R.E. S. P. E. C. T

Interesting set of exchanges from Facebook.

M:  I don’t care what party you’re from...DO NOT sit behind a President and shuffle papers while he describes how a young woman was brutalized, tortured and murdered at the hands of a terrorist. DO NOT sit behind and shuffle papers while the story is told of the ultimate sacrifice given by a young military man, while his wife and young son look on. The families of these people who gave their lives were sitting in the gallery and there are literally Congress-people NOT STANDING in honor of them. I am disgusted. I want to throw up. It is not about YOU!  It is NOT about party politics. It is about young people, humanitarians and military, and the daily sacrifices they suffer. I never get involved in politics on social media and don’t plan to start. I always watch my language on social media but tonight I have this to say...GET OFF YOUR POMPOUS ASSES AND STAND in HONOR of ANYONE who serves in any capacity. No matter whether you like the man standing at the podium or not.  Do not propose to serve your country in elected office if you can’t, AT A MINIMUM stand in honor of those who serve. Shame on all of you. Shame on all who have made divisiveness what it is today. And that goes out to ANY party member who furthers this nonsense. But mostly it goes to anyone who is so eaten up with hatred that they cannot honor those who do what not many choose to do. #IamoverthisBS

Me:  Yes let’s honor those who serve like Trump when he insulted, yes, attacked a gold star family. Yes like taking money from the military to build his silly wall. Yes like attacking John McCain, a war hero, and smearing and slandering him as well. Yeah what respect this guy shows to the military!

N:  He does not know the meaning of the word respect

SF:  The paper was the copy of his speech he handed to her when he refused to shake her hand. To follow the speech she had to turn the pages.

D:  I have to been taught to treat others as I would like to be treated. Don’t believe I  need to say anymore as I wish to be treated with respect. .

Me:  You don’t hold Trump to that standard. OK she tore up the papers to show contempt for his posturing. But this is the man who says he grabs women by the pussy, stalks married women to seduce them, insults...well you know all the things he does. Is there no limit to whi should be treated with respect? Should we treat a rapist with a great deal of respect? How about a Nazi who screaming about how he wants to murder all the Jews? Respecting a person for their humanity is different from respecting the way a person behaves and conducts himself. It’s like tolerance. Tolerance doesn’t mean you tolerate everything and anything. There are limits.

World War Last?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a30708035/w76-2-nuclear-weapon-submarine/

When I first read this I was astonished. I recall the days of tactical nuclear weapons in the Cold War era. Atomic cannons, nuclear armed backpacks for the sabotaging of dams, nuclear land mines, and a whole witch’s nest of other bizarre devices were proposed and/or deployed. 

(I still wonder if I actually saw an atomic cannon moving through a small German town one late night. For whatever reason I couldn’t sleep and in the presunrise hours looked out the second story window of the room we were staying in and saw what certainly looked like an "Atomic Annie" cannon to me being carefully maneuvered through the dark, empty streets. When I asked around to see if any of the adults know about any such devices actually being deployed in Germany at the time no one seemed to be sure. Were they not sure? Or are they just keeping a secret? Don’t know to this day.)

When I was a child it seemed one more exciting military device. But later I realized the foolishness of such a thing. The vast power of even a low yield nuclear device is simply too much to be utilized for tactical purposes, and there’s also the issue of what consequences result.  Tactical or strategic, using a nuke is using a nuke!  The nation that has such a weapon used against its armed forces might very well reply with a strategic nuclear device and that’s World War III.*

So the U.S. deploying a tactical nuclear missile today  seemed to make no sense to me at all.

Thankfully, I have an excellent resource. My friend Bobby is an expert in economic and military issues. So I asked him why are we doing this? His response made it clear that I was correct in thinking that there was some risk of escalation from tactical to strategic (though potentially less than I had believed), but that I was wrong in thinking that there was no sane reason for the deployment. Here’s his explanation:

So much to say here. My entire 'expertise' involves the relevance of tactical nukes and whether there exists a nuclear taboo that makes their use unthinkable. Most people, including policymakers, believe that the taboo exists, it is strong, and it restrains actions. My research found that to not be the case at all. Planners strenuously tried to find a good use for them and usually failed to do so. Mainly, they are relative crummy weapons to existing conventional alternatives.  

Submarine nuke deployment is obviously not new, in fact, it is the bedrock of the US nuclear triad. The objective of this low yield deployment is interesting - to respond to low-yield nuclear attacks. The purpose is to control runaway escalation by creating more "rungs on the escalation ladder." I do believe it will actually have some deterrent value; there is a calculated temptation by a nuclear adversary to use a low-yield nuke on an asset outside of the homeland given that a disproportionate US response with a strategic nuke (probably triggering general nuke war) is not very credible. This demonstrates that proportional responses are available to us.

