My immediate reaction on reading the opening passage of this op-ed at the Wall Street Journal by Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi:

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies.

was better them than me. I have been through a vast number of company-required and companywide sensitivity training sessions over the years. Any allure they might have had evaporated 30 years ago. Here’s their assessment of the sessions they witnessed:

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

In workshops such as “Integrating Healing-Centered Engagements Into a DEIA School Program” and “Racial Trauma and the Path Toward Healing,” we learned how DEI practitioners use segregated affinity groups and practices such as healing circles to inculcate feelings of trauma. Even students without grievances are trained to see themselves as victims of the their ancestors’ suffering through “intergenerational violence.”

The next step in a school’s transformation is “inclusion.” Schools must integrate DEI work into every aspect of the school and every facet of the curriculum must be evaluated through an antibias, antiracist, or antioppressive lens. In “Let’s Talk About It! Anti-Oppressive Unit and Lesson Plan Design,” we learned that the omission of this lens—“failing to explore the intersection of STEM and social justice,” for instance—constitutes an act of “curriculum violence.”

All school messaging must be scrubbed of noninclusive language, all school policies of noninclusive practices, all libraries of noninclusive books. Inclusion also requires that all non-Bipoc stakeholders become allies in the fight against the systemic harm being perpetuated by the institution. In “Small Activists, Big Impact—Cultivating Anti-Racists and Activists in Kindergarten,” we were told that “kindergartners are natural social-justice warriors.”

It isn’t enough for a school to be inclusive; it also must foster “belonging.” Belonging means that a school must be a “safe space”—code for prohibiting any speech or activity, regardless of intent, that a Bipoc student or faculty member might perceive as harmful, as uncomfortable or as questioning their “lived experience.” The primary tool for suppressing speech is to create a fear of microaggressions.

In “Feeding Yourself When You Are Fed Up: Connecting Resilience and DEI Work,” we learned techniques, such as “calling out,” that faculty and students can use to shut down conversations immediately by interrupting speakers and letting them know that their words and actions are unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. Several workshops focused on the practice of “restorative justice,” used to re-educate students who fall afoul of speech codes. The final step to ensure belonging is to push out families or faculty who question DEI work. “Sometimes you gotta say, maybe this is not the right school for you. . . . I’ve said that a lot this year,” said Victor Shin, an assistant head of school and co-chairman of the People of Color Conference, in “From Pawns to Controlling the Board: Seeing BIPOC Students as Power Players in Student Programming.”

With the implementation of diversity, inclusion and belonging, schools can begin to address the primary objectives of DEI work: equity and justice. NAIS obligates all member schools to commit to these aims in their mission statements or defining documents. Equity requires dismantling all systems that Bipoc members of the community believe to cause harm. Justice is the final stage of social transformation to “collective liberation.” The goal is to remake society into a collective, stripped of individualism and rife with reparations.

In sessions such as “Traversing the Long and Thorny Road Toward Equity in Our Schools,” “Moving the Needle Toward Meaningful Institutional Change,” “Building an Equitable and Liberating Mindset” and “Breaking the White Centered Cycle,” we learned that the only way to achieve equity and justice is to eradicate all aspects of white-supremacy culture from “predominantly white institutions,” or PWIs, as NAIS calls its member schools, irrespective of the diversity of a school’s students. Perfectionism, punctuality, urgency, niceness, worship of the written word, progress, objectivity, rigor, individualism, capitalism and liberalism are some of the characteristics of white-supremacy culture in need of elimination. In “Post-PoCC Return to PWI Normal,” DEI practitioner Maria Graciela Alcid summarized: “Decolonizing white-supremacy-culture thinking is the ongoing act of deconstructing, dismantling, disrupting those colonial ideologies and the superiority of Western thought.”

DEI was “another thing to put on the plate, and absolutely now, it is the plate on which everything sits” said teacher Gina Favre, describing her school’s transformation.

No longer are private schools focused primarily on teaching critical thinking, fostering intellectual curiosity, and rewarding independent thought. Their new mission is to train a vanguard of activists to lead the charge in tearing down the foundations of society, reminiscent of Maoist China’s Red Guards.

