Responsibility to protect

Aysha Qamar of Daily Kos reported that all across the country parents are showing up at school board meetings demanding districts not adopt mask mandates and otherwise displaying their worst selves. Qamar also reported that the school board in Paris, Texas amended its dress code to require masks. Qamar wrote:

The statement [by the district] noted that the governor’s order did not suspend any part of the Texas Education Code, which allows board members to amend dress codes. “The Texas Governor does not have the authority to usurp the Board of Trustees’ exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district,” the statement continued.

Also, disability rights groups have filed federal lawsuits against the mandate ban alleging such a ban puts students with disabilities at risk. In announcing his mask ban Gov. Greg Abbott wrote, “The path forward relies on personal responsibility—not government mandates.” Commenter moose65 to this post wrote, “That “personal responsibility” line is utter horse s---.” And TexasTom replied:

Of course it is — because Republicans who utter this bulls**t about “personal responsibility” are using it to appeal to people who are completely irresponsible.

Michaeleen Doucleff of NPR reported on the world condemning the US decision to offer booster doses of COVID vaccines. Some of their reasoning: * Booster shots in the US won’t slow down the pandemic. There isn’t much difference in protection between two doses and three. There is a great deal of difference between two doses and zero. * Diverting vaccine doses from unvaccinated people will help drive the emergence of more variants, which have a chance of being more dangerous and able to evade the vaccine. * America says they’ve donated 100 million doses and another 500 million are on the way. But the world needs 11 billion doses, and in many countries less than 5% of people are vaccinated. However, if you are offered a third shot booster, refusing it doesn’t mean it will go into an arm halfway around the world. At the end of July I included a quote from Leah McElrath:

Republicans across the nation are leveraging this pandemic to try to create chaos that they hope will ultimately undermine parental support for the public education system. Mark my words.

McElrath isn’t the only one noticing that. Several noticed years ago that was the main reason why Cruella DeVos was hired to be Secretary of Education under the nasty guy. Laura Clawson of Kos has noticed that Corey DeAngeles, the national director of research at the American Federation of Children, founded by DeVos, has been making the rounds at conservative think tanks and bringing his message to hard conservative platforms. Wrote Clawson:

And at any given time these days, DeAngelis’ Twitter feed is a mix of anti-masking and anti-teaching-about-racism, all with the singular goal of leveraging right-wing outrage over masks and the false picture of critical race theory to defund public schools and privatize public education dollars. To be clear, this isn’t about one guy. This is about the alliance between the institutional—Betsy DeVos-founded—school privatization movement and anything that allows them to undermine public education. They are willing to cozy up to conspiracy theorists and rape fantasizers and actively endanger kids’ health in the pursuit of that goal.

Why defund public schools? So those people don’t get an education and aren’t able to succeed in the world – and don’t learn their oppression is not the natural order of things. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted an editorial from the Hindustani Times.

After the end of the Soviet Union, during the unipolar moment — of United States (US) hegemony — the doctrine of humanitarian intervention picked up. This was based on the notion that sovereignty was not sacred, and that if a regime was involved in human rights violations, the international community was within its rights to intervene in a particular country. This principle was picked up by two different streams of thought. The first were the neo-conservatives who, during George W Bush’s era, argued that promoting democracy and enabling regime change was a legitimate extension of humanitarian intervention. The second were liberal internationalists who extended the principle to evolve a doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) — if a State failed to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, then other states could take timely, collective and decisive action.

Of course, Western nations didn’t apply this principle evenly. They intervened when and how it suited their strategic interests.

The fall of Afghanistan may well have eroded the entire architecture of Western interventions. If the US, as Joe Biden’s speech defending the withdrawal on Monday indicated yet again, is not willing to step up to protect minority, women and human rights, and can leave Afghans at the mercy of a brutal regime which has a record of rights violations, it will be hard for Washington to justify its intervention elsewhere in the future on these principles. The rise of China has already added a protective buffer to authoritarian regimes. ... But the abrupt end of an invasion meant to counter terror, create a democratic political order and protect human rights may have ended up eroding the political, moral and legal argument for such interventions itself. The possible dilution of global military interventions is positive. But if it emboldens despotic regimes, like the one taking over Kabul, the world is headed for more turbulent times.

Nuclear fission is when atoms of uranium or plutonium split apart. They make a big bang and leave radioactive debris all over the place. Nuclear fusion is when two atoms of hydrogen are forced together to make an atom of helium. This is the way the sun generates energy and it is much cleaner for the surroundings. One little problem – the equipment must get close to simulating the conditions in the sun for fusion to happen. Catherine Clifford of NBC News reported that the National Ignition Facility within the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory briefly achieved fusion. This is such an important step that Omar Hurricane, a chief scientist at the lab, called it, “a Wright Brothers moment.” Hurricane stressed using fusion, a clean source, to generate energy to allow us to get rid of all those dirty sources, is still a long way off. The reason is simple – it takes a great deal more energy to produce those sun-like conditions than the resulting fusion produces. Back when I was an undergrad – a few decades ago – I remember taking a class led by a geology professor, though it wasn’t a class in geology. It was one of those classes held at 8 am, which college students don’t handle well. While I don’t remember the exact topic of the class I do remember I did a paper on the status of fusion. Back then the understanding was researchers were close to achieving fusion, though recognized the big problem of putting more energy in than getting out, with the hope achieving fusion in a few years. Decades later, they did. Some may be thinking, don’t we have hydrogen bombs based on fusion? Yes, they exist. I believe they use fission to create the conditions for fusion to happen. Hydrogen caught between two exploding chunks of plutonium could indeed experience the conditions of the sun. But that’s not feasible for a power plant on earth. Speaking of a Wright Brothers moment – today, August 19, marks 150 years since Orville Wright was born. Their Wikipedia page, though it contains much more information than I need, notes the extent of their formal education: Orville completed 3 years of high school, Wilbur completed 4. Hunter of Kos reported that the West has been so dry that next year state allocations for water from the Colorado River will be cut. That’s the first time a cut will be imposed. Arizona’s portion will be cut by 18%, Nevada’s by 7%, and California’s portion won’t be cut – yet – though California is already in a dire situation because of the low snowpack last year in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Hunter concluded:

The infrastructure costs associated with even keeping the taps in towns and cities in the region from running dry will be staggering, at this point. Given the speed with which the climate seems to be shifting, it's not a certainty that it can be done before some of those water systems collapse.

A few days ago someone said that 10-15 years ago a lot of climate reports, though I don’t know about official ones from the IPCC, said the temperature will likely rise by this amount by the end of the century and sea level might rise by that amount by the end of the century. Turns out that was a wrong way to frame the situation. It certainly implied we had plenty of time. Storms and fires in the last few years now show we didn’t. And don’t.