FEMA Follies

 My friend Susan posted:   "News broke yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had advised federal emergency workers to evacuate Rutherford County, North Carolina, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, because of concerns about their safety after Trump and MAGA Republicans spread the false rumor that federal agents are forcing people off their land to start lithium mining projects. The alert came after the U.S. Forest Service sent an email to federal responders saying that National Guard troops had encountered armed militia saying they were “hunting FEMA.” FEMA officials will no longer go door-to-door with disaster assistance, but instead will stay in fixed locations." Heather Cox Richardson

I commented:   In a recent call to a radio program, a caller revealed that he and his wife were deeply worried about his father-in-law. They did not live in Florida and so could not help him. His home had been severely damaged by the hurricane, he had no power, and he was going hungry. When they told him to get aid from FEMA, he informed them that FEMA was trying to give him money, but he refused  to take it because he had heard on right wing media that if you take aid from FEMA they will steal your home

The caller concluded that this is a cult in action.

The Dumbing Of College

I really hate to contradict myself, even an earlier self, but I must admit that the prevalence of screens in the lives of younger generations has had a disturbing impact on the ability to read effectively. Of course, a huge portion of the culpability is a direct result of the inanity of no child left behind and other educational atrocities we have inflicted upon our children.

Competition for scores makes no sense in the collegial and highly social setting of education. It's as if we told doctors that we would pay them according to how many of their patients recovered (or survive,) so that they would hide the secrets to their success in order to can earn more money by letting the patients of their competitors die.

I can give my 40 year younger self a pat on the back for having recognized the stupidity of competitive based education and standardized testing abused as a measure of teacher and school effectiveness; which greatly contributed to the inability of our younger generations to read it understand lengthy and complex texts.

Still, I think screens are playing a part in all of this.  

>Educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core "emphasized informational texts and standardized tests for over two decades," said The Atlantic. As a result, teachers shifted from reading books to short passages, "mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests." Shifting toward truncated reading was meant to help train kids to better synthesize information from texts, Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, said to the outlet. But in doing so, we’ve "sacrificed young people's ability to grapple with long-form texts in general."<

https://theweek.com/education/college-students-read-books

Knots Of Time

 A Snippit About that Meme 

It was one of the  oddest cases that Dr. Philbine had ever encountered.

The patient was hysterically excited and displayed a deeply passionate conviction that the world owed him a debt of gratitude that should be boundless and immeasurable.

According to him, he had become the savior of the world by employing  a device that permitted him to travel back in time. In and itself, he was not even terribly proud of this remarkable accomplishment, which he at least, was convinced was true. 

No, he was instead obsessed with his glorious success in that he had gone back to Vienna in 1909 and there murdered a teenaged artist named Adolf Hitler.

When asked why this should be considered to be a positive accomplishment, he began to thrash about and scream, "Hitler! Hitler! Don't you understand, you  moronic jackasses!" And much more of the same.

When the staff continued to refuse to praise him for this bizarre "achievement" the patient withdrew into himself and became largely silent, only muttering  incoherently to himself from time to time.

The case took a very peculiar turn when agents of the FBI turned up and insisted upon interviewing the man.

Dr. Philbine declared that this was not possible due to the severe responses his patient had to being agitated with any reference to this mysterious artist. He demanded to know exactly why the FBI could possibly be interested in this case.

The agents indicated to him that there was in fact a device which, when activated, had returned an individual to 1909. This lead to inquiries to the Vienna police, who discovered that there had indeed been an obscure young artist named Adolf Hitler who was found shot to death in 1909.

The case had never been solved.

Sadly, subsequent attempts to determine why the patient had committed this bizarre act only served to drive him deeper into his delusional internal world. He was never charged with murder because of the unavoidable conundrum of can you charge someone with murder if the victim was murdered over a century before the killer was even born? This was a legal issue which neither the judicial system of the United States nor that of Vienna were prepared to undertake.

Repeating History

https://apple.news/AxF_akWjjSxiW6F0fwoDl2w

Is it any surprise that Trump is now dreaming of concentration camps?

Answer: No. 

