Last week Cecilia Culver delivered a speech to her graduating class at George Washington University and she took the opportunity to speak out against the atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza, calling it flatly what it is, a genocide and Israel an apartheid state. It received a deservedly rousing reception and standing ovation from the assembled audience and is well worth listening to.
For whatever reason, the Trump gang has decided to attack research and higher education. One form this has taken is to cut research grants and overhead charges that fund research programs and upend the review processes that go into awarding the grants. In addition, it seems to have decided that international students are undesirable and should be pressured to leave. It is doing this by harassing them with detentions and deportations and annulling their visas for the flimsiest of reasons.
It has also threatened universities with funding cuts if they do not kowtow to the administration’s demands. You would think that elite universities would hold out but one of them, Columbia University, was one of the first to buckle under with almost no protest. And yet despite its cravenness, it has still been subjected to large funding cuts.
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As if one needed evidence that Trump and his coterie only view the rights of white people as worth being concerned about, his granting of refugee status to white farmers while deporting people of color left and right, and his shameful sandbagging of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa during the latter’s visit to the White House (that seems to be be becoming a pattern of ambushing foreign leaders) springing on him photos and videos of unsubstantiated claims of discrimination against whites, should be evidence enough. Trump’s administration alleges ‘white genocide’ in that country while ignoring the blatant genocide by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.
Sisonke Msimang gives the background to how a relatively small group of white South Africans have been successful in getting the ear of Trump and his cronies. The largely white trade union Solidarity and its policy arm AfriForum led by someone named Kallie Kriel used the claim of white genocide to garner publicity for their cause, making trips to the US during the first Trump term and talking with right wing media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, who are always eager to feed the sense of white grievance of their audiences.
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(Every year at Case Western Reserve University where I used to work, the incoming class of students were assigned a book to read which formed a theme for some of the programs during the year. The first one was a welcoming program at Severance Hall, the performing center of the Cleveland Orchestra. The university president and other officials would give remarks and the program would end with me sharing my reflections on the book. I am posting today (slightly edited) the text of the talk I gave in 2007 about that year’s book, journalist David Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America. I stumbled across this while going through my computer archives.)
Welcome to Case Western Reserve University! The people you will encounter during your four years here , the staff, faculty, and fellow students, are very different from the people described in David Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America and I would like to address the question: What has created that difference?
Two answers are usually given. One is that we live in a meritocracy, and that we got where we are because of our own virtues, that we are smarter or worked harder or had a better attitude and work ethic than those who didn’t make the cut. I am sure that everyone in this auditorium has been repeatedly told by their family and friends and teachers that they are good and clever, and it is tempting to believe it. What can be more gratifying than to be told that one’s success is due to one’s own ability and efforts? It makes it all seem so well deserved, that there is justice in the world.
Another answer is that luck plays an important role in educational success. I suspect that most of us were fortunate enough to be born into families that had most, if not all, of the following attributes: stable homes and families, good schools and teachers, safe environments, good health, and sufficient food and clothing. Others are not so fortunate and this negatively affects their performance in school and later in life.
But there is a third possibility that is not often discussed and that is that the educational system has been deliberately designed so that just a small number end up like you and a much larger number of people end up like the people in the book, people who not only have failed but more significantly have learned to think of themselves as failures.
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Two couples who are friends of mine are traveling separately to Europe over the summer. Each couple consists of one US-born person and the other a naturalized citizen. When describing their holiday plans, they spoke only of their itinerary and what they looked forward to seeing and doing, By contrast, if I were to be making a trip by air, even within the US, Trump’s America now requires me to think of what I should do if I am confronted by agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is no idle concern on my part, since my political views could well trigger interviews with them.
My post about the detention and questioning at Chicago airport of social media activist Hasan Piker by CBP on his return to the US from a trip to France made me think about what might be going on behind the scenes that trigger such detentions. In Piker’s case, there did not seem to be any obvious clues such as past violations of the law. What the CBP seemed to be focused on were his public criticisms of Trump and of Israel. But even if there had been some legal infraction, even a minor one, what is the process by which ‘violators’ are identified and pulled aside for questioning?
