Welcome to the start of the “work” week: Monday, October 20, 2025, and National Chicken and Waffles Day. I’ve never had this dish though we have several joints serving it on the South Side, as it was popular in the American South and probably brought here during the Great Migration after WWI. There is of course a Wikipedia page on the dish, and its origins go back farther than I thought:
Chicken and waffles, as a combined recipe, first appeared in the United States’ colonial period in the 1600s in Pennsylvania Dutch country. The traditional Pennsylvania Dutch version consists of a plain waffle with pulled, stewed chicken on top, covered in gravy.
A version using fried chicken is associated with the American South. The waffle is served as it would be for breakfast, with condiments such as butter and syrup. This version of the dish is popular enough in Baltimore, Maryland to become a local custom.
I think I’d like the Southern version, shown below, as I think alternating bites of the savory, crunchy chicken with the sweet, syrupy waffles would be lovely:
It’s also the Indian holiday of Diwali, International Chefs Day, National Brandied Fruit Day, National Mozzarella Stick Day, World Calvados Day, and World Statistics Day.
Here’s a statistic I found from AI (no guarantees of truth!): The average human spends a year of their life sitting on the toilet.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 20 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*In a NYT op-ed, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tells us why “The Democrats’ main problem isn’t their message” (archived here). What is it, then?It’s that people aren’t hearing the Democrats’ message.
There is a necessary and invigorating debate over the direction of the Democratic Party and what it must do to regain the voters it lost in 2024 and get enough electoral victories to retake power at the federal level. Some argue that Democrats need to move to the right on certain high-profile issues — whether immigration or civil rights for trans people — while others say the Democrats need to double down on working-class populism and court voters who have given up on the system in disgust.
But one thing that tends to get lost in this discussion is that for all the failures of the Democratic Party in 2024, in narrow terms the Harris-Walz campaign’s message was actually an effective one. The campaign and its allied super PAC spent more money on advertising than any other presidential effort in history, and most of that was concentrated in the swing states. There, voters were less likely to defect to Mr. Trump than in nonswing states such as New Jersey, New York and California. And the message of those ads was in line with a lot of what many critics have suggested — focused on core economic issues and framed in populist terms, with Ms. Harris portrayed as an ally of the working class.
In other words, even though she lost, her core problem was not her message, however imperfect it might have been. It was an inability to get enough people to hear it, in spite of record-breaking advertising spending. If Mr. Trump had not run a single paid advertisement in the race, he almost surely would have dominated the single most important resource of our age: attention. Democrats need to win the attention contest in 2026 and beyond if they want to win back the country.
His solutions to capture American attention are these: Go everywhere (“In our current environment, national candidates must be comfortable talking off-script in a wide variety of venues with lots of different kinds of interlocutors.”); always be posting (“Successful campaigns must prioritize producing content. One thing successful content creators will tell you about excelling in the world of digital attention is that there’s no penalty for quantity.”); don’t worry so much about negative attention (“because of how distracted and distractible the public has become, gaffes — or controversial and even offensive statements by candidates — do not matter the way they once did”), and, finally, recruit candidates who are good at getting attention and talking to people (It almost seems ludicrous to state this explicitly, but if you’re going to compete in this new environment, you need candidates with a natural aptitude for attracting attention and then holding it?).
The last bit seems to me most important. Kamala Harris was, in my view, a dreadful candidate, regardless of how many Democrats dissimulated about the “joy” she brought. Even if she went everywhere and posted her word salar constantly, it was her word salad and her inability to answer serious questions coherently that helped cost her the election. The problem was the last point: we did NOT have a candidate with nearly any aptitude. The other points are good, but the last one is crucial. Who should we get: Newsom, Pritzker, Buttigieg, or a dark horse? My solution, which is only partly farcical, is to put James Carville in charge ot the campaign and do what he says.
*Over at Heterodox STEM, reader Coel Heller expands on an essay by Freddie deBoer, who I used to write a lot about. deBoer has not only first-hand experience in education, but is also a hereditarian, so while he asserts that throwing money at schools in a “no child left behind way” doesn’t work, he fails, says Heller, to carry his own views to their logical conclusion.