The real issue is what is known as the distinguishability problem. This low yield warhead is simply an augmentation of the W76 on a trident; consequently, it is indistinguishable from its big brother when used. Adversaries are poised to misidentify it because of the risks of being wrong. Big bad.

So, possibly good for nuclear deterrence with Russia and China. Not actually helpful for escalation control or use. 

Bobby Valentine 

PhD Political Science

University of Chicago

*Note: Yes the great fear of a war with the Soviet Union was that masses of Soviet tanks would swarm through the Fulga Gap invading Germany and tactical nuclear weapons did seem like a way to clearly put an end to that, but at the risk of World War III turning into the extermination of mankind?  Well, at least it was intended as a deterrent for the Soviet tank invasion which never happened.  An invasion we military brats who lived in Germany thought might happen any day.

Cassandra and Me

https://time.com/5775795/education-reform-failed-america/

A very important article which I don’t think will gather much attention. It should. So in the hope that at least one or two people may read it because I am posting this here as well as on Facebook:

I picked a few key excerpts from the article. Please read them, then please read the entire thing. Read it if you care about America’s children, America’s education system, or America’s future.

I do wonder however why no one seem to have looked at the foolish root of all these failures, the No Child Left Behind program, and identified it as the No Child Left Unharmed program back when it was a brand new idea.

Oh, that’s right! I called it that.  At the time it was created. Way back then. Or, to put it another way, “Why don’t nobody never listen to me??!!”

> The “reformers” relied on the business idea that disruption is a positive good. I call them “disruptors,” not reformers. Reformers have historically called for more funding, better trained teachers, desegregation, smaller class sizes. The disruptors, however, banked on a strategy of testing, competition, and punishment, which turned out to be ineffective and harmful.

...But every public school in the nation continues to be saddled with an expensive regime of annual standardized testing that is not found in any high-performing nation.

...Some charter schools get high test scores, but they usually get high scores by excluding students with disabilities and English learners or by high attrition rates.

Voucher studies in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and the District of Columbia found that students in voucher schools actually lost ground compared to their peers in public schools. This is not surprising since some voucher schools have uncertified teachers and are free to teach a curriculum that mixes facts and religious stories.

...For almost twenty years, the Bush-Obama-Trump program of standardized testing, punitive accountability, and school choice has been the reform strategy. It has utterly failed. <

Fit As A ...

https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/darwin-competition-collaboration-evolutionary-biology-climate-change.html?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=1348bf2cbd-briefing-dy-20200127&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-1348bf2cbd-44635989

I have a couple of problems with this otherwise interesting article.

First, let’s be clear that John Gould, not Charles Darwin, identified these various birds as all finches.  The article mistakenly declares that, “… Darwin noticed small variations in the beaks of a few finches, unlocking, we are told, the mystery of life’s variation over time and space.”  In fact, Darwin erroneously believed that the birds were different species and not all finches.  It was only after ornithologist Gould corrected him, that Darwin was able to make his insightful deductions.

Second, the article’s statement that, “Scientists are slowly understanding collaboration’s role in biology, which might just help liberate our collective imagination in time to better address the climate crisis”, ignores the fact that some scientists realized that cooperation was an excellent example of fitness from the very inception of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

The article is correct, of course, in stating that many Western scientists have been very slow to recognize this essential element.  This is especially true of non-scientists who prefer the non-Darwinian concept developed by Spencer which has been mislabeled “social Darwinism”.

However not all scientists were so foolish.  There were always those who were more clear sighted, especially those not quite so prejudiced by the heavily colonialist and racist attitudes that were normative in Western 19th century culture, who realized that fittest did not automatically mean most brutal and most exploitive.

The most famous example being a Russian prince.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/technology/2012/10/evolution-of-cooperation-russian-anarchist-prince-peter-kropotkin-and-the-theory-of-mutual-aid.amp

> Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species sparked major battles. The most famous may have been between science and religion, but there were disputes within science as well. One of the most heated was whether natural selection favored cooperative or competitive behaviors, a battle that still rages today. For almost 100 years, no single person did more to promote the study of the evolution of cooperation than Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin traveled the world talking about the evolution of cooperation, which he called “mutual aid,” in both animals and humans. Sometime the travel was voluntary, but often it wasn’t: He was jailed, banned, or expelled from many of the most respectable countries of his day. For he was not only the face of the science of cooperation, he was also the face of the anarchist movement. He came to believe that his politics and science were united by the law of mutual aid: that cooperation was the predominant evolutionary force driving all social life, from microbes to humans. 

... He challenged Darwin’s followers, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley, and their claims that natural selection almost always led to competition. Yes, Kropotkin admitted, sometimes that happens, especially in the tropics, but mutual aid was just as common, if not more so. <

Ultimately Krepotkin agreed with the point of the first article.  We must learn to cooperate in order to better solve the problems of humanity.