We have tried it  before and it was a crime against humanity.  Trump plans to repeat the atrocity and to make it even worse.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/concentration-camps-existed-long-before-Auschwitz-180967049/

Addenda to the Facebook post (above) summarizing the history.

>President Dwight Eisenhower’s notorious mass deportation program, “Operation Wetback,” that took its name from a derogatory slur against Mexican migrants. In the 1950s, federal agents conducted aggressive raids and rapidly deported hundreds of thousands of migrants by truck, train, plane and cargo ship. The enterprise was a humanitarian nightmare, as a Vox report recounting the operation explained:

Conditions for deported immigrants were horrifying. A later congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a “penal hell ship” and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage. Immigrants who were dumped over the border in trucks didn’t fare any better. They were shoved into trucks “like cows,” driven 10 miles into Mexico, and unceremoniously dumped into the desert — often in punishing heat, without water. Families were torn apart.

At the time, The Los Angeles Times described the prison camps, surrounded by wire fences, as “concentration camps.” Columbia University historian Mae Ngai estimates that nearly 90 migrants died of sunstroke after being stranded in the desert.<

Historical note:   Concentration camps were first created by Spanish to be used against Cuban rebels fighting for their nation's freedom. The Spanish general in charge of Cuban operations refused to implement the plan, calling it inhumane. He was relieved of duty and a new general, who approved the idea, took charge to implement it.

Later the British used the system to fight against Boer  insurgents in South Africa.

Finally, Hitler turned the concept into outright death camps.

We don't need to add America to the list of nations using concentration camps...Oh. Too late. That is exactly what the Japanese detention centers were during World War II. 

As concentration camp go, those detention centers were on the less horrific side.  Nonetheless, they were concentration camps aimed at a racial minority.

Righting Wrongs

 Regarding the following article, I made a Facebook post which I am now expanding for more detail.

https://theconversation.com/the-curious-joy-of-being-wrong-intellectual-humility-means-being-open-to-new-information-and-willing-to-change-your-mind-216126

Facebook post:

The point this article is making is one that seems natural to me. I've actually been told, once or twice, that people are surprised to find that I am so willing to acknowledge facts and change my stance on an important issue if sufficient evidence has been offered to demonstrate that I've been wrong. To me it just seems an obvious necessity.

If you insist that you are invariably and unalterably correct then it follows that you will often be wrong. We are none of us perfect and intellectual flexibility is required.

In other words, if you want to be right, you must be willing to  admit that you're wrong. 

I want to continue this so I will make it into a blog post with more detail if anyone's interested.

Addenda:

I have known for quite some time a very commonly referred to fact about the attacks on Pearl Harbor in World War II.  It's not just that I believed it, many historians have reported it as factual  as well.  It is so commonly accepted  as a truth that you hear it in almost any analysis of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

The story is that there were three waves of attacks planned on Pearl Harbor. The first two waves were conducted as planned and we all know how successful they were. Of course, the difficulty with the whole operation was that the American aircraft carriers were not in harbor but out on maneuvers. The report goes that

Admiral Nagumo (in charge of the Pearl Harbor attacks) canceled the third strike which was to destroy the logistical facilities including the fuel supplies because he did not know where the American aircraft carriers were and felt it was more important to protect the precious assets of Japanese aircraft carriers than to conduct this third wave.

The show I was watching stated that this was a myth and that no third wave was ever planned. When I heard that my immediate response was, "What!?! Make your case!"

And the historian being interviewed promptly proceeded to do so. And he convinced me. No third wave was ever planned. 

There were three critical points in making this clear. 

The first was that all Japanese naval reports regarded the mission as a complete success with the exception of the American aircraft carriers not being in harbor. That's a pretty clear statement.

The second part is that Japanese naval doctrine throughout the entire war had a list of targets which were to be struck in order of importance. At the very last place on the list was logistical facilities, including fuel supplies.  In other words, if there had been a third wave it would have attacked all the ships that had not yet been sunk and ignored the supposed goal of such a wave.