Such interventions don’t work. They’ve been tried multiple times and, as deBoer documents at length in his essay Education Doesn’t Work 3.0, they have little effect. That is, while schooling raises the ability of kids generally, all of the policy interventions ever tried do nothing to reduce the achievement gaps between the most-able and the least-able pupils. Indeed, if anything, they enhance them, because the more-capable pupils are most able to take advantage of whatever is on offer.
As deBoer says: “children who start out ahead in early childhood education stay ahead through the end of their academic careers, while the students who start out behind stay behind, in large majorities and with very few exceptions. […] Reformers talk in terms of “unlocking potential” or “closing gaps”, but history shows the rank order is remarkably resistant to even the most sweeping and expensive pedagogical efforts. Intervention after intervention has failed to meaningfully affect the sticky nature of relative academic performance”.
DeBoer thus concludes that we all have: “… an inherent or innate academic potential” and that “The most direct and parsimonious explanation for this attribute is genes”. DeBoer defends his thesis capably and at length, and obviously he is entirely correct (his article contains links and citations to support his claims, which I do not reproduce here).
Heller then notes that various genetic studies show that genetic variation for educational attainment within a population is due about 70% to variation in genes and 30% to variation in environments (I don’t know the latest figures, but that sounds close). Such genetic analysis may, as Luana and I wrote in our Skeptical Inquirer article, be useful in helping individuals. But of course the big brouhaha is not about differences among individuals within groups, but individuals between groups, mostly minorities. This is the hottest potato in genetics, and few will touch it. Heller does:
Isn’t it much simpler and more parsimonious to suppose that genetics, so dominant in explaining differences in individual ability, could also be a significant factor in group differences? Yes it is heresy, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be true. (And here I’m not attempting to survey the positive arguments for that conclusion, I’m just examining the internal logic of deBoer’s essay.) Too many treat this matter as a moral issue, when instead it is purely factual, about how the world is, not how we wish it were. In the end reality matters, and one is not going to help those who one is trying to help if the basic diagnosis is wrong.
Eventually we will know about group differences, as some researchers don’t care about taboos. And there are advantages of knowing about group differences in behavioral traits. As Luana and I wrote:
It should be clear from this example that the reasons for studying genetic differences between ethnic groups is to boost the success of individuals whose DNA is known, not to rank different groups for one trait or another. But to do this boosting, we must first understand the nature of genetic differences among groups. Many objections to this kind of work vanish when you realize that while the focus is on population-specific DNA segments associated with achievement, the ultimate goal is to help each person do their best.
In our view, then, research on cognition or educational attainment within and between groups should not be demonized, banned, or automatically denied publication, and the data should be publicly available. It goes without saying that scientists should be cautious about such research and vigilant against its misuse or misrepresentation. But in the end, it’s hard to argue with the idea that the more we understand—and that includes genetics—the more success we’ll have with social policies. Indeed, there are good arguments suggesting that stifling research on IQ, or equating this research with racism, will cause more harm than good. After all, political equality should be a moral imperative, not an empirical hypothesis, and ultimately the value of a human being does not and should not depend on their IQ or years of schooling.
Or are there some subjects where resarch should simply not be done? I think that’s true on ethical grounds, but am wary of such research being governmentally forbidden. And genetic differences among groups of people should not be forbidden, as it has the potential to help individuals. It’s not good policy to willy-nilly try various interventions to reduce or eliminate differences between groups until we know the cause of those differences. And those causes may result in educational policies being tailored not to groups, but to individuals who, by belonging to different groups, may on average have different sets of genes. In other words, we might be able to tailor educational policy to the specific genes of each individual.
*The Times of Israel reports that the slow establishment of an interim government in Gaza is allowing the revival of Hamas. SURPRISE! Did you expect otherwise?