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In a basketball game between two professional teams in the WNBA, the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky, Caitlin Clark of the former team was charged with a ‘flagrant foul’ against Angel Reese of the latter team. This resulted in some fans hurling abuse at Reese.
The WNBA says it is looking into allegations of “hateful fan comments” during Indiana Fever’s fiery win over the Chicago Sky on Saturday.
…Sources have told the Indianapolis Star the investigation is based around racist comments directed towards Reese from a member or members of the crowd, although they are not believed to have been directly related to the incident with Clark. On Sunday, the WNBA said it is looking into the matter without going into specifics.
“The WNBA strongly condemns racism, hate, and discrimination in all forms – they have no place in our league or in society. We are aware of the allegations and are looking into the matter,” the league said in its statement.
The Indiana Fever likewise issued a statement saying they are aware of the allegations and adding that the team are working “closely” with the WNBA in its investigation. “We stand firm in our commitment to providing a safe environment for all WNBA players,” the team said.
In Trump’s America, no one is safe from government harassment and abuse. As we have seen, anyone can be picked up while walking along the street by masked people, bundled into unmarked vehicles, and ‘disappeared’, just like what happens in the worst kinds of despotic regimes. The abducted person may end up in a distant detention center and kept in awful conditions or even deported to countries like El Salvador that are notorious for their terrible prisons. You can see a list of recent such cases here.
So it is a good idea for everyone to know what rights they have and what they should do if ever they ever find themselves being taken in and questioned by the police or agents of the government for anything at all, however minor it may seem, like a traffic stop. This one-minute long video by longtime civil rights attorneys Bill Goodman and Denise Heberle, who look like a pair of genteel grandparents, succinctly tells you exactly what you should do in such situations.
In the previous post, I wrote about the Trump gang’s efforts to quickly deport large numbers of Venezuelans using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that has only been used three times in its history: the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, claiming that these people were members of the gang Tren de Aragua and formed the invading force of the Venezuelan government.
Today, in a 7-2 opinion (predictably with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting), the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees must be given time to challenge their deportations
The court emphasized that the men — whom the Trump administration has labeled “alien enemies” — are entitled to more due process than the administration has so far provided. That means advance notice of their deportations and a meaningful opportunity to challenge the deportations in court, the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion.
In particular, the justices faulted the administration for its attempt last month to carry out swift deportations just one day after providing a bare-bones deportation notice to the detainees. The Supreme Court intervened at the time to stop those deportations, and in Friday’s decision, the court elaborated on its decision and extended its order blocking them.
“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the court’s opinion said, without deciding exactly how much notice is required.
A small victory for due process against a government that has no regard for the law or human rights.
The Trump gang, in its feverish determination to deport as many people as possible, has been running roughshod over constitutional protections such as due process. It has argued that this is allowed because the US is currently being invaded by foreign forces. This would come a surprise to pretty much anyone given the lack of fighting in the towns and rural areas of the country. Few would be even able to tell you who the invading forces are. To put you out of any suspense, the invading army is supposed to consist of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua acting under the direction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. As a result Trump is invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify the arbitrary arrest, detention, and deportation on various trumped up charges that the people are members of this invading army.
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In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, during the Manhattan project to develop the nuclear bomb, one of the concerns was whether the nuclear explosion created during a test might create such high temperatures that it leads to the nuclei of nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere fusing together and triggering a chain reaction that essentially sets the atmosphere on fire, frying the entire planet. Oppenheimer tells general Leslie Groves, the director of the project, that the calculations of Arthur Compton showed that the chance of such a thing happening was less that three in a million, and thus acceptable. When Groves said that he was hoping that the answer would be zero, Oppenheimer replied that you could not expect such an answer from theory alone..
While the idea that theory can never give you absolute certainty about anything is correct, the actual story is more complicated. It turns out that the Oppenheimer-Compton story is based on an article written by Pearl S. Buck, based on an interview she had with Compton, and some of the details are apocryphal. Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical program at Los Alamos, who had shown how fusion reactions lay behind the energy production of stars, had concluded early on that the chance of a runaway fusion reaction igniting the air was so small as to not be worth worrying about.
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