The New York Times invited Jonathan Pie (who should need no introduction to readers of this blog) to explain to people in the US what is going with the British prime minister Boris Johnson and the scandal over the many parties he attended while his government was preventing anyone else from having any gatherings.
Pie was only too willing to oblige.
The war rhetoric against Russia over Ukraine keeps getting ratcheted up. We have representatives of the US government making all manner of allegations about the threatening actions by Russia, including that they are planning false flag operations and crisis actors to provoke an invasion (as if Russia taking its cues from Alex Jones) without providing any shred of evidence.
In an exchange with State Department spokesperson Ned Price, AP reporter Mike Lee presses him to provide more than assertions and reminds him about WMDs in Iraq where similar US government assertions that they had solid evidence turned out to be flat-out lies meant to serve propaganda purposes and lay the groundwork for the invasion of that country.
Watch this exchange as Lee presses Price to provide any evidence at all only to be told by Price that him merely asserting something should be all the evidence that is necessary. Lee reminds him about the Iraq lies.
WATCH: Heated exchange between @APDiploWriter Matt Lee and @StateDeptSpox Ned Price on declassified information. pic.twitter.com/8TFJdSW4M6
— CSPAN (@cspan) February 3, 2022
More reporters should follow Lee’s lead and demand that the public be given more than their “Trust us. We know but can’t tell you” rubbish.
I am puzzled by this news report that says that Dutch authorities in the city of Rotterdam are considering temporarily dismantling a bridge in order to allow the yacht commissioned by Jeff Bezos to reach open water.
A plan to temporarily dismantle a recently restored historic bridge in the heart of Dutch port city Rotterdam so that a huge yacht, reportedly being built for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, can get to the North Sea is unlikely to be plain sailing.
Reports this week that the city had already agreed to take apart the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as De Hef, sparked anger with one Facebook event set up calling for people to pelt the multimillion dollar yacht with rotten eggs.
However, a spokeswoman for Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb told The Associated Press on Friday that while a request has been submitted by a shipbuilder for the bridge to temporarily be taken apart over the summer, no permit has yet been sought or granted.
…The current Hef railway bridge was opened for trains to cross the Maas River in 1927 and taken out of service in 1993 when it was replaced by a tunnel. Public protests spared it from demolition and it eventually underwent a three-year renovation that ended in 2017. The middle section of the bridge can be raised to allow ships to pass underneath, but apparently not high enough for the new yacht’s masts.
Amnesty International is the latest mainstream organization that has finally come to the conclusion that what Israel practices with regard to the Palestinians is apartheid, joining other human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem that said similar things a year ago. The 280-page report outlines in great detail the reasons for saying so, pointing to what it calls decades of oppression. It says that Israel achieves this through four main methods.
Fragmentation into domains of control
At the heart of the system is keeping Palestinian separated from each other into distinct territorial, legal and administrative domains
Dispossession of land and property
Decades of discriminatory land and property seizures, home demolitions and forced evictions
Segregation and control
A system of laws and policies that keep Palestinians restricted to enclaves, subject to several measures that control their lives, and segregated from Jewish Israelis
Deprivation of economic & social rights
The deliberate impoverishment of Palestinians keeping them at great disadvantage in comparison to Jewish Israelis
[Read more…]
(Via David Pescovitz)
I published this article More Than ‘Millennials’: Colleges Must Look Beyond Generational Stereotypes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. LVI, no. 7, October 16, 2009.
I wrote it in response to what I saw as a lot of disparaging remarks made about the cohort of young people that have been labeled as ‘millennials’. This was not just in the media but also among educators. I spent much of my teaching career teaching members of this cohort and felt that they were being maligned, because my own experience with them was nothing like what was described.
All people are flawed but we are not flawed equally. There are many axes that can be drawn along moral and ethical dimensions and each one of us will fall at different points along them, having different strengths and weaknesses. It is next to impossible to extract an overall single score that would define our ethical and moral worth for comparison purposes, unless one decides to pick one axis as determinative over all the others. Doing so is what enables some people to feel morally superior to others. But even then, while it is hard to do that for positive values, there can be a particular moral and ethical dimension where someone is so bad that it overrides everything else and we can conclude that they are simply bad people, even if they have some redeeming qualities in some area. Sociopaths fall into that category.
[Read more…]
One of the things that surprised me after coming to the US is how many students (and even adults) believed that it was Christopher Columbus who established the fact that the Earth was round and that prior to his 1492 voyage across the Atlantic, people believed the Earth was flat. (Some people still believe the Earth is flat but that is another story.)
I wrote an article about this myth that appeared in Phi Delta KAPPAN, vol. 88, no. 8, p. 590-592, April 2007 that you can read by following the link below.
I find that some of my published articles can no longer be freely accessed on the web and so I have begun to do what I had been planning to do for a long time, and that is to post my non-technical articles on this site and not depend on the publications to maintain the links and provide access to them.
I posted the first one yesterday in response to a request from someone who could not access the article on the original journal site. That article garnered a huge response in the educational community. I will be adding posts with links periodically. The title of the posts will have the article title and my name so that they can be found easily by search engines.