The US and Middle Eastern mediating countries are working to put together a committee of Palestinian technocrats responsible for the postwar management of Gaza, while the pullback of Israeli forces from deep inside the enclave has allowed Hamas to reassert its control in the Strip.
US special envoy Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and former UK prime minister Tony Blair are leading the effort on behalf of the Trump administration, with the ex-British leader crisscrossing the region to hold meetings with various stakeholders.
Each wants a say in the list of Palestinian technocrats who will serve on a transitional committee responsible for administering day-to-day affairs in Gaza.
The Palestinian committee will be overseen by a Board of Peace headed by US President Donald Trump, whose other members have also yet to be finalized.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty announced earlier this week that the Palestinian ministers have, in fact, been selected and vetted, but a source familiar with the matter denied this and claimed that the top Egyptian diplomat made the comments as part of an effort to finalize the list of candidates his country prefers, as Cairo seeks to benefit financially from the reconstruction process.
But the US and other mediating countries — Egypt, Qatar and Turkey — will also need at least the acquiescence of PA rival Hamas, given that the terror group remains the most dominant Palestinian force in Gaza and has the ability to play a spoiler role.
While Hamas has agreed to give up governing control of the Strip, the ceasefire deal inked last week in Sharm el-Sheikh did not include the issue of disarmament, and the terror group has indicated that it is not prepared to give up its weapons.
In the meantime, it is using those arms to go after rival clans in the Gaza Strip, summarily executing several dozen Palestinians it has accused of collaborating with Israel.
Anybody with two neurons to rub together realizes that Hamas will not give up power no matter who tries to run the Gaza strip. This is the toughest problem of the war, but the sooner the Arab countires confect a non-corrupt, non-Jew-hating government for Gaza, the faster we can have a peace that seems more secure. Hamas must surrender unconditionally and give up its weapons. Neither the U.S. nor Israel can require that, but perhaps the Arab states can.
*The NYT describes how fragile the peace really is right now:
Israel on Sunday launched its heaviest wave of attacks on Gaza since a fragile cease-fire took hold a week ago and said it was suspending humanitarian aid to the territory after accusing Hamas of firing on its forces and violating the truce.
Israel said two of its soldiers were killed in combat in Gaza on Sunday. Gaza’s health ministry initially reported 14 Palestinian deaths across Gaza on Sunday.
Both Israel and Hamas have now accused each other of violating the truce after repeated flare-ups of violence over the past three days. But both made clear on Sunday that they were still committed to maintaining the truce.
The transfer of aid into Gaza has been halted until further notice, according to two Israeli officials who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.
Earlier in the day, the Israeli military said Palestinian militants had attacked its forces across cease-fire lines in Gaza, and it launched airstrikes in retaliation. It said the Palestinian fighters had fired an anti-tank missile at its troops and then shot at them in the Rafah area of southern Gaza that remains under Israeli control, according to the cease-fire agreement.
The military called this “a blatant violation” of the truce. In response, the military said, Israeli forces struck in the area “to eliminate the threat” and dismantle tunnel shafts and other military structures. Later Sunday, the military intensified its attacks, saying it struck dozens of Hamas targets throughout the Gaza Strip.
Yes, I agree that Israel has the right to defend itself in Gaza, even after it’s pulled back, if the IDF is fired on. And Hamas will push the IDF as far as they can. But I agree with a comment that reader Norm made yesterday:
I want Israel to adhere to the agreement until Hamas breaks it definitively. Failing to return all of the dead hostages on time is not definitive, as there is room for doubt over whether Hamas really has them or not. (Returning hostages a couple at a time when Israel raises hell does suggest that Hamas is withholding bodies, but it’s not definitive—or “definitive enough” in my view.) Hamas will break the agreement definitely at some point, and Israel will need to respond. But I want the U.S. and the other partners in the region to see the response as justified—whether they say so publicly or not.
