus, but it frequently provided
fact checkers with an overview and links to other sources. We need to teach students how to use Wikipedia in a similar way. 

As teachers, we also need to familiarize ourselves with how the site functions. Too often we have received responses from students indicating that they don’t trust Wikipedia because their teachers told them never to use it. Although far from perfect, Wikipedia has progressed far beyond its original incarnation in the early days of the web. Given the challenges students face online, we shouldn’t deprive them of this powerful tool.

In short, we must equip students with tools to traverse the online landscape. We believe integrating the core competen-cies of civic online reasoning across the curriculum is one promising direction. It will require the development of high quality resources, professional development for teachers, and time for professional collaboration. 

We have begun this work by making our tasks freely available on our website (sheg.stanford.edu). We are also collaborating with the Poynter Institute and Google. As part of this initiative, known as Media Wise, we are creating new lesson plans and professional development materials for teach-
ers. These resources will be available on our website in the coming months. 

This is a start, but more is needed. We hope others will join in this crucial work. At stake is the preparation of future voters to make sound, informed decisions in their communities and at the ballot box.

Notes

1. Brett Edkins, “Americans Believe They Can Detect
   Fake News. Studies Show They Can’t,” Forbes (Dec.
   20, 2016), http://www.forbes.com/sites/brettedkins/2016/
   12/20/americans-believe-they-can-detect-fake-news-
   studies-show-they-cant/#f6778b4022bb.
2. Joel Breakstone, Sarah McGrew, Mark Smith, Teresa
   Ortega, and Sam Wineburg, “Why We Need a New
   Approach to Teaching Digital Literacy,” Phi Delta
   Kappan 99, no.6 (2018): 27–32; Sarah McGrew,
   Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and
   Sam Wineburg, “Can Students Evaluate Online
   Sources? Learning from Assessments of Civic
   Online Reasoning,” Theory and Research in Social
   Education 46, no. 2 (2018): 165–193, https://doi.
   org/10.1080/00933104.2017.1416320; Sarah McGrew,
   Teresa Ortega, Joel Breakstone, and Sam Wineburg,
   “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News:
   Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment,”
   American Educator 41, no. 3 (2017): 4–10.
3. Stanford History Education Group, Evaluating
   Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online
   Reasoning (Technical Report. Stanford, Calif.:
   Stanford University, 2016), https://purl.stanford.edu/
   fv751yt5934.
4. Warren Throckmorton, “The American College of
   Pediatricians Versus the American College of
   Pediatrics: Who Leads and Who Follows?” [Blog
   post], (Oct. 6, 2011), http://www.wthrockmorton.
   com/2011/10/06/the-american-college-of-pediatricia
   ns-versus-the-american-academy-of-pediatrics-who-
   leads-and-who-follows/.
5. Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, “Lateral
   Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less
   and Learning More When Evaluating Digital
   Information,” Teachers College Record (in press),
   Stanford History Education Group Working Paper
   No. 2017-A1, Oct 9, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/
   sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=3048994
6. Kim LaCapria, “American Pediatricians Issue
   Statement That Transgenderism is ‘Child Abuse’?”
   Snopes (February 26, 2017), http://www.snopes.com/fact-
   check/americas-pediatricians-gender-kids/.
7. Southern Poverty Law Center (n.d.). American
   College of Pediatricians, http://www.splcenter.org/fighting-
   hate/extremist-files/group/american-college-
   pediatricians.

CommentLikeYou can also reply to this email to leave a comment.

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice © 2024. Manage your email settings or unsubscribe.

Get the Jetpack app

Subscribe, bookmark, and get real-time notifications – all from one app!

 

Steve Ruis imagines a debate between Trump and Biden

Uncommon SenseRead on blog or reader

The Debate We All Want

Steve Ruis

Jan 20

In a Trump-Biden final, what if both candidates are required to take truth serum and then debate. I imagine it would go something like this:

Mr. Trump Sleepy Joe, you are too old. You won’t make it through another four years.

President Biden Hell, you are as old as me and you are fat besides. You die your hair so as to not look your age and what was with that phony doctor’s report on your health in your first year? The doctor said you dictated it to him. Getting a little head start on your dictatorship, eh. “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency, . . .” my ass. How the heck would that doctor know the health status of all of the presidents throughout our history. Your bullshitting got the best of you there.

Mr. Trump And if you are re-elected we get another “Tax and Spend™ Democrat!

President Biden Hey it is better than giving your wealthy friends and huge corporations the biggest tax cuts in our history and then spend, spend, spend anyway. You passed your tax cuts, $8.4 trillion worth (over 10 years) and then you added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. Gee, I wonder where the money came from to pay for those tax cuts? After promising to reduce the national debt, bigly, if I remember correctly, you then increased the national debt more than any other president in our history. Way to keep your promises, Donald!

