I haven’t been in a position in which I could watch them or even catch the pundit commentary afterwards.

Did I miss anything?

In my reading I often run into complaints about the U. S.’s abandonment of its role in global leadership. I don’t think that’s something to which we should aspire but I disagree even more with its premise. I don’t think there’s been a decline in the U. S.’s global leadership so much as a complete collapse in international followership.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union the major European powers, i.e. the United Kingdom, France, and Germany just decided they didn’t need us anymore. The only times in which putative U. S. leadership has been been involved has been in those cases in which France and Germany in particular wanted to accomplish something, e.g. remove the Libyan government, and they just didn’t care to devote the resources that they would have required to do so.

I mention this from time to time but it must be remembered that official statistics on literacy are meaningless. Just to take a single country as an example, in China literacy has different definitions depending on what they refer to as one’s “station in life”. There’s one definition of literacy for a subsistence farmer, another for a factory worker, another for professionals, etc. That’s how China achieves its reported 95% literacy rate. What would the real literacy rate be using a uniform high standard? It’s impossible to know but I wouldn’t be surprised at 50% or less.

All literacy statistics are self-reported, each country defines literacy in its own way, and which of a country’s residents are included in its official statistics varies from country to country.

IMO any literacy rate above 95% is probably nonsense and yet many countries claim it. They probably aren’t including the disabled in their statistics and their statndard for literacy may be as basic as being able to recognize your name when you see it written.

I thought you might find thie model curriculum developed by the California Education Department as reported by Williamson Evers at the Wall Street Journal entertaining:

Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.

On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaved people’s uprisings in the antebellum South, to the elements of Hip Hop and African cultural retentions.”

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats—imposed lower underwriting standards on the home-loan industry. Republicans billed it as a way to expand the middle class, while Democrats crowed that it would aid the poor.

In a sample lesson on Native Americans, the curriculum suggests students offer their responses to a fictional environmentalist speech by Chief Seattle as well as an anodyne quote about relationships from the recently deceased rapper Nipsey Hussle. The Chief Seattle error is part of a larger problem. The curriculum perpetuates the myth that the Indians had the same values as present-day ecologists. In truth, Native Americans had a mixed approach to nature. The curriculum writers should have looked carefully at the scholarly evidence presented in Shepard Krech’s 1999 book, “The Ecological Indian”—about, for example, the setting of brush fires that got out of control and the needless killing of buffalo, beaver and deer.

The curriculum lauds bilingual education, but it omits that this program—in which teachers conducted class mostly in Spanish until seventh grade—failed in California and was disliked by much of the Latino community.

The curriculum is entirely wrongheaded when it comes to critical thinking. Critical thinking is described not as reasoning through logic and consideration of evidence but rather a vague deconstruction of power relationships so that one can “speak out on social issues.” Thinking critically “requires individuals to evaluate phenomenon [sic] through the lens of systems, the rules within those systems, who wields power within systems and the impact of that power on the relationships between people existing within systems.”

Such a curriculum presents a serious problem of fairness to students. In a course titled “Math and Social Justice,” will you be graded on having correct answers on the math or politically correct answers on social justice?

This curriculum explicitly aims at encouraging students to become “agents of change, social justice organizers and advocates.” In the sample unit teachers are directed to have students plan “a direct action (e.g., a sit-in, die-in, march, boycott, strike).” Teaching objective history clearly isn’t the goal. Rather, it’s training students to become ideological activists and proponents of identity politics.

I presume that one of the objectives of the curriculum is to be relevant to the school age population and, since half of the school age population is Hispanic, that such a focus exists isnt surprising. However, I suspect that the number of Puerto Ricans one would encounter in California is vanishingly small and most of its Hispanic population is Mexican-American. The percentage of California’s black population has been around 6% for decades and I would not be surprised if the percentage of native born African Americans were declining. so that portion of the curriculum puzzles me.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead articulates what may be an argument counter-intuitive to some of you, that U. S. global power has increased over the last few years:

The circus atmosphere of the Trump presidency sometimes obscures this, but the past few years have witnessed a marked increase in American power. Washington’s reach is expanding, its ability to enforce its will on others has grown, and it has become more willing and able to use its power disruptively. Moreover, as recent protests in Moscow and Hong Kong demonstrate, liberal ideas still have the power to challenge the world’s autocrats. Russia and China have decided to work together more closely in large part because both countries are more worried about the U.S.