> But what Kropotkin cared about more than anything was that understanding mutual aid in animals might shed light on human cooperation and perhaps help save humanity from destroying itself. Whether that happens remains to be seen. <

The important point here is to recognize that survival of the fittest means exactly that. Survival of those most fit to survive. Being fit to survive may or may not be related to cooperation. It may or may not be related to fierceness.  Fitness depends upon the environmental circumstances in which an organism is set.  

For example, complex life is all eukaryotic life. And what is a eukaryote? It’s a cell that has a nucleus and other organelles contained within it. So how did that situation evolve?  It is widely accepted that symbiosis between a bacterium and a procaryote occurred, probably by accident.  Possibly by one eating the other and failing to digest it!

In other words, all complex life is based on two formerly competitive lifeforms learning to cooperate. Survival of the fittest. Survival of the most cooperative.

American Horror Story

I was planning a rather lengthy post for this particular topic but I’m unable to actually create it. The reason is explained at the very end of this truncated version. It all started with a Facebook conversation.

A friend who has fallen down the rabbit hole into the very deep depths of Trumpsterism posted an advertisement for actors to aid in a disaster simulation. This is a perfectly normal event which happens in various places around the country on a regular basis. Later on in the conversation, I pointed this out to someone who was refusing to believe that the advertisement was anything but a recruitment for people to fake a mass shooting at the Virginia gun rally so that the government could once again blame poor, pitiful and totally nice gun owners who were actually innocent.  The specific point I made was that we had drills of this type once a year at my school. It was to train first responders, our staff, yes and even the children, to be ready in case a disaster actually did occur.  It also tested our response systems and allowed for us to improve them.

Another poster commented with a montage composed of actual mass shootings with Sandy Hook right in the center. The point was that these were all faked by some evil cabal of who knows what?

I responded by declaring that those who attacked murdered children and their grieving parents, that is, people like her, were so morally disgusting,so repugnant, that she literally made me sick to my stomach.

Several hours later I decided that I would make this into a post in the manner in which I usually do. That is, I would simply copy everyone’s comments and post them with my own additional commentary. As always, I would protect both the innocent and the guilty by using only a single initial to identify them.

However, when I tried to look at the post, I could see only the beginning of her comment, “And you can crawl…”

This was followed by the declaration:

The comment may have expired or it may only be visible to an audience you’re not in. 

I would like to have seen what comment she made. I’m curious as ro exactly where she wants me to crawl. Unfortunately I have no access to the post, not even other parts of it.  In fact, I did crawl into bed shortly after I made my post. That’s because I wasn’t joking. She literally made me sick. I’m so upset at these moral degenerates who insist that mass shootings are all somehow staged events, including the horrors at Sandy Hook, that my blood pressure shot up high enough to trigger a vertigo attack. Thankfully, I was able to sleep for three hours and feel a bit better now. Naturally, that’s not the end of it. Once I have an actual serious vertigo attack,  I remain extra sensitive to them for a week thereafter. So I need to be careful and not deal with the most despicable of the conspiracy theorists for that time period. I suppose that means it’s a good thing I got blocked.

I also suppose it would give her a lot of satisfaction to know that her hateful attack on murdered children and their grieving parents actually succeeded in making me sick. Then again, the fact that it was my moral revulsion at her which sent my blood pressure soaring might have given her pause. No. I seriously doubt that she would stop her self degradation at any level.

In conclusion let me say, 🤮

Profile In Infamy

Again this post is very short but it should be extremely provocative and thus I think is worthy of repeating here in my blog.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-impeachment-a-profile-in-courage-11579220188

The impeachment was not partisan. Johnson was a vile, hateful, racist, bigot. He undid much of the benefits gained with the deaths 600,000 Americans. He returned Blacks to a kind of non-citizenship in the South, the consequences which we are still suffering today. The man was justly and properly impeached and John F. Kennedy was a fool to consider the despicable acts of Sen. Edmund G. Ross  a profile in courage.  It was a profile in racism. A profile in infamy.

Democracy? What Democracy?

In response to a friend’s post referring to an article which declared that we are not a democracy, we are a republic, and that this is a good thing because it prevents tyranny of the majority, I commented as follows. This makes for a rather short post but it is one which should be sufficiently provocative to generate a great deal of discussion.

In fact, we are republican democracy.  A blend of both.   We are not a pure democracy. Neither are we a pure republic.

The electoral college was created for the specific purpose of guaranteeing the power of the southern states by allowing them to count their slaves as 3/5 of a person for their share of representation. It was intended to create a tyranny of the minority. It has succeeded. 

Have no doubt. The electoral college is an artifact of our heritage of slavery. It is intended to ensure that the American people are not allowed to rule themselves because the founding fathers, imperfect as they were, felt that ordinary people should not be allowed to even vote. Only white, wealthy men should be allowed that power. I disagree with them on that point.