Mr. Trump You are not mentally fit to be President. If I am re-elected, I will be the best president ever elected.

President Biden Right. If I remember right, you are the one claiming the COVID pandemic would be over “by summer” and then when it wasn’t you suggested taking a deforming medicine used on horses and household bleach. Yet, when you got it, off to the hospital for the finest medical treatment money could buy, that is US federal money, you didn’t pay for it yourself. Then when you got back to the Oval Office you got back to claiming the COVID pandemic was a hoax and that it was started by the Chinese. You lie so much, you can’t keep your stories straight.

Mr. Trump Heck, if you are re-elected, we will get another four years of open borders.

President Biden If you had read a book on American history, you would know that our borders were open until the late 1800’s but haven’t been ever since. And, since you are a wannabe dictator, you probably don’t realize that the president doesn’t have the power to open our borders. Only Congress can do that, but since you have hand picked the Republican leaders in Congress, Congress doesn’t do anything any more, is that right?

Mr. Trump Fancy talk for a Senior Citizen. But immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

President Biden Again, idiot talk from an idiot. Unless you are 100% Native American you are descended, as I am, from immigrants. Immigrants made this country great, and you want that, right? Obviously there is quite a mess at our southern border, with millions seeking asylum. When you were president, what was that immigration reform bill you got passed? Oh, that’s right, you Republicans won’t pass an immigration reform bill because you want to whine and wring your hands over the problem. Every time Democrats propose bills to solve the problem, you Republicans vote them down. Why is that Donald? Are you afraid they might take over the party?

President Biden And what about your plans to weaponize the federal bureaucracy? To extract the revenge and retribution you talk about all of the time?

Mr. Trump That’s why I need immunity from all laws as president.

President Biden But the federal government can only give you immunity from federal laws, right? Think, Don, I’ll go slowly. But your legal problems aren’t just with the federal government. You have several court cases in various states, like Georgia and your home state of New York. You lost a fraud case in New York recently, and so you have villainized the state’s Attorney General: she can’t be both female and black and be competent, too, right Donald?

Mr. Trump She’s a Democrat acting on orders from you!

President Biden Oh, the states are so very good at taking orders from presidents, really? I suspect they will under your new administration, though.

Mr. Trump Damned right they will.

Mr. Trump Look at what you have done to the economy, the worst inflation in 50 years!

President Biden Wow, I am the cause of that, am I? I have more power that I thought, to be able to cause inflation here at home and then all around the world. If that is so then you must give me credit for reducing it, because we did so in advance of the rest of the world.

Actually much of the inflation we have suffered through was due to greedy corporations that felt they could raise prices willy-nilly and just blame it on inflation. Don’t deny it, we have CEOs on record saying that’s what they did or planned to do. And then you, and your minions in Congress, are working on another round of tax cuts for those selfsame greedy corporations. That’s a lot of gall, even for you, Mafia Don.

Mr. Trump Mafia Don? Are you calling me names?

President Biden Yeah, me, Sleepy Joe is calling you one of the many names you have earned for yourself. What, did you think you were the only one who could make up disparaging names for your opponents? (I can give you a definition of disparaging if you need one.)

Moderator We just have time for just one more statement each, gentlemen.

President Biden In case you haven’t noticed, Don, we can tell when you are lying. Yes, you have this tell, how do I put it? We can tell you are lying because your lips are moving.

Mr. Trump Hey, presidents need immunity from all prosecutions, otherwise when they leave office they will be prosecuted by their political opponents and the legal fees alone will bankrupt them.

President Biden (Subvocally) Or you could just not break any laws . . .CommentLikeYou can also reply to this email to leave a comment.

Uncommon Sense © 2024. Manage your email settings or unsubscribe.

Get the Jetpack app

Subscribe, bookmark, and get real-time notifications – all from one app!

What Common Core Won

This article, from 2017, is by Curmudgucation (retired English teacher Peter Greene), and is a great summary of the actual results of the Common Core movement. He reprinted it today (12/29/2023).

=================

I’ve said often that the Common Core failed in its creators’ central goal– to establish a set of national standards followed “with fidelity” by every school from Maine to Alaska. Every school would follow the exact same set of learning goals so that a child who left Iowa to attend school in Florida could make the switch without missing a step. The standards would be set in cement (remember the rule that a state could only add 15% additional Stuff) and we would all march together in lockstep into a fully-standardized perfect education future.

