RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Trump’s presidential candidacy is yet another symptom of the decline of American culture and the degeneration of the public square into a freak show largely featuring sinister authoritarians like Hillary Clinton [5] on the one hand and puffed-up clowns on the other. Trump, of course, is in the latter camp, but he plays into the hands of the former.”

It’s hard not to be in Donald Trump’s corner when his targets are the likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

McCain may justifiably be indignant over Trump’s stupid and clumsy savaging of him for having such poor taste as to be captured in Vietnam, but the Arizona senator displayed judgment that was just as poor when he claimed [1] Michele Bachmann’s entirely reasonable [2] questions about Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood ties manifested an “ignorance” that “defame[d] the spirit of the nation.”

So when it comes to John McCain and Donald Trump, it’s blowhard versus boor. But that doesn’t excuse Trump. His current position at the top of the polls — and the very real possibility that he could continue to bestride the narrow Republican field like a Colossus while his petty rivals walk under his huge legs and peep about to find themselves dishonorable graves — is a sign of how much American politics has turned into an Oprah show of celebrity worship, lurid grandstanding, logorrheic superficiality, and tabloid scandalmongering.

What happens to the Iran nuclear deal if Iran already has a nuclear weapon?

Both Iran and North Korea were part of the A.Q. Kahn proliferation network, and bilateral trade in oil and weapons has continued despite UN resolutions designed to stop it. Ballistic missile cooperation is documented, and nuclear cooperation has been an unspoken theme in Washington. Pyongyang helped Damascus, Iran’s ally, build a secret reactor. There are reports that North Korean experts visited Iran in May to help Iran with its missile program. Pressed by reporters on the subject of North Korea-Iran nuclear cooperation a few weeks ago, even the State Department acknowledged that it takes reports of such cooperation seriously.

I want to change public concern from Global (GW) to Global Cooling (GC). Presented here are three arguments in favor of such a drastic shift — which involves also a drastic shift in current policies, such as mitigation of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide.

My main argument relies on the fact, backed by historical evidence, that cooling, even on a regional or local scale, is much more damaging than warming. The key threat is to agriculture, leading to failure of harvests, followed by famine, starvation, disease, and mass deaths.

Also, GC is reasonably sure, while GW is iffy. The evidence, again, is historical — from deep-sea sediment cores and ice cores. Our planet has experienced some 17 (Milankovitch-style) glaciations in the past 2 million years, each typically lasting 100,000 years, interrupted by warm inter-glacials, typically of around 10,000-yr duration. The most recent glaciation ended rather suddenly about 12,000 years ago. We are now in the warm Holocene, which is expected to end soon.

In fact, we may have already entered into the next glaciation — as we can discover only in retrospect. (Past cycles suggest a very gradual cooling initially — with ice accumulation and a drop in global sea levels, a decrease in atmospheric CO2 into the cooling oceans and lowest temperatures occurring only much later in the cycle.)

While engaging in the mundane task of gathering financial statements for a “secure retirement” meeting with my husband’s and my adviser, this Baby Boomer stumbled upon documented proof that our nation does not have the guts to confront one of its most serious economic problems. The realization came when I pulled from my files a document statement innocently titled, “Your Social Security Statement.”

At first glance, the statement did not appear menacing. I was told I could expect to receive a benefit of “about $2,136 a month” upon reaching age 70 — which certainly seems like good news. But immediately I thought of a parallel of President Obama’s infamous Obamacare promise: “If you like your Social Security, you can keep your Social Security.”

Then, as if on cue, I saw an asterisk with the following message:

The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2033, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 77 percent of scheduled benefits.

TestPerfect is a new Silicon Valley start-up with an ambitious mission: to design a standardized college admissions test free of cultural or racial bias, resistant to differential test-prep efforts and accurately predictive of academic performance in postsecondary education.

TestPerfect’s chief executive says that development is far ahead of schedule and that a prototype exam should be available within two years. The forthcoming test promises to revolutionize college admissions by replacing not only the SAT but also traditional admissions-office functions such as evaluating transcripts from thousands of different high schools, parsing the compound adjectives of teacher recommendations and interviewing sweaty-palmed prospective students.

Once TestPerfect goes viral, as it surely will, the college admissions process, formerly the source of so much angst, individual and societal, will be rendered infallible, or close to it.

