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

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

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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. 

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!

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.

Christian Nationalists are against Democracy

From Peter Greene:

===•=======•====

Why A National Christian Foundation?

PETER GREENE

NOV 8

Why is it that the continuing theme among certain folks is that this country was founded on Christian (or Judeo-Christian) principles? How does the myth of a Christian nation, and the desire to teach it to the young, fit in their larger picture?

We could devote an entire book or twelve to how that claim is incorrect, but the simplest end run around that argument is that this nation’s founding fathers could not agree about anything– not even whether or not they wanted to be founding fathers of this country– and so we should understand any statement along the lines of “The founding fathers all wanted X” is automatically disqualified. 

The Christian nation myth is certainly about establishing the primacy of Christianity in American life along with a privileged position for its adherents. 

But for many folks, the nation established on Christian principles myth goes hand in hand with a disbelief in democracy. 

I know we all understand that some folks in this country don’t much care for democracy, but I’m not sure we all understand just how much some folks disagree with democracy entirely. They could tolerate it for a long time while it was a game they were in a position to win. But as white Christians become an ever-smaller part of US citizenry, the dislike of democracy is becoming more open. 

Just this morning, we’ve got Rick Santorum saying out loud with his mouth the words “pure democracies are not the way to run a country.”

Robert P. Jones, honcho of Public Religion Research Institute (part of Brookings), in an interview with Chauncey DeVega, made this point while talking about Mike Johnson:

If you listen carefully to Johnson and others on the right, they use the word “republic” and not “democracy.” That is not just something pedantic. They believe in the rule of the virtuous, not in a “we the people” democracy where everyone is equally represented. What they’re actually committed to is a particular outcome where America’s laws and government and society correspond to God’s laws as they see it. That’s the only legitimate outcome for Johnson and other white Christian nationalists. Everything else is illegitimate. They will use the language of democracy and voting if it achieves their ends and goals, but Johnson and the other white Christian nationalists and many other conservatives at present are not committed to those principles and values if they come out on the losing side of a democratic election.

Katherin Stewart, in The Power Worshippers (a must-read) put it even more succinctly:

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

I think there’s one more layer to this. In theNew York Times, David French responds to Johnson’s claim about using the Bible as his chief policy guide by pointing out that Johnson, as a supporter of The Big Lie, is violating the Biblical principle of honesty. But I will bet dollars to dishrags that Johnson doesn’t see it that way.

There’s a phrase that my evangelical friends like to use– “in the world, but not of it.” It reflects a view that Christians are just passing through this world, but their task is to pass through without getting any of its cooties on them. I maintained that it was why Betsy DeVos as education secretary appeared to never even kind of try to be accountable to the legislature– they are of this world, but she is not, and so she owes them nothing. 

Honesty is an ethical behavior we owe toward fellow humans, but when Christian nationalists look around, they don’t see fellow humans. They see worldly sinners pursuing illegitimate goals through illegitimate means using illegitimately tools, like, say, democracy. Godly Christians owe those various layers of illegitimacy nothing. It’s not wrong to lie to them, to manipulate them or abuse power to shut them up, because they are of this world and its sinful, illegitimate pursuits, and righteous folks are called to avoid compliance with them, called even to thwart them and battle them with whatever tools are handy.

Democracy is fine, when it’s useful for truer pursuits. But for Christian nationalists, democracy is at best a tool, but not a foundational principle of this country. For them, the foundational principles are alignment with God’s Truth (as they understand it), and everything takes a back seat to that. This is why attempting to argue that public schools are important democratic institutions, a foundation of a democratic nation–those arguments mean nothing to Christian nationalists who don’t particularly value democracy in the first place.

The movement undoubtedly a mixture of true believers and opportunists. Either way, part of the push is for children to be taught that the foundation of this country is not democracy or Enlightenment principles, but the word of God (as they understand it), and to that end, to take public education away from the people who have made it “Satan’s youth ministry.” That’s why injecting programs like the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum (which targeted history before any other subject matter) is a goal, and why this particular sub-sect of right wingers will continue to focus on how US history is taught– because it’s critical to their cause, and their power, that people grow up understanding that the country is meant to be ruled by only those who understand God’s Immutable Objective Truth, and not just any shmoe that a bunch of people vote for.

What Hamas Wants

My friends on the left who support Hamas’ attack of a month ago are making a big mistake.