But the Core was revealed as both political kryptonite and amateur-hour educational junk. It entered the Bad Policy Witness Protection Program and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. Also, states took about five minutes to realize they could go ahead and rewrite, alter and add anything they damn well felt like.

David Coleman’s dream of fifty states all yoked to his vision was dead.

But something else was not dead, and is, in regrettable fact, very much alive.

Once upon a time, school districts would plan curriculum, the whole scope and sequence and pedagogical approach as well as the actual content– they would do all of that by consulting the experts that they had already hired. Maybe a curriculum director if they had one, or some other administrator if they didn’t. Certainly an assortment of their actual classroom teachers. Those folks might consult some other reliable sources as well as using their own professional judgment to develop the district’s educational plan.

But that was once upon a time.

Now the goal is standards-based curriculum.

Instead of curriculum conversations that begin with “What do we believe a graduate of our school district should know?” we now get conversations that begin with “Let’s take a look at the standards.” And then schools use them as a checklist. Let’s work our way down the list of standards and make sure that we have something written into the curriculum that allows us to check off each one so that we can say it’s “covered.” And let’s be double-certain when it comes to the tested standards.

Here are the questions that are not answered (and sometimes not asked) in attempts to build standards-based curriculum:

Where did these standards come from? Who wrote them, and is there some reason to believe that they know better than our own trained professionals what students in our district should learn? Are the standards based on any sort of research, and is that research valid and trustworthy?

What is not covered by the standards? Are the standards strictly focused on skills while ignoring content (spoiler alert: probably)? Are there areas of our course of study that we, in our considered professional judgment, consider vital, but which the standards do not address? And if there are any, given a finite school year, can we discuss setting aside some of the standards in order to make room for content and material that we consider important?

When the Common Core wave passed, it had swept away the notion that actual teachers and administrators are experts in education. Instead, the standards-based school district now assumes that nobody in the school system actually knows what should be taught, and that the most they can be trusted with is to “unpack” the standards and create a checklist-certified list of education activities that will meet the standards’ demands. That’s the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the district doesn’t believe that trained education professionals can be trusted with even that much, and should just be handed materials that dictate the teacher’s every move, throwing aside their professional judgment and replacing it with the judgment of some bureaucrat or textbook publisher.

Worst of all for the long run, this approach has infected schools of education who prepare their few remaining future teachers to accept this, to envision for themselves a diminished role as content delivery specialists or instructional facilitators or classroom coaches.

Common Core was pitched against a definite enemy– the teachers who insisted in teaching things in their own classroom just because they thought those things were worth teaching, the teacher who insisted on using her own professional judgment, the teacher who wanted to function as an autonomous individual. Ironically, even though the Common Core did not conquer the nation’s school districts as it had hoped, it did manage to deliver a serious defeat to its chosen enemy.  We now understand in (too many) districts that we must adhere to the Standards, which have descended manna-like from some mysterious, magical higher power. They are not to be argued with or contradicted, nor will there be any discussion of the educational wisdom (or lack thereof) behind them. They are to be treated as our compass, our grail, our North Star. Teachers should sit down, shut up, and start aligning.

And that defeat of professional educators, that clampdown on teacher autonomy– that’s the one victory that Common Core State (sic) Standards can claim.

Refusal by Muslims to accept Jews as equals is the source of the conflict.

I am copying the response by Chaim Handler on Quora to this question:

Why couldn’t Jews and Arabs get along in Palestine? Is Zionism the source of the conflict?

Handler replied:

Obviously Zionism is the cause of the conflict, just as Abolitionism was the cause of the conflict between the Union and the Confederate States, leading to the United States Civil War. Correcting injustice can harm those who benefit from that injustice, even if that injustice is not their fault. In the case of Zionism, the injustice was 75 generations of subjugation and persecution of an entire nation in exile.

In the words of the Arab mayor of Jerusalem during the late 19th century, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi: “Zionism in principle is natural, beautiful, and just… Who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country”. He wrote this in March 1899 in a letter to the chief Rabbi of France. Of course there was a “but”, and the “but” was just as true as his admission of the justification for ZIonism. He argued that implementation of Zionism would cause upheaval for the Arab population, and it would, without any doubt. That fact was not about to deter the Jews from exercising the rights that even he acknowledged as just.

When the League of Nations decided to implement Zionism as an integral aspect of the Mandate for Palestine, they had to weigh what they termed “the grounds for the reconstitution of the Jewish national home” against the right of what they termed the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” to self-rule, and their verdict was that the non-Jewish communities in Palestine were not entitled to further deny the Jewish People their liberty within their ancestral homeland.