*I haven’t posted much about Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish columns, but that’s due largely to the time they arrive (late afternoon), after I’ve already written up the Nooz for the next day. So I’ll highlight his latest piece, “The secret of Trump’s Gaza Triumph,” subtitled “Who could have foreseen the president’s stunning innovation?” Sullivan’s big question is why this triumph, which is what he considers it, happened now rather than before:
The release of the Israeli hostages (no women tellingly and appallingly among them) is an unalloyed wonderful thing. I can’t imagine what these poor souls have gone through, or what was done to them solely because they are Jews. The return of the remains of the rest is also positive, of course, if it transpires, however grim the reality. The return of aid, if it truly gets under way, will be literally lifesaving — which even the Queers for Palestine must be able to celebrate. No one should begrudge a US president credit for helping make that happen. I sure don’t. And pausing this conflict is a real, if modest, gain.
But the $64,000 question, of course, is how and why this happened now rather than before. After all, Hamas offered a similar hostage deal for a ceasefire in April this year and October last year, and Netanyahu said no, insisting that Hamas needed to be totally destroyed and brought to “unconditional surrender” — or another 10/7 was inevitable. So what changed, after so little did?
. . .The latest Gaza offensive was still taking place, remember, after the Hamas leadership had been largely wiped out, after the entire Gaza strip, including Rafah, had been made uninhabitable, after Hezbollah had been taken out of the game, after Iran had been attacked and its nuclear threat dented, after hundreds of thousands of civilians had been displaced not once, not twice, but multiple times, after 70,000 lay dead, including many thousands of children, and after Gaza had been brought to the verge of famine. Still not enough, we were told. Hamas was like the armless, legless Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail — and yet somehow still lethal.
So if none of those things had caused Israel to stop its relentless assault on Gaza and its population, what had?
Here’s Sullivan’s answer:
And then you see it. The critical thing that happened — the thing that changed the entire dynamic — is that Netanyahu finally got so cocky last month he decided to bomb Qatar. Israel bombs other countries all the time at will, of course, but the concept of actually bombing Hamas diplomats while in negotiation must have been particularly irresistible: the mother of all fuck-yous to international law.
The only trouble was that this time, Bibi had bombed Trump’s Qatari sugar-daddies — the ones who’d just bribed the fathomlessly corrupt president with a giant 747 and were busy funneling billions into Jared’s bank account. Worse than that: Bibi hadn’t even bothered to tell the US in advance. So Trump was totally blindsided and humiliated.
Think about that for a moment: the prime minister of a foreign country believed he could bomb diplomats of a US ally and military base without telling the US in advance and get away with it. This staggering Israel exception to every rule is so routine we barely even notice it anymore. But in this case, the bombing made Trump seem less powerful than Netanyahu.
. . .Trump did something else as well: finally pissed off enough, he told Arab leaders that if they backed his Gaza deal, the US would prevent Israel from formally annexing the West Bank, despite the vicious campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing Netanyahu was unleashing there.
In other words, Trump finally did what no president had done for a very, very long time: he put real pressure on Israel. His rage after the Qatar bombing was the catalyst.
. . . You want to know the secret genius of Trump’s Gaza deal? It’s America First. A US president finally put the US interests ahead of Israel’s, and didn’t blink. Fuck yeah.
This all makes sense, as things happened very quickly after the Qatar bombing, though Qatar isn’t really a U.S. ally, since at the same time it harbors a U.S. airbase, it harbors Hamas bigwigs and funnels money to Hamas. But this is a pretty temperate column for Sullivan, who seems to have been pretty anti-Israel for a long time. He’s happy that “Trump and future presidents will begin to see the potential benefits of doing the thing that actually made this possible: treating Israel as a normal ally, whose interests matter but should never eclipse that of the superpower.” But Israel is more than just a “normal ally”; it’s the only bastion of democracy in the Middle East and the only refuge of the Jews. Still, it’s hard to deny that, at least at this stage, Trump did a good thing, walking a fine tightrope to bring peace. And Israel should not have bombed Qatar without consulting the U.S., which would have forbidden it. But is it now “peace for our time” or simply a pause in the war as Hamas rebuilds? I’m hoping for the former but betting on the latter.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s having translation problems:
Hili: I hear a mole.