Finally,  the third point is that the belief that there was to be a third wave was based entirely on an interview with Captain Fushida, who was the tactical commander of the airstrikes. He reported that he was stunned by the canceling of the third wave. But it should be noted that he said this some 20 to 25 years after the attack and after listening for all those years to Americans wondering why the Japanese were so foolish as to not strike at those precious supplies which would have crippled the American fleet, including the aircraft carriers, for much longer.

It is extremely significant to note that when interviewed immediately after the war, Fushida reported that the attacks on Pearl Harbor were conducted as planned and were completely effective with the exception of the absence of the American carriers. In other words there's no report of any third wave being planned until well after the events and only in the light of harsh American criticism of such a wave not being intended.

It seems clear that Fushida was remembering things the way he wanted them to have been long after the attacks and after the conclusion of the war. 

So, while I based my statements on widely accepted facts as reported by historians, the historians had it wrong and therefore so did I. 

Silly Is As Silly Philosophizes

This article irritated me on several levels, so I responded. My responses won't make much sense unless you read the article so I suggest you look at the link  first.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-married-bachelor-proves-that-unicorns-exist/

 Things can't be mutually contradictory? Then light is a wave and not particle. Unless it's a particle and not wave. Or at least it's kind of both sometimes, and also one or the other at other times and...

And Einstein's famous train thought experiment simply can't be true. Except it is. Under certain circumstances mutually exclusive concepts are both correct. To Susan on the train, both doors open at the same moment in time and that is an absolute fact. But it is also an absolute fact that to Bob standing outside the train as it passes by, the rear door opens first. Sorry, all of you who believe in classic Greek logic as an absolute  truth, but Greek logic is very limited and is not adequate for our modern level of knowledge.

The article makes a great deal of 'suppose you know one of these things is true, but how do you know they're true?'  The article makes much ado about this simple point, but why?  It's better to sum it up quickly.

 What if you're wrong? What if you're absolutely certain you're correct, but in objective reality you are not? That's all that needs to be said about it. Going on and on about it may sound erudite, but verbally beating a dead horse is a waste of words. This article is very pretentious, but it takes simple points and makes them lengthy and abstruse.  

This is a great weakness of philosophers.

To put it even more simply,  the liar paradox which has so often been presented, that is still being presented with awesome respect for the brilliance of its creator is nothing but the silly nonsense of misusing and even abusing human language. 

As for me, insofar as I find it profound, I find this article profoundly silly.

We don't need a lengthy philosophizing to demonstrate that it's silly. It is simply silly. All the philosophizing simply gives a nonsensical foolish statement the image of being profound and serious when fact it's nothing but a silly statement. Frankly, philosophers take themselves far too seriously.

Why say in a simple direct self evident statement that which is obviously true, when you can write an entire article endlessly dodging about and describing in exotic terms that which even a fool could see at first glance?

The answer is quite obvious and simple. Philosophers are paid by the word. Furthermore, lengthy words receive bonuses!

Feeling Blue

 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-quiet-revolution-of-the-sabbath

The article presents a very interesting mix of the value of keeping the sabbath both from  personal and legal viewpoints.  Strictly nostalgically, I cannot help but recall the joy of Sundays. We didn't go to church very often, which I preferred to avoid, but it was the day for the Sunday papers to arrive. It was a day for me to read through the comic pages with full page presentations instead of mere strips (and also in full color not black-and-white). Then I would go to the political pages which similarly went in depth and at length rather than the brief snippets that had been presented during the week.   Finally, I hit the arts pages, which always interested me.

It was a day when my mother used her cast-iron cookware to make Sunday breakfast. I recall it as an extensive and rather elaborate meal, although honestly I can only really remember her carefully spooning hot oil on top of the egg yolks so they could be flipped over without breaking and sitting in my favorite spot at the kitchen nook I could glance at the window at the playground surrounded by the apartments in which we lived in Germany.  

But even as a child what I really resented about Sunday was the blue laws. I did not appreciate the idea of not being able to go to the store.  

At the time it never occurred to me, but now I have to wonder, if Sunday is so utterly sacred and precious how is it that the priests, ministers, and pastors get away with working on that day? 😏