At the time there were approximately 500,000 Ottoman Arabs living in what was defined by the Allied Powers as Palestine. For every one of those Arabs there were at least 25 Jews in the world who had parents, grandparents, great-grandparents… 75 generations of antecedents, all of whom were denied their freedom and persecuted because of their religious and ethnic background. More than a century of “enlightenment” had not led to an end to the persecution of the Jews and there was no indication that the injustices suffered by Jews in the diaspora would end. This could be the last opportunity to put an end to the exile of the Jewish People. How could they allow such a chance to slip away?

Their recognition of the humanitarian crisis caused by anti-Jewish persecution was proven correct in the most extreme and tragic manner barely two decades later, when a third of the Jews in the world were exterminated by the Nazis. The reconstitution of the Jewish national home was not only “just” but necessary. The former Ottoman Arabs populating the Near East were achieving their independence with the establishment of many vast lands from Egypt to the Emirates, including Syria, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, etc.

While the Palestine was to be the Jewish home, it was made clear that the Jewish home was to be governed as a democracy where the civil rights of all were to be protected, non-Jews would have complete religious freedom, and their culture and lifestyle would be preserved. In fact one of every five Israeli citizens is Arab and enjoys full equality and democratic rights, and few Israeli Arabs today regret that their parents or grandparents chose to remain rather than fleeing to lands where they would live under Arab hegemony but lack the freedoms and opportunities Israel affords them.

Certainly Zionism caused conflict, but that fact does not prove that Zionism is unjust. To a great extent the harmful effects of the implementation of Zionism could have been prevented, had the Arabs demonstrated any appreciation for the reality that Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi acknowledged in his letter. Most if not all of the hardships suffered by the Arabs as a result of Zionism were the effect of their futile resistance to what turned out to be inevitable. They didn’t care about the legitimate rights of the Jewish People. They cared only about the privilege they believed themselves entitled to as Arabs and Moslem in the predominately Arab Middle East. They see themselves as the victims of Israel’s failure to allow the Arabs to defeat them, which is really sad and pathetic.

At this stage the conflict is perpetuated only by the stubborn refusal of the Palestinians to reconcile themselves to the reality that has existed 73 years. There is no turning back the clock. Looking forward the Palestinians and Israelis can be partners in a mutually beneficial future, or the hardships being suffered by the Palestinians can continue indefinitely. The choice is theirs.

Space Travel ** to Any Exoplanet** is Impossible. Stop Messing up our Only Planet!

When I show people things in the sky, I want them to realize how lucky we are to live on a nice, warm, wet little planet in a relatively safe part of a medium-large galaxy, and that if we aren’t careful, we could turn this planet into one of those many varieties of deadly hell that they are viewing in the eyepiece.

We should be very thankful that this planet got formed in a solar system that had sufficient oxygen, silicon, iron, nitrogen, and carbon for life as we know it. We are fortunate that all of those ‘metals’ I just listed (as astronomers call them) got cooked up in cycle after cycle of stars that went boom or whooshed their outer layers into the Milky Way. We are lucky to be alive at the far multicellular side of the timeline of life on Earth*, and that no star has gone supernova in our neighborhood recently or aimed a gamma-ray burst directly at us.

We are exceedingly lucky that a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years and allowed our ancestors, the mammals, to take over. We can rejoice that most of us in the USA can have our physical needs (food, shelter, clean water, clean air, and communication) taken care of by just turning a knob or a key, or pushing a button, instead of hauling the water or firewood on our backs. (There are, obviously, many folks here and abroad who live in tents and who have essentially none of those nice things. We could do something about that, as a society, if we really wanted to.)

I am often asked whether there is life elsewhere. My answer is that I am almost positive that there are lots of planets with some form of life in every single galaxy visible in an amateur telescope. But there is no possible way for us humans to ever visit such a planet. Nor can aliens from any exoplanet ever visit us, whether they be single-celled organisms or something you would see in a Sci-Fi movie.

Yes, it is possible to send a handful of people to Mars, if we are willing to spend enormous sums of money doing so, and if the voyagers are willing to face loss of bone and muscle mass, and the dangers of lethal radiation, meteorites, accidental explosions, and freezing to death. If they do survive the voyage, then by all means, let them pick up some rocks and bring them back for analysis before they die.

