Would you sell them out?

Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community wrote about a new history textbook for Russian high schools. He worked from images posted on X by Mark Bennetts of The Times of London. The book is for grade 11 students, which is their last year of high school. There are some notable features of this history book. It teaches that the nasty guy lost the 2020 election “as a result of obvious electoral fraud by the Democratic Party.” It also says that Biden’s entire career has been “accompanied by corruption scandals” and that he and his family “have commercial interests in Ukraine.” No mention of the nasty guy’s criminal charges. As part of that narrative it says that (while their own elections are fake) elections in democracies are (also) fake. The new history book says nothing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s policies of Perestroika and Glasnost. As for the Cold War, it ended because Gorbachev gave “unilateral concessions” to the West. Historian Nikita Sokolov called the new book an “outrageously bloated propaganda leaflet.” Yes, it is indoctrination. Similar to the indoctrination Gov. Abbott of Texas and Gov. DeathSantis of Florida are doing with their bans of lessons and books about black and LGBGTQ people and about climate change. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about an article that historian Timothy Snyder wrote for the Kyiv Post back in November. In it Snyder posed a repeated question. Here’s a bit of it:

Americans have an alliance in North America and Europe which has existed for more than seventy years, with the goal of preventing an attack from the Soviet Union and then from Russia. Imagine that, when the Russian attack came, the hammer fell on a country excluded from that alliance. Ukraine indeed took the entire brunt of the invasion, resisted, and turned the tide: a task assigned to countries whose economies, taken together, are two hundred fifty times larger than Ukraine's. In so doing, Ukraine destroyed so much Russian equipment that a Russian attack on NATO became highly improbable. With the blood of tens of thousands of its soldiers, Ukrainians defended every member of that alliance, making it far less likely that Americans would have to go to war in Europe. Would you sell them out?

Snyder also notes because of American support for Ukraine China is not making moves on Taiwan, though China is watching what we do very closely. Also, American is seen as the guarantor for democratic societies. Do we want to weaken that reputation? Plus...

“Putin has a theory of victory that involves votes in the US Congress,” and clearly “thinks that he has a better chance in the Capitol than he has in Kyiv.” Snyder rhetorically asks whether our intention is to prove Putin correct.

Finally, what’s all this assertion that Americans are “fatigued” with the war? We aren’t even fighting and giving money is hardly “fatiguing.” Snyder wrote:

If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster: across all of these dimensions: food supply, war crimes, international instability, expanding war, collapsing democracies. Everything that the Ukrainians are doing for us can be reversed if we give up. Why would lawmakers even contemplate doing so?

There is much consternation about what presidential candidate Nikki Haley said at when asked a question by a reporter. The question: “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” All the uproar is because her answer did not include the word “slavery.” Chris Geidner of Law Dork News tweeted the full text of the exchange. In his opinion the answer should end Haley’s political career, though I’m sure it only endeared her to Republicans. I want to mention one little bit of Haley’s answer. She said, “I think it always comes down to the role of government. We need ... freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.” On the face is a plausible reason for the Civil War, a reason that hides a great deal. What she is saying is we need freedom to oppress other people through enslavement without the Northern government getting in the way. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Iowa and Nebraska dropped food assistance to kids who are not in school during the summer. They declined significant federal aid for that program. States are disenrolling kids from Medicaid after pandemic-era protections ended. In some states this is now a “child health insurance crisis.” McCarter’s point is these red states proclaim how “pro-life” they are. But that doesn’t extend to their post-birth children. It seems red states hate children. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed a new climate report put out by Global Tipping Points. It identified 25 potential climate tipping points and five are already at risk of tipping. A tipping point has to do with a system in which one component may change gradually while the whole system seems only minimally affected. Then the component reaches a particular level and the whole system changes quickly and radically. When systems are interconnected – like the global climate – that could mean...

Triggering one harmful tipping point could create “a domino effect of accelerating and unmanageable change to our life-support systems,” according to the report's authors.

Understanding these tipping points means we also understand “business as usual” can’t continue. Some of those tipping points at risk involve: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover, plus the ice sheet on Greenland. Their collapse would mean extensive sea level rise, perhaps as much as 20 feet. Shifts in rainfall patterns could change grasslands into forests or deserts and dry up several of the world’s largest lakes. The failure of the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Current could create severe weather changes in both North America and Europe. The failure of other ocean currents could disrupt the Southern Hemisphere monsoons. I thought of an example of this last bit I had heard from another source. The jet stream (I think) blows across South Africa about half the year providing rain and then is offshore to the south the rest of the year. A warmer earth may mean the jet stream stays offshore the whole year, resulting in much less rain. The Amazon Basin could collapse and the rainforest could become significantly drier, trapping less carbon. There are some positive tipping points. These include the sharp reduction in the cost of renewable energy and the rising sales of electric vehicles. Even so, these good things need to be stimulated through government efforts. The report says it isn’t enough to monitor CO2 levels and temperatures. That should not be at the top of our list of concerns.

It’s how rising temperatures may trigger events that fall like a line of dominoes, taking much of the environment and human society down with them. And the scariest thing may be how often the report confesses that we don’t understand all the factors behind many of these potential disasters.

An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported the Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a lower court’s ruling that permitted the nasty guy to stay on the state’s primary ballot. The Supremes said, “We are not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this court.” The plaintiffs could try again if the nasty guy makes it to the general election. But that seems too late. Why allow a candidate to progress to the general election if he will be disqualified once he gets there? The ruling contrasts with the one in Colorado which said the nasty guy should be banned because he led an insurrection. And today there is news out of Maine. Bulldozer of the Kos community reported the state’s laws say the Secretary of State qualifies candidates for a ballot. So the Maine SoS was asked to hold a hearing. The nasty guy responded to the petition but otherwise offered no defense. The ruling is that the nasty guy is removed from Maine ballots. Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic has been writing about memorable Christmas tunes. This article looks at the song “Do You Hear What I Hear?” written by Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker in 1962. This was about the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With that as background what do we make of lyrics such as, “a voice as big as the sea?” Kornhaber doesn’t have an answer. The words “pray for peace, people everywhere” takes on new meaning. Kornhaber notes saying it this way is “beyond any one religion.” And the words “a star, a star, dancing in the night with a tail as big as a kite” come close to describing a nuclear missile taking off on a column of flame. Jeff Danzinger posted a cartoon on Kos showing what Santa does on December 26.