They should read, for themselves, the Hamas founding document.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

It is a call for butchery and for a Muslim theocracy over the entire world that would specifically attempt to subjugate or kill all Jews, all Christians, all atheists, and those of any other faith as well.

Read what it says about you leftists, or about the idea of a multi-ethnic, secular state in the region between the Jordan, the Mediterranean, and the Sinai peninsula!

These religious fanatics make any right-wing European or American Christian nationalist look like peace-loving moderates by comparison.

Here are a few excerpts. I highlighted a few of them.

=====•========•=====

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”

…

“The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It goes on to reach out and become one with another chain that includes the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

“Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

“The Slogan of the Islamic Resistance Movement:

“Article Eight:

“Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.

…

“Strategies and MethodsStrategies of the Islamic Resistance Movement: Palestine Is Islamic [W]aqf:

“Article Eleven:

“The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?

“This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.

…

“Peaceful Solutions, Initiatives and International Conferences:

“Article Thirteen:

“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. “Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know.”

“Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?

“But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.” (The Cow – verse 120).

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.”

====•======•=====

These are not people you should be allying with!

The dangers of seeking revenge

I didn’t write this, and I’ve never shot at anyone, but this article seems very apt when you think of the bloodthirsty, racist butchery last month perpetrated by Hamas in the region where I once lived.

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

Hamas, Israel, and the Dark Power of Vengeance

I know what it feels like to be driven by vengeance in warfare. I also know it can lead soldiers to cross the line.

WILL SELBER

NOV 6, 2023

A teddy bear is seen on the ground near the bomb shelter of a kibbutz home attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in Holit, Israel, near the border with Gaza. According to an IDF officer, two grandparents who resided here held the bomb shelter door closed during the attack to protect their grandchildren. All were injured but survived. (Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

I WAS ONE MONTH into my first deployment when I saw my first dead little girl.

It was 2006 in Baghdad, and the Shia–Sunni civil war had erupted in full force. Carnage greeted us daily.

Hers wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen. Hardly. I had already responded to multiple mass-casualty car bombs that ripped through Baghdad’s markets. My boots were often covered with blood as I stepped over and through scores of dying Iraqis crying out for help.

But her murder was different.

Her body was crumpled in the back of an Iraqi Police Ford Ranger, alongside other victims of a powerful Iranian-backed terrorist group, Jaysh al-Mahdi.

We pushed the other bodies to the side of the truck and pulled her to the rear. She had been gagged and handcuffed, and her head punctured by a drill bit. We later found out that she had been raped in front of her family, to punish them for being Sunnis.

Her face still haunts me. At night, when I’m alone, and the demons come, I still see her face—with that puncture hole. Some nights, she comes to me in my nightmares, begging me to avenge her.

All I wanted was to avenge her innocence. But the culprits were my partners, the Iraqi Police. The Iraqi Police were thoroughly infested by Jaysh al-Mahdi fighters because they controlled the Ministry of Interior. I would never get my chance to avenge her death—and I’ve yet to fully forgive myself.

But I would eventually taste vengeance. During my years in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw other atrocities up close and personal. The Taliban, the Haqqani Network, the Islamic State, and al Qaeda routinely murdered, raped, and tortured innocent civilians.

Killing those terrorists was intoxicating. Whether it was in a firefight or planning an operation and watching it unfold, slaying monsters is immensely satisfying. In fact, it is addictive, so I kept going back on six separate deployments.

---

THROUGHOUT THOSE DEPLOYMENTS, I learned that righteous vengeance is a potent drug.

That’s not something most people understand. When in polite society, I often speak of the horrors of war, of which there are many. This is the sort of thing that most Americans—especially well-meaning liberals—expect to hear, and want to hear.

Only once have I spoken openly and honestly about the thrill of killing. After a few too many drinks at an upscale party in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive woman asked me, “What’s the best thing about deploying?”

I stared at her deadpan and said, “Killing those animals for what they did.”

The roomful of pleasant professionals looked aghast.

---

THESE EXPERIENCES FLOODED MY MIND after seeing the horrific images of Hamas’s October 7 pogrom. Upon seeing the mutilated bodies of innocent children, I started thinking about all the children I had seen slaughtered by similar groups.