The College Board has just published a revision of its controversial AP U.S. history framework. The revision is designed to meet the concerns of the 2014 framework’s many critics. As one of those critics, I want to give a preliminary response. This is also the first in what will be a series of posts on the new AP U.S. history framework and related issues.

Based on a preliminary reading of the Thematic Learning Objectives and the first two historical periods, I would say that the revisions do not allay my concerns about the College Board’s approach to AP U.S. history. The College Board has removed some of the framework’s most egregiously biased formulations, yet the basic approach has not changed.

Since the College Board has said that the revised framework will not require modifications to textbooks, there is reason to believe that we are looking at largely cosmetic changes. The textbooks are what students actually see. If the latest revisions won’t change the texts, they can’t mean much. Based on my reading of the first two periods, even if the College Board does call for textbooks to be revised along the lines of the new framework, the changes would be trivial.

Did Mike Huckabee Actually Compare Obama to Hitler?
It’s been a hard time for politicians not named “Trump” to get any attention, but Mike Huckabee managed it. He did it by comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.

At least that’s what I gathered from headlines like this one from Gawker:

“Mike Huckabee Compares Obama to Hitler”

I don’t put huge amounts of stock in Gawker headlines (or really any headlines on the Internet), but then I saw that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said Huckabee had “essentially likened [Barack Obama] to Adolf Hitler.” National Journal’s Ron Fournier went on a tear on Twitter, insisting that Huckabee apologize for comparing Obama to Hitler. And of course, Hillary Clinton and Obama himself denounced Huckabee for making a Hitler comparison. Clinton even said she was “really offended personally,” as if her feelings are what really matters.

Here is what Huckabee said in full during an interview with Breitbart News:

When Four Corners re-visited the Charlie Hebdo massacre, straight-bat journalism was trumped by propaganda and blatant reportorial bias. Mention the murder of Jewish schoolchildren? Don’t be silly! That might have clouded the message that Muslims, and only Muslims, are the real victims.
Watching Their ABC’s Four Corners last week I was once again impressed by Aunty’s adroit, manipulative touch in the art of a subtle propaganda. Introduced by compere Kerry O’Brien as “provocative and personal”, the show purported to examine the fallout in France from the Charlie Hebdo massacre. An insult to common sense, to balanced reporting and even-handedness, it was an abrogation of journalism’s responsibility to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What I saw instead was a master class in how to gloss over inconvenient facts, air tendentious assertions unchallenged and present the ideological commitment of the story-tellers as the base line from which all further discussion should, and must, proceed.

More than 500 Hamas members of Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin al-Qassam, are supervising the military training and religious education in the camps to train future jihadis in the war against Israel. Hamas’s religious education is aimed at teaching the children about Islam and its sharia laws. They are also being taught that making peace with the “infidels” is prohibited under the teachings of Islam.

It is disturbing to see how international and Palestinian human rights organizations, especially those claiming to defend children’s rights, are turning a blind eye to this large-scale child abuse by Hamas. These organizations only care about children’s rights when there is a way to throw all the blame on Israel.

The Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, are also poisoning the hearts and minds of their people by constantly inciting them against Israel. These children will never accept the two-state solution that Abbas is talking about. Nor will they ever recognize Israel’s right to exist in this part of the world.

“Teach your children how to play, how to smile… Build for them an institution…on the love of Palestine and not how to get themselves killed.” — Palestinian activist Eyad al-Atal, criticizing Hamas for “depriving an entire generation of Palestinians of their childhood.”

Rather than a Folie à Deux, call it a Folie à 5+1: a mutually reinforcing delusion involving Iran, the United States, Russia, China and the Europeans. What makes the outcome of the Iran nuclear deal so dangerous is that none of the parties to the agreement has thought through the consequences of its actions, least of all Iran itself. They are not so much sleepwalkers, as historian Christopher Clark characterized the combatants who stumbled into World War I, as waking fantasists.

There is one state of the world in which things go right, namely, Iran’s passive acceptance of national decline. There are innumerable ways in which everything can go terribly wrong. Game theorists who try to construct a decision tree from these criteria would assign a very low probability to a good outcome and a very high probably to a bad one.

Iran believes that it will lead the Shi’ite Muslims of the region to restored power; America believes that Iran’s enhanced status will foster a beneficial balance of power; China believes that the balance of military power between the Sunni and Shi’ite states (and between Iran and Israel) will prevent war; Russia believes that Iran will serve as a counterweight to the Sunni jihadist that threaten its southern flank; and the Europeans as usual close their eyes and hope for the best.