But wait: we already have robots that can do that! Plus, robots won’t leave nearly as many germs behind as would a group of human beings. And we already know a lot about how Mars looks, because of all the great photos sent back by ESA, JAXA, NASA and others for some decades now. You can see photos taken by NASA at JMARS, which I highly recommend. (https://jmars.asu.edu/ )

While one can justify sending a few brave folks to Mars for a little while, it is completely insane to think that we can avoid our terrestrial problems by sending large populations there. Mars is often colder than Antarctica, is close to waterless, has poisonous perchlorates in its soil, no vegetation whatsoever, and no atmosphere to speak of. How would millions or billions of exiles from Earth possibly live there? Do you seriously think they can gather enough solar energy to find and melt sufficient water to drink and cook and bathe and grow plants and livestock in the huge, pressurized, aluminum cans they would need to live in? No way.

I wish there was some way to get around the laws of physics, and that we could actually visit other exoplanets. But there isn’t, and we can’t. I’ve seen estimates that accelerating a medium-sized spaceship to a mere 1% of the speed of light would require the entire energy budget of the entire human population of the planet for quite some time. (For example, see https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/447246/energy-requirements-for-relativistic-acceleration ) 

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that you could actually generate enough energy to accelerate that spaceship with nuclear fusion or something. The next problem is the distance. It’s a bit over 4 light years to the nearest known exoplanet in a straight line, (compared with about half an hour for Jupiter) which means that a one-way trip to Proxima or Alpha Centauri for any possible spaceship, at one percent of the speed of light, (3,000 km per second), in a straight line, and pretending that you don’t need years and years to both accelerate and decelerate, would take over four centuries.

Our fastest spacecraft so far, the Parker Solar Probe, reaches the insanely fast speed of 190 km/sec, but that’s still fifteen times slower than my hypothetical 1% of c. At the speed of Parker, it would take around six thousand years to reach the Proxima Cen planetary system! If all goes well!

Do you seriously think that a score or so generations of humans would agree that they, and their descendants for the entire 400 years, would live in a large metal box with no gravity to speak of, subject to who knows how many blasts of gamma rays, x-rays, and super-high-energy cosmic particles? What are the chances that each single generation would agree to stay the course and that nothing would go wrong? Solar panels would not produce any energy to speak of for most of the trip!

The argument is made that perhaps the travelers would be put into suspended life. If that were possible, and nothing went wrong, upon arrival, they could send some radio message back to Earth saying, “Hi, we made it, wish you were here…” That reply will of course take four years to reach Earth. Would people back on Earth still remember the few dozen who began the trip out, made over 4 centuries earlier, at an absolutely prodigious expense?

And the return trip would take another 400 years, if they can find a proper power source…

But that’s just for the very closest exoplanet. The others are all much, much farther away, so one-way trips for ones within 10 parsecs, i.e., in our tiny corner of our galaxy, at one percent of the speed of light, would require a thousand to three thousand years to reach. Each way.

Forget it. Just send a radio message, and see if we get a reply. Oh, wait – we’ve been doing that for several decades so far. No reply so far.

Speaking of radio – it’s only 120 years since Marconi first sent a very crude radio message from a ship to a station on land, and now we routinely use enormous parts of the entire electromagnetic spectrum for all sorts of private and public purposes, including sending messages like this one. Astronomers are able to gather amazing amounts of information via the longest radio waves to the very shortest gamma rays and make all sorts of inferences about worlds we have never seen at optical wavelengths. In addition, we have begun detecting gravity waves from extremely distant and powerful events with devices whose accuracy is quite literally unbelievable.

There is no planet B. We must, absolutely must, take care of this one, lest we turn into one of those freezing or burning variations of hell that we see through our eyepieces. Think I’m being alarmist? We now know this nice little planet Earth is more fragile than we once believed. It has been discovered that life was almost completely wiped out on this planet several times. The Chixculub impact I mentioned earlier, the Permian extinction and Snowball Earth are just three such events.

More recently, folks thought it was impossible for people to cause the extinction or near-extinction of the unbelievably huge flocks and herds and schools that once roamed the earth: passenger pigeons, buffaloes, cod, salmon, redwoods, elms, chestnuts, elephants, rhinos, tropical birds, rainforests, and so on, but we did, and continue to do so. The quantities of insects measured at site after site around the world have plummeted by 30 to 70% and more, over just a few decades, and so have the numbers of migratory birds observed on radar feeds. Light pollution, the bane of us amateur and professional astronomers, seems to be partly responsible for both the insect and bird population declines.

In addition, we are dumping incredible amounts of plastic into the oceans, and rising water temperatures are causing coral reefs around the world to bleach themselves and die, while melting glaciers are causing average sea levels rise and threaten more and more low-lying cities.

What’s more, only a very tiny fraction of our planet’s mass is even habitable by humans: the deepest mine only goes down a few miles, and people die of altitude sickness when they climb just a few miles above sea level. Most of the planet is covered by ocean, deserts, and ice cap. By volume, the livable part of this planet is infinitesimal, and the temperatures on it are rising at an alarming rate.