My fists immediately closed, and my shoulders furled forward. My jaws clenched tight, an acid taste flooding my mouth. These were the same physiological reactions I had when I saw atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As adrenaline coursed through my body and my rage peaked, I wanted only one thing—vengeance for the innocent massacred in Israel. It is the same feeling that hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers likely feel, many of them now in or preparing to enter Gaza.

In the coming weeks, the IDF will face perhaps the biggest military test since its creation 75 years ago. That is saying something for such a vaunted fighting force. They will face a determined enemy who has likely meticulously planned their defense. There will be snipers, attempts to kidnap soldiers via tunnels, human shields, suicide bombers, and likely advanced Iranian weapons (be on the lookout for explosively formed projectiles).

They will be fighting while the world watches intensely. Every exchange of fire will be filmed by ubiquitous cell phones, some broadcast in real time. Every Hamas fighter and supporter will try to paint IDF actions as inhumane so they can be used as propaganda, sapping the West’s resilience in the process.

The IDF will be held to a standard that Hamas is never judged by. It is not fair, and it will inevitably lead to the death of many IDF soldiers. It would be far easier to just fire and forget, civilian casualties be damned. Although my experiences in urban warfare weren’t existential, I often felt enraged when I could not respond in kind. Taking potshots from nearby mosques was very common in Baghdad. In Afghanistan, Taliban fighters would intentionally fire at us from crowded bazaars, then melt into the population, daring us to overreact. In Iraq, Iranian-backed terrorists often handed out toy guns to young boys. I nearly killed a young Iraqi boy during a dismounted patrol because of Iran’s disregard for life. Other American service members in a similar situation did pull that trigger—and were forever haunted.

---

WHILE IT IS NOT FAIR that the IDF is held to a different standard, it is also what makes them a fundamentally liberal fighting force. In a recent interview, Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, boasted, “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves.”

This echoes many other terrorists since 2001 who mocked the softness of Westerners for loving life while priding themselves for loving death. Hamas believes slaughtering babies, raping women, and kidnapping Holocaust survivors is their strength, but it will be their ruination.

Hamas’s brutality galvanized public opinion against them. They are now being painted as akin to the Islamic State by many Western leaders, including, most importantly, President Biden. This type of rhetoric provides vast room to maneuver for the IDF. However, the IDF’s righteous vengeance must be properly vectored. IDF sergeants and company-grade officers will have to walk a fine line by harnessing the power of their righteous vengeance in eliminating Hamas while also ensuring they don’t become the monsters they hope to destroy.

It happened to the United States in My Lai and Abu Ghraib. It happened to Staff Sgt. Robert Bales in a small district in Afghanistan. I know American service members who crossed that line after one of their friends was killed. They hungered for vengeance. And to a man, they regret it to this day.

Soldiers cross the line in battle. It happens in every war. When you allow men to kill, some inevitably go too far. That’s because there is a powerful temptation to respond to your enemy’s atrocities with similar brutality. Again: Bloodlust is a very real thing. I know that firsthand. I’ve felt it running through my veins. But it is also perilous. While the IDF must be ferocious and unleash overwhelming force to vanquish Hamas, they must also not lose themselves in the process. The balance is incredibly difficult to maintain, especially in an urban environment where the enemy lurks in every crevice—and after witnessing the most deadly attack against Jews since the Shoah.

The IDF will be fighting to restore deterrence. They will be fighting to destroy Hamas. They will also be fighting to avenge the 1,400 Jews who were butchered. That will motivate them to endure. It will steel their resolve. It mustn’t, however, change who they are.

Israelis love life. And in the final analysis, that is their strength, not their weakness.

Got Standards?

When I was teaching I noticed that new standards, objectives, goals, and buzzwords, goals, objectives and standards got rolled out every few years or so, only to be abandoned, deprecated, and forgotten shortly thereafter.

“Mr Fitz” is a good observer of a lot of the craziness in American education today. This long strip is about the nutty idea that educational Standards are the one and only thing that can save American education, and hence save the world.

Curmudgucation: 40 Years of Failure by the “Ed Reformers” – Now What?

Peter Greene has some suggestions:

https://open.substack.com/pub/curmudgucation/p/the-end-of-ed-reform-and-a-clue-for?r=3u611&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

I had been also thinking (but did not write down) that the tide would turn, and that teachers and schools themselves would no longer be seen as the whole cause of poverty or brilliance.