I emphatically do not object to students learning the history of the United States, warts and all. I was astonished that more people weren’t aware of the Tulsa race riots the centenary of which was last year. I had learned about them in school. Why didn’t they?

And my parents taught me the importance of not using the “N word” and treating all people with kindness and consideration as well as the benefits I’ve gained through the accidents of my birth including race and my family 70 years ago. Why didn’t theirs?

I am skeptical that DEI training, as described above, will benefit anyone beyond those being paid to conduct them. Is being openly patronizing really an improvement over hidden prejudice?

I materially agree with Tom Nichols’s slightly tongue-in-cheek definitions of liberal democracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, libertarianism, socialism, and communism at The Atlantic’s “Peacefield” newsletter. I particularly like his definition of liberal democracy:

Liberal Democracy

What it is: A system of government that lets you read cranky articles about politics like the one you’re reading right now.

More specifically, democracies derive a ruling mandate from the free choices of citizens, who are equal before the law and who can freely express their preferences. Liberal democracies enshrine a respect for basic human rights (including the right of old cranks to speak their mind). Rights are, one might say, unalienable: The losers of elections do not have their rights stripped away. All citizens abide by constitutional and legal rules agreed upon in advance of elections and are willing to transfer power back and forth to each other peaceably.

What it isn’t: “The majority always rules.” Getting everything you want every time. Governing without negotiation or compromise. Winning every election. Never living with outcomes that disappoint you. Never running out of toilet paper or cat food.

Democracy, in sum, is not “things you happen to like.”

I have a few quibbles, of course. For one thing the most important “means of production” is money. I wonder if that realization would change his thinking?

I wish he had provided a definition of fascism. He uses the term twice in the article but never defines it. I’m curious which governments his definition would include and which it would not.

I’ll offer a definition of my own:

Majoritarianism

What it is: A system of government in which the majority always rules.

What is isn’t: Liberal democracy

I also have one more quibble. Sadly it is not true that “words mean things”, at least not for everybody. For the more post-modern among us it’s a Humpty-Dumpty world and words mean precisely what they wish them to mean, no more, no less.

Speaking of questions that came up in comments and preschool, there’s a fascinating article at NPR by Anya Kamenetz largely consisting of an interview with the individual who conducted the study of Tennessee’s statewide preschool program that found negative effects from the program on test scores, math, science, reading, and behavioral problems. That wasn’t what Dale Farran wanted or expected and, frankly, she was shocked by it.

The key point is that some preschool programs are better than others and the direction in which we’ve been headed for decades. Consider:

“One of the biases that I hadn’t examined in myself is the idea that poor children need a different sort of preparation from children of higher-income families.”

She’s talking about drilling kids on basic skills. Worksheets for tracing letters and numbers. A teacher giving 10-minute lectures to a whole class of 25 kids who are expected to sit on their hands and listen, only five of whom may be paying any attention.

“Higher-income families are not choosing this kind of preparation,” she explains. “And why would we assume that we need to train children of lower-income families earlier?”

Farran points out that families of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.

This is not what Farran is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where “teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children.” She thinks that part of the problem is that teachers in many states are certified for teaching students in prekindergarten through grade 5, or sometimes even pre-K-8. Very little of their training focuses on the youngest learners.

So another major bias that she’s challenging is the idea that teacher certification equals quality. “There have been three very large studies, the latest one in 2018, which are not showing any relationship between quality and licensure.”

Read the whole thing.

Who’d a thunk it? Children learn best through doing things that are developmentally appropriate and for young children that means play. That flies in the face of what we’ve been training teachers to do for decades. They’ve been told the wrong things.

The key point here is that universal pre-K is not only not sufficient it may actually be counter-productive. It needs to be the right kind of preschool as well.

In his column at Yahoo! Finance Rick Newman identifies a number of strategies that the Biden Administration might use in trying to counter inflation:

• Fix supply chains and boost domestic manufacturing.
• Promoting competition.
• The “build back better” plan.

critiquing and, to some degree, rejecting each in turn. While I suspect that President Biden will tout BBB as inflation-fighting, I’m skeptical. I think it’s more likely to be inflation-producing. As we are learning to our sorrow, there’s truth in Milton Friedman’s lament that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

When you increase consumption without increasing either production or imports by extending credit to ourselves (borrowing), it produces inflation by definition. The childcare provision of BBB promises to increase productivity but productivity and production are not the same. It could increase production but it’s as or more likely to have no effect on production.