Intelligent people disagree about the wisdom of the Trump administration’s Iran policy, and success is far from certain—but as a demonstration of American power, the economic isolation of a major oil producer in the teeth of stiff European, Chinese and Russian opposition is an extraordinary spectacle. To Russia—another major oil producer dependent on trade with the West that has felt the bite of American sanctions—it is terrifying.

Three factors contribute to this surge in American power. First, the success of fracking and related technologies together with the increased use of renewable energy in the West makes world energy markets more resilient. Oil prices are stable and relatively low even though Iran and Venezuela have essentially been forced out of the market.

Second, the growing sophistication of information technology means that U.S. authorities can track complex transactions and enforce secondary sanctions to an unprecedented degree. European governments have been shocked to discover that they cannot protect national companies wishing to do business with Iran from American law. Moscow and Beijing cannot help but notice that these tools could one day be turned against them.

The third factor is Mr. Trump. By using trade and tariffs as weapons in unrelated negotiations, the president has increased America’s clout. European efforts to resist U.S. sanctions on Iran, for example, must be carried out in the shadow cast by Mr. Trump’s threats to impose massive tariffs on key European products on vaguely defined “national security” grounds.

I don’t think I would phrase it in quite that way. I think I would say that over the last 25 years the U. S. has shown an increasing predisposition to use more of the power it has. I am unsure as to whether U. S. power is actually increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same. I’m not even sure how one would go about measuring that.

What I agree with is that our predisposition to use our power has driven Russia and China into a sort of marriage of convenience. Our actions in Libya was an important turning point that in that. We assisted in the overthrow of the government of another country when it was not particularly in our interest to do so and contrary to UN Security Council resolutions.

I also think that marriage of convenience will sooner rather than later end in an quickie divorce. Russia and China are inevitable geopolitical competitors not congenial companions with common interests other than countering the United States.

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post. We shouldn’t have worse income inequality than the countries people usually compare us with, e.g. Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, etc. But I’ll bite. How to we accomplish that without closing our southern border a lot tighter than it is right now.

None of those countries share a 1,500 mile land border with a country in which the per capita income is a quarter theirs. None of them have the percentage of the population born in that other country that we do. People in that country rarely have an adequate command of the language of business here in the United States (English). Most do not have the equivalent of a high school education.

That disparity and the lack of enforcement of our laws provides an effective subsidy for businesses to orient their business models around low-wage employees. In other words they not only changes how much businesses are willing to pay. It changes what they do.

I agree with the editors that it is a policy problem. I suspect we’re thinking about different policies.

In her New York Times column Maureen Dowd lambastes progressives:

The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter.

They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.

The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

My father stayed up all night the night Truman was elected because he was so excited. I would like to stay up ’til dawn the night a Democrat wins next year because I’m so excited to see the moment when the despicable Donald Trump lumbers into a Marine helicopter and flies away for good.

But Democrats are making that dream ever more distant because they are using their time knifing one another and those who want to be on their side instead of playing it smart.

which may sound familiar because I’ve been saying the like for some time. When Nancy Pelosi isn’t progressive enough for the left wing of the party, it should provide a clue. They are drifting ever farther from being a party that can win national elections. Whoever the presidential candidate acceptable to them might be, if he or she drives the voters of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota away drawing 100% of the votes in Seattle will do him or her no good.

I really dislike articles like this one by S. Frederick Carr at the Wall Street Journal, the thesis of which is that the Chinese cannot extinguish the Uighur people and culture. Here’s its kernel:

Beijing hopes its ruthless “Strike Hard” campaign will stamp out the Uighurs as a distinct group. But sheer numbers will make that effort near impossible. Official data put the Turkic population of Xinjiang at 8.6 million, but it is likely well over 10 million. To exterminate them would require a double Holocaust.