Will we be able to curb the burning and leaking of fossil fuels sufficiently so as to turn around the parts of global warming caused by increases in carbon dioxide and methane? I am not optimistic, given that the main emitters have kept essentially none of the promises that they have been making to those various international gatherings on climate, and graphs like this one:

Copied from: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

I have been wondering whether we may need to reduce temperatures more directly, by putting enough sulfur compounds into the stratosphere. We have excellent evidence that very violent volcanic eruptions have the power to lower global temperatures with the sulfates they put into the stratosphere. It would not be great for ground-based astronomy if such compounds were artificially lofted high into the atmosphere to lower global temperatures, and we won’t know for sure exactly which areas of the planet would benefit and which would be harmed, but at least it’s an experiment that can be stopped pretty easily, since the high-altitude sulfates would dissipate in a few years. High-altitude sulfates do not seem to cause the obvious harm that SO₂ does at the typical altitude of a terrestrial coal-burning power plant.

Adding iron to the oceans to increase the growth of phytoplankton, which then consumes CO₂, dies, and settles to the bottom of the ocean, has been tried a number of times, but doesn’t seem to have a very large effect.

I agree that large-scale injection of sulfates into the stratosphere is scary. I also agree that there is a whole lot of unknown unknowns out there and inside of us, and we are being very short-sighted, as usual.

1. We have mapped the far side of the moon better than we have mapped the floors of Earth’s oceans – yet permits are being filed right now to begin deep-ocean dredging for manganese nodules, which will enrich some folks greatly. Unfortunately, that dredging is bound to utterly destroy those slow-growing ecosystems, before we even know what’s down there in the first place!

• We continue to dump unbelievable amounts of plain old trash, fish nets, fishing lines, live ammunition, modern warships and hazardous chemicals into the oceans.

• While the waters and atmosphere of the USA are much, much cleaner now than they were when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, places like Delhi or Beijing are so polluted that folks can barely see the sun on a clear day.

• If dark matter and dark energy really do exist, that means that scientists have absolutely no idea what 96% of the universe is made of!

• If dark matter and dark energy don’t exist, then that means that astrophysicists don’t understand long-distance gravity and physics nearly as well as they thought. The late Vera Rubin (a past NCA member who should have won a Nobel for her careful measurements of the rotational measurements of galaxies that led to the Dark Matter hypothesis) once told me when we were co-chaperoning a field trip to the Smithsonian for the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Saturday program for middle-schoolers, that she thought that the entire question is perfectly open. I think she’s still correct.

• If the Big Bang is real, then how come the Webb is seeing fully-formed galaxies as far back in time as it can see?

• Do the alternative theories to the Big Bang (eg, Burbridge’s hypothesis that matter is being created in the centers of active galactic nuclei) make any sense?

But — does anybody have better solutions?

Can we engineer our way out of the mess we are making on this planet – the only home that humans will ever have?

There is cause for optimism:

• Our NCA speaker this month, Deborah Shapley, will tell how, almost exactly a century ago, astronomers finally figured out that the Milky Way was just one of many billions of other galaxies. Since that time, the amount of astronomical information gathered has been staggering, as has the efficacy of the instruments!

• I have vivid memories about how smoggy and stinky the air used to be on a typical summer day in almost any American city of my youth. A fat-rendering plant right here in Georgetown (DC) stank worse than a hundred skunks, and is now gone. I know a paper mill in West Virginia whose fumes had long killed almost all the vegetation downwind of the factory. Nearby, acid drainage from an abandoned coal mine turned a stream so acidic that the rocks (and water) were amazing shades of orange, reds, and yellow. The rivers of this national often flowed with raw sewage, trash, and mine waste. Some, like the Cuyahoga, even caught fire, repeatedly (see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-least-dozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/ ). The passage and actual enforcement of the Clean Air  and the Clean Water Acts have cleaned up the air and water in this country to an amazing degree in my lifetime (I’m over 70). However, my friends who grew up in India and China tell me that the air and water pollution over there is worse than I can possibly imagine and is not improving at all.

• When I was young, it appeared that nearly every adult I knew chain-smoked cigarettes and drank a lot of alcohol, and the bars, restaurants, dormitories, private houses, classrooms,  buses and airplanes everywhere were filled with tobacco smoke. Today, I seldom encounter the nasty smell of tobacco smoke anywhere, and the number of drunk-driving fatalities is way down as well.