Instead, I feared that racists would once again become free to loudly and publicly blame black and brown people for their own poverty, just like they did from the end of Reconstruction 147 years ago, right up through the anti-Civil Rights backlash of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1983 the essay (disguised as an objective report) called “Nation At Risk” (NAR) jump-started an Education Reform drive that was truly bi-partisan, and had scores of billionaires both liberal (eg Gates) and conservative (eg Waltons) willing to fund it and push politicians to back it. Presidents Clinton, Bush2, and Obama and their secretaries of education all embraced it.

If you hadn’t noticed, this reform movement failed completely.

By its own terms (that is, test scores).

Despite having ‘edu-reformers’ in charge of every single large public school system in the nation.

But it took a while for those failures to become obvious.

At first, only a handful of writers such as Gerald Bracey pointed out the errors in that study and in the reformers’ steamroller. When the report first came out, I was teaching math to 7th graders in a very poor region of DC, and felt embarrassed that so many of my students there (100% Black) did so poorly in school, despite my efforts and those of my colleagues.

Some teachers from East Asia warned me not to believe the hype surrounding NAR. They said the model of education that exists in China, Japan, Korea and so on was NOT one that should be emulated by the US.

But I did believe the myth.

Later, I read some columns by Bracey and others and began to have doubts.

Then the amazing fraud Michelle Rhee was given control of DC’s entire public school system in 2007, less than two years before I retired.

I had never heard of the woman before, but upon her being named Chancellor of DCPS, I heard that she claimed to have performed educational miracles in a low-income, all-Black public school as a 3rd and 4th grade charter school teacher in Baltimore. She wrote in her resume: “Over a two-year period” in the mid-1990s she “moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”

When I read that sentence in her resume, I seem to recall my jaw literally dropping open.

If you have ever been around kids and looked at their test scores, you would realize that this feat would be the equivalent of landing a triple axel in ice skating, while also sinking a three-pointer in the NBA, and running a marathon in under two hours.

Simultaneously.

If this really had happened, it would have been front-page news in every single publication that dealt with education.

(Sounds like George Santos took lessons on fake resume claims from Michelle Rhee!)

Of course, there were no such articles. So I scratched my head and wondered.

After I retired, someone pointed me to where the fairly detailed Baltimore test scores could be found. I looked at them, and found that she had mythologized a small bump in test scores into the greatest educational achievement ever accomplished, anywhere. And nobody had called her on this lie.

I suspect that the bump can be attributed in large part to the fact that over one third of the students at her grade level, at that school, in that year, had scores that were so low that they weren’t counted!!! I wrote a few posts on my blog about it, and even did a call-in on an NPR interview with her, asking why she lied so much, in particular about those scores. She just giggled, as if to imply that I was just being an idiot for trying to call her on such a small technicality, when she was still working miracles.

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From the Daily Howler: “In the 1994-1995 school year, the seven schools run by EAI were under enormous pressure. During and after the previous year, major disputes had broken out about the low test scores of the EAI schools; by the fall of 1994, everyone knew that the pressure was on, that the plug might be pulled on the program. (As a simple Nexis search will show, all these matters were being discussed in the Baltimore Sun.) Do we possess three brain cells among us? If any school in the EAI group had an educational miracle occurring, this glorious fact would have been shouted to the skies by EAI’s corporate leadership. Trust us: The teachers involved would have gained acclaim in the national media—the kind of “acclaim” Rhee used to say she had attained, before she realized she had to stop saying it. It’s absurd to think there was some large group of third-graders “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher,” but their test scores somehow never came to the attention of the UMBC researchers.”

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Apparently nobody else with any knowledge of basic, elementary statistics and probability had previously bothered to compare those actual scores with her extraordinary claims. So I wrote what I found, with a fair amount of fury at the fact that such an amazing, world-class fraud and liar could be in charge of education in my home city, Washington, DC, the very seat of national government and so on. I got my 15 minutes of fame, but while Rhee did retire in disgrace, she has unfortunately never been indicted for fraud, even though she clearly suborned all sorts of cheating and erasing of bubble marks on students’ tests, and gave prizes and awards to one of the most prolific cheaters, a principal in my own neighborhood. (see here for some details.)

As I have recently feared, but did not put into writing, the really scary part now is that right-wingers and racists are using the failure of this billionaire-led disruption of public schools to get rid of the very idea of public education as a public good. They applaud the self-segregation.

Along with Curmudgucation, I find the prospect very scary.