Beijing’s alternative to genocide is to destroy the language and culture, but a culture’s identity cannot be so easily destroyed. Memories of Yusuf, Mahmud, scores of other poets and saints, the language, folklore, cuisine and way of life are simply too deeply rooted. The Uighurs also have developed coping mechanisms. While the government demands that boys be sent to Chinese schools, girls are continuing the study of their native language. Efforts to suppress the Uighurs’ culture will further radicalize them and drive their lives deeper underground.

The Uighur tragedy now holds the world’s attention. Beijing has managed to bribe Saudi Arabia, Turkey and several other Muslim countries into silence, but the gag order cannot be sustained for long. Meanwhile, multiple countries near and far now host large, well-educated and active communities of Uighur expatriates.

Let’s look at the record book. From 1938 to 1945 the Germans killed roughly 6 million Jews and another 4 million gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities. Ashkenazic culture and the Western dialect of the Yiddish language were effectively wiped out. The Eastern dialect continues to be spoken by 1.5 million people in Ukraine, Israel, and the United States. Don’t be surprised if, in another generation, it is only spoken natively by a handful of old people.

The British, far more temperate than the Nazis, extinguished Cornish several centuries ago and nearly succeeded in eliminating Scots and Irish Gaelic (now fewer than 200,000 native speakers between them). The French came pretty close to exterminating the Breton language and culture. They also did a pretty good job on the French Basques—about 50,000 continue to speak their language.

Stalin killed nearly 20 million Ukrainians, about two-thirds by starvation, the rest by more direct means. The wars fought in Genghis Khan’s name killed 40 million people, extinguishing who knows how many languages and cultures.

In the 16th century the Spanish extinguished many entire cultures in their conquests in the Americas including the Aztec, Maya, and Inca, leaving few speakers of their languages (today there are probably around 10 million all told), replacing their cultures with a version of their own.

The Romans destroyed the Gaulish language and culture, first by the sword and then finishing off the remainders by cultural means. We don’t know how many languages and cultures they overwhelmed but they certainly include Coptic (now a liturgical language), Phrygian, and Galatian. We also don’t know how many languages and cultures the Ottoman Turks killed off.

There is a long list of North and South American Indian languages and whole cultures which are extinct, killed off by European invaders and settlers, disease, their neighbors or just overwhelmed. The number of languages and cultures extinguished by Arabization since the 6th century is vast.

If languages and cultures could never be destroyed, we would still have people walking around speaking Sumerian, Elamite, Hittite, and Akkadian. We don’t. None of those language have even left descendants.

Eradicating the Uighurs, other than its diaspora population, is certainly within the power of the Chinese. Whether they will do so or not I cannot say but the sooner the world realizes that the better. The Uighurs have no allies willing to defend them.

The Romans called them diÄ“s caniculārÄ“s, literally “the dog days”, because they associated the hottest, most humid days of summer with Sirius, the Dog Star, in the constellation Canis Major, the larger dog, listed as one of the 48 constellations by Ptolemy almost 2,000 years ago. I can tell it’s the dog days of summer because there are no interesting op-eds or editorials in any of the major news outlets. Everyone is either on vacation or just phoning it in.

Europe is suffering through the hottest summer on record. High temperatures in France and Italy have been between 90°F and 110°F or, said another way, weather that wouldn’t be particularly unusual for Chicago in summer and completely normal in St. Louis, where I grew up.

You haven’t experienced summer until you’ve worked next to a blast furnace in a steel mill in a St. Louis summer with the ambient temperature and humidity both around 100. My dad was a conscientious objector to air conditioning as well so I never lived in an air conditioned home until I was a grown man.

My dad was not an ogre. Far from it. But my mom’s first major expense (after paying for my dad’s funeral) was to have central air installed in the house.