• During my youth, the various nuclear powers exploded literally hundreds of nuclear weapons in the open air and underwater, spewing Strontium-90 and other radionucleides into things like cow or human milk, and doing untold destruction to the oceans nearby. While the number of world-wide nuclear explosions per year has dropped tremendously since then, they still continue, and may start up again on a larger scale.

• Some noteworthy experiments re stopping global warming are listed in this month’s National Geographic. One of them, which has promise but also obvious drawbacks, involves dumping large quantities of finely ground-up alkaline rocks and minerals like  olivine counteract the increasing acidification of the seas being caused by the absorption of so much carbon dioxide. Will these experiments work? I don’t know.

But let us not turn this planet – the only home we will ever know – into one of the barren, freezing or boiling versions of hell we see in the eyepieces of a telescope.

I have raised pigs, and I noticed that they never foul their own beds, if they are given any room to move around. Let’s be better than pigs and stop trying to extract riches in the short run while destroying the lovely planet we all love in the long run!

Heaven is not somewhere else.

It’s right here, if we can keep it that way and fix the damage we have done.

======================================================

* For five-sixths of the roughly 3.7-billion-year time line of life on earth, all living things were single-celled microbes (or a few microbes living together). We mammals have only been important for the last 1.7% of that time, and we humans have only harnessed radio for about 130 years, which is an infinitesimally small fraction of 3.7 billion. Assuming that planets and stars are created at random times in the history of the universe, and assuming that a certain amount of enrichment of the interstellar medium by many generations of dead stars is necessary before life can begin at all, then it looks to me like the odds are not at all good for intelligent life of any sort to exist right now on any random planet we may study. And, unfortunately, if they do exist, we will never meet them. If there is an incredibly advanced civilization somewhere within 100 light years that can actually detect those first radio signals, then they just received our first messages. If they do respond, we won’t get the answer for another century or two!

Video Interviews from Hamas and Gaza

I have just watched some interesting interviews about the Gaza/Hamas war.

One is from some of the Hamas fighters who were captured by the Israeli Defence Forces and who say that what they did was inexcusable, and that they were tricked by the leaders of Hamas:

Another one is by the son of the co-founder of Hamas, who has nothing good at all to say about the organization:

Some thoughts on Israel/Palestine

I am cutting and pasting some thoughts from commenters on Steve Ruis’ blog. He pretty much blames the Israelis for the mess and wants the US to stop supporting their armed forces, but not all of his readers agree, as you can see below. My writing is highlighted just like this paragraph.

I would like to emphasize that Hamas explicitly sees their campaign as a religious jihad or crusade or war to **kill Jews**. They explicitly state that do not want to live in peace with Jews and Muslims and Christians in any secular state, and they scorn any negotiations. They want total victory in battle. Unfortunately, they have millions of supporters.

And they have fooled many folks around the world who call themselves anti-racists: they are supporting the most brazen and openly anti-Semitic, i.e., racist force in the world.

========================Here start the quotes =======================

Old-time religion (and I’m not referencing modern-day terminology) is at the core of these “war-like” activities. The only desired “freedom” harks back to (supposed) promises made by a non-existent god.