Furthermore, Mr. Newman is confusing inflation with price increases. President Biden does have some prospective tactics for lowering prices, largely by reversing things he’s done since coming into office. For example, he could encourage additional production of oil and gas in the United States. However, the political costs to him among progressives in that are such I don’t expect him to do it.

Highly targeted tax cuts for business investment could increase production but those, too, would bear political costs and I’m concerned that as is habitual for Congress the “targeted” part will be omitted and exacerbate our present problems without materially increasing domestic production.

I think it’s far more likely that President Biden will cross his fingers and hope that the Fed pulls his inflation onions out of the fire, focusing on additional fiscal stimulus to ease the pain of inflation which IMO is precisely the wrong strategy.

A question came up in comments and as is frequently the case, it led me on a treasure hunt. The omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is now being said to have multiple “sub-variants”. An article at The Conversation by Lara Herrero and Eugene Madzokere says this:

Errors often occur during the process of duplicating the viral RNA. This results in viruses that are similar but not exact copies of the original virus. These errors in the viral RNA are called mutations, and viruses with these mutations are called variants. Variants could differ by a single or many mutations.

Not all mutations have the same effect. To understand this better, we need to understand the basics of our genetic code (DNA for humans; RNA for SARS-CoV-2). This code is like a blueprint on which all organisms are built. When a mutation occurs at a single point, it won’t necessarily change any of the building blocks (called amino acids). In this case, it won’t change how the organism (human or virus) is built.

On occasion though, these single mutations occur in a part of the virus RNA that causes a change in a particular building block. In some cases, there could be many mutations that together alter the building block.

A variant is referred to as a strain when it shows distinct physical properties. Put simply, a strain is a variant that is built differently, and so behaves differently, to its parent virus. These behavioural differences can be subtle or obvious.

For example, these differences could involve a variant binding to a different cell receptor, or binding more strongly to a receptor, or replicating more quickly, or transmitting more efficiently, and so on.

Essentially, all strains are variants, but not all variants are strains.

while this article at The Conversation by Paul Griffin says this:

Viruses, and particularly RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, make lots of mistakes when they reproduce. They can’t correct these mistakes, so they have a relatively high rate of errors, or mutations, and are constantly evolving.

When the genetic code of a virus changes as a result of these mutations, it’s referred to as a variant.

Omicron is a “highly divergent” variant, having accumulated more than 30 mutations in the spike protein. This has reduced the protection of antibodies from both prior infection and vaccination, and increased transmissibility.

and

A lineage, or sub-variant, is a genetically closely related group of virus variants derived from a common ancestor.

The Omicron variant comprises three sub-lineages: B.1.1.529 or BA.1, BA.2 and BA.3.

From which I infer several things:

1. B.2 is genetically closely related to B.1, the originally detected form of the omicron variant. It’s therefore part of the omicron lineage, i.e. a sub-variant.
2. It is not yet known whether B.2 has a behavioral difference from B.1. It might end up being designated a strain. We just don’t know yet.
3. A lot of this stuff consists of judgment calls. To some extent they’re making it up as they go along.

There’s quite a bit I haven’t written about today. The topics in the opinion pages have been inflation, Ukraine, the Jan 6 committee, COVID-19, and Trump. I’ve very nearly written everything I have to say on all of those topics. Let’s hit the highlights one at a time.

Like just about everybody else I think that inflation is too high. I don’t think it’s transitory; I do think it’s multi-factorial, and I do think that fiscal policy was one of those factors. What I wish more people were noting was that Congress is very likely to do precisely the wrong thing in response to inflation, particularly in an election year—they’re likely to appropriate more money they don’t have. There’s a risk of a positive feedback loop with monetary policy and fiscal policy at cross-purposes.

On Ukraine whatever we do we should absolutely, positively not commit troops to Ukraine, in effect treating it as though it were already a NATO member, unless Germany puts some serious skin in the game. Germany’s mugwumpery is reprehensible.

I thought that Speaker Pelosi erred in not letting the Republicans put whomever they chose on the committee. Not doing that weakened its legitimacy. The Republicans are definitely not covering themselves in glory in their public statements.

It looks to me very much as though public opinion and conduct were forcing the hand of policymakers on COVID-19. I think that people (like me) who are at risk for serious disease due to age or predisposing conditions should be fully vaccinated and boosted.

With respect to Trump’s carrying government records home with him, I think as I think about so many things. Either the law should be enforced or it shouldn’t be a law. That includes the Records Act. Performative jurisprudence is loopy. Enforcement of the law shouldn’t depend on how much you like the person. It may actually be the case that the Records Act does not apply or, at least, cannot be enforced against the president.

Any bets on when the statistics on “encounters” at our southern land border will be updated? I would not be surprised if they weren’t updated until after the mid-term elections.

Update

Forgot about Joe Rogan. I don’t much care. Never listened to his podcast. Probably never will.

As I read this post by Michaeleen Doucleff at NPR on the “family tree” of SARS-CoV-2 variants:

In many ways, viruses are like families — giant, complicated, extended families with cousins, aunts, uncles, grannies and grandpas galore.

Just as with human families, scientists can generate family trees for viruses, showing how each member (or variant) is related to the others. Children are connected to parents by branches, and cousins are connected through their grandparents.

For viruses, these family trees give biologists insights into how a virus has evolved over time and what changes to expect in the future.

During the pandemic, the family tree of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, has produced more surprises than anyone expected.

A number of random thoughts occurred to me. The first was how much we still have to learn.

The second was that there is a major distinction between science and scientists. Scientists, being human, have a bad habit of getting out in front of the actual science. We need to be careful to distinguish between “following the science” which is only prudent and “following the scientists” which may well not be.

The third was to wonder how many other things (other than the virus’s rate of mutation) will we learn we have been wrong about in time?

Jeff Bezos’s superyacht is so big that moving it out of harbor in Rotterdam requires that the Koningshavenbrug bridge be temporarily dismantled to accommodate it, reports USA Today:

Jeff Bezos’ superyacht is too large to pass through the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, so the town decided to dismantle the bridge. In retaliation, local residents vow to egg Bezos’ yacht as it passed through.

As of Thursday, more than 14,000 people were “interested” and 4,000 confirmed they will attend a Facebook event titled “Throwing eggs at superyacht Jeff Bezos.”

The Dutch port city said it would temporarily break down the historic Koningshavenbrug Bridge because Bezos’ 417-foot-long yacht won’t fit, Agence France-Presse reported.

“Calling all Rotterdammers, take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through the Hef in Rotterdam,” organizer Pablo Strörmann wrote in the Facebook post.

Why is that good news for Poland and the UK? The Netherlands is a major exporter of eggs but it’s one of the largest importers of eggs in the world. Its net imports of eggs from Poland and the UK are the largest. It imports more eggs from Germany and Belgium but it exports more to them than it imports.

If we hear more voices like Jeffrey Sachs’s in this piece at Project Syndicate:

Neither side can claim innocence at this point. Rather than trying to pretend that one side is a saint and the other a sinner, everyone should be focused on what it will take to achieve security for both sides and the wider world. History suggests that it is best to keep Russian and NATO forces geographically separated, rather than confronting each other directly across a border. European and global insecurity were at their highest when US and Soviet forces faced off against each other at short range – in Berlin in 1961 and in Cuba in 1962. Under those harrowing, world-threatening circumstances, the construction of the Berlin Wall served as a stabilizer, albeit a deeply tragic one.

Today, our paramount concern should be Ukraine’s sovereignty and peace in Europe and the world, not NATO’s presence in Ukraine, and certainly not a new wall. Ukraine itself would be much safer if NATO stopped its eastward expansion in exchange for Russia’s withdrawal from eastern Ukraine and its demobilization of forces along Ukraine’s border. Diplomacy along these lines, supported by EU and United Nations involvement, is urgently needed.

the world might be able to escape the Ukraine crisis without a catastrophe and without a complete collapse in the world order.

Against that are Germany’s desire for expanded markets and nostalgic American expansionists’ inexplicable attraction to apocalypse.