Comment by Nan — November 6, 2023 @ 12:30 pm | Reply

• This religious core is certainly true of Hamas specifically and widely shared by Palestinian civilians. It’s the same existential threat Israel has to face every day but one the West seems incapable of recognizing. Harris and other New Atheists have been banging the warning gong on this for quite some time. From Coyne: The core religious belief is “what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do. These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians—on purpose, not as collateral damage—and still consider themselves good.
• When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.
• If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, or resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around.
• The problem is religious certainty.” — November 14, 2023 @ 10:42 am | Reply
  • And this goes back to claim of equivalency. As Harris points out, “Yes, there are (religious ) lunatics on both sides, but the consequences of their lunacy are not equivalent—not even remotely equivalent. We haven’t spent the last 20 years taking our shoes off at the airport because there are so many fanatical Jews eager to blow themselves up on airplanes.”Harris’ point is that we all live in Israel now. It’s just a lot of Westerners don’t realize it.“
  • Of course, the boundary between Anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people, literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies, and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and yes… babies. And who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and who are using their own innocent noncombatants as human shields. If you’re both sides-ing this situation—or worse, if you are supporting the wrong side: if you are waving the flag of people who murder noncombatants intentionally, killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, burning people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace”, and decapitating others, and dragging their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is Great.”
  • If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days, in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics—who again, have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as though it were a religious sacrament, because for them it is a religious sacrament. If you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. 
  • Whether you’re an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.Yup, we all live in Israel now. It’s time to wake up and call out the both-sides-ism as serving only the jihadists.
    • ===================
• Me (GFB) writing here: I think there is a big difference between being an outright anti-Semite on the one hand, and being naive about who the good guys and the bad guys are. In general, I think anybody reading these words agrees that slavery and racism are bad, and that includes anti-Semitism. My friends on the left who are demonstrating against the Israeli military response see themselves also as opposing colonialism and imperialism.
• The problem, unfortunately, is that MohammedAllah repeatedly calls for killing Jews and calls them all sorts of despicable, racist names, mostly because they refused to believe that he was the true messenger of god. Hamas quotes his murderous words many times in their declaration, which I have posted links to in a previous post.
• Most people who call themselves Christians and Jews today only practice a very small fraction of the laws set forth in Leviticus, and if someone (like me) was raised a Christian (Episcopalian in my case) and later decides that he/she no longer believes any of that fairy tale, they may lose family connections (or not), but generally nobody will try to kill you. Unfortunately, that is not the case in Islam:
• ================ Here I am copying and pasting from Quora. I don’t read Arabic, so I have to rely on what others say:
• Does the Quran clearly state that apostates, those who have given up Islam, should be killed? Are there Muslims on Quora who support this?
• To be fair there are no direct orders to kill apostates in the Quran.
• However, one of their most authentic and trusted hadiths – Sahih Bukhari – very clearly states multiple times:
• Sahih Bukhari (52:260) – “…The Prophet said, ‘If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.’ “
• Sahih Bukhari (83:37) – “Allah’s Apostle never killed anyone except in one of the following three situations: (1) A person who killed somebody unjustly, was killed (in Qisas,) (2) a married person who committed illegal sexual intercourse and (3) a man who fought against Allah and His Apostle and deserted Islam and became an apostate.”
• Sahih Bukhari (84:57) – [In the words of] “Allah’s Apostle, ‘Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'”
• Sahih Bukhari (89:271) – A man who embraces Islam, then reverts to Judaism is to be killed according to “the verdict of Allah and his apostle.”
• There is also a consensus by all four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (i.e., Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafii), as well as classical Shiite jurists, that apostates from Islam must be put to death. The process of declaring a person to be an apostate is known as takfir and the disbeliever is called a murtad.
• The majority of all Muslims I’ve come across on Quora defend this practice and say that even today in Muslim-majority countries that it’s perfectly reasonable, acceptable and Ok under Sharia that someone should be executed if they publicly renounce their faith. In fact in Pakistan there are even “anti-blasphemy” laws where if you “insult the honor of the Prophet or Allah” then you can be put to death. Free Speech and Islam apparently don’t get along.
• Something which, frankly, is beyond a little worrying that Muslims don’t see as an issue.

Not thankful enough

It is absolutely amazing what a physically satisfying life I and many other of my fellow-citizens lead. I don’t think we give thanks to Jésus and Maria and José and Sara and Bill and Tyrone and Tynesha who do the hard work of bringing us clean water, electricity that hardly ever fails, natural gas for heating & cooking, an amazing interstate highway system, and internet connectivity, and clean my house, without me having to do anything except pay for it out of my generous retirement.

I would like to express my thanks to the crew and staff of DC Water for their recent and very neat, thorough, and expeditious replacement of the old lead water service line with a brand-new copper line at our house. There had been numerous years-long delays in getting the process started, but once the work began, it took under 6 hours.I watched most of the fascinating process. . .

Watching the “missile” slowly drill its way from a hole that they drilled very neatly into our basement wall, horizontally, to 3 neat, previously-dug and fairly small holes outside our house was fascinating. The missile really looks like one. It is powered by compressed air.

Since the gardener (ny wife) had previously put the front flower garden to bed, and a bunch of leaves kept falling, the only visible residue outside was a rather neat patch in the asphalt, and there was a small amount of brick dust and a slight scotch to a small piece of painted concrete.

I am so thankful to live in a country and in a city where we can have nice clean water by just turning a tap, at a price that I estimate as roughly 3 cents per gallon. And I electric lights that sometimes, if I want, can turn on just by moving into a room or approaching the porch. And inexpensive gas heat and a thermostat that keeps the temperature comfy for me and my cats. And a great sewage treatment program , arguably the best in the world!! (2cents out of that 3 cents is for the sewer system and its upgrades).

I am sad that so many people who have none of those things, but only the discomforts of modern life: wars, diseases, no heat in winter, nor relief from same in hot weather, and sometimes neither shelter, food or water.

In comparison, anyone reading this is, actually, greatly blessed by life in many, many ways, already — including by being connected to literally billions of other people and institutions, and access to nearly all of recorded history — for a pittance.

We aren’t grateful enough. I know I’m not.

Guy Brandenburg

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-