Andrzej: And what is it saying?
Hili: I don’t know, it’s speaking a foreign language.
In Polish:
Hili: Słyszę kreta.
Ja: I co on mówi?
Hili: Nie wiem, mówi w obcym języku.
*******************
From Give Me a Sign:
From Animal Antics,, a d*g is undergoing deep introspection:
From The Dodo Pet:
Masih points out the hypocrisy of Iran’s leaders (read all the text):
The daughter of Ali Shamkhani one of the Islamic Republic’s top enforcers had a lavish wedding in a strapless dress. Meanwhile, women in Iran are beaten for showing their hair and young people can’t afford to marry. This video made millions of Iranian furious. Because they… https://t.co/MAb9hNgBnN pic.twitter.com/WoRgbpXQFA
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 19, 2025
From Ricky Gervais (do watch “After Life”), things that can’t be said too often, including “You might not know it’s the last time.”
If you think Ricky Gervais is just a comedian, then you’re not listening.
“Once you realise you’re not gonna be around forever, I think that’s what makes life so magical.” pic.twitter.com/GrKChdvGxX
— After Life 🐕🦺 (@ForAntilly) October 19, 2025
From Malcolm, with a new hypothesis advanced:
I think cats and their tails have separate consciousnesses 🤣🧡pic.twitter.com/Ul4U1yxoDT
— No Cats No Life (@NoCatsNoLife_m) September 8, 2025
From Luana. OY!
I helped my dad clean out the basement and found this book, I’m an only child. 👀 pic.twitter.com/Y6QaVy6pZO
— SweetMarie (@Oceanbreeze473) October 17, 2025
One from my feed. This rhino clearly didn’t appreciate his ride, and he shows it. What amazing strength!
He was walking off and then was like “and you know what?!” pic.twitter.com/7gTN1cm6HU
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) October 19, 2025
One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death, together with her mother, as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old. Had she lived, she'd be 87 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-20T10:39:45.194Z
Two from Matthew. Here’s the first post in a thread of his visit to the Shanghai Museum of Natural History:
I feel as though I have been miniaturised and am in one of @tetzoo.bsky.social’s display cabinets…
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-10-19T09:14:18.450Z
Protests in Chicago. Matthew adds: “They are chanting “Move Back” which is what the cops say, I guess. dig the Angler Fish suit.”
Im dead 😂😂😂
— CarpinSanDiego (@carpinsandiego.com) 2025-10-19T00:06:28.455Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. -John Dewey, philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer (20 Oct 1859-1952)
I would first of all challenge Hayes to tell us what the message of the Harris campaign was. It seems to have been “more of the same.” As for the need to win attention, this can easily come across as a cry for attention. It does explain a lot of the performance art that the Dems are engaging in, though. The message is still unclear, though.
Re Ms Harris being portrayed as an ally of the working class — if that was their intent then it was a dire portrayal indeed — lots of “effete, snobbish intellectuals”¹ and no “solidarity forever”.
. . . . .
¹ Spiro T, 1969
I don’t buy Sullivan’s bribery charge against Trump because Trump, unlike Biden, has never seemed like anyone’s paid actor. I think Victor David Hanson is much better on the subject of “why now”. In regard to Qatar specifically:
But my favorite is:
Thanks for highlighting my article Jerry!
Qatar IS actually a major non-treaty US ally, for good or ill. Al Ubeid AFB is one of the most important nodes in our foreign power matrix.
Sullivan is wrong, it wasn’t Israel’s “light dusting” of Doha with bombs that got things moving, though it helped. Moreso Trump and also Hamas’ exhaustion.
I wish people would stop thinking about Hamas as any more legitimate bargaining force than the Taliban or Isis. That said… they totally represent the Gazan people. The idea that the poor wee ewok victims of Gaza are opwessed by the evil Hamas is nonsense.
There is virtually no daylight between Hamas/Isl.Jihad and the population. To think otherwise is magical thinking, to put our own western secular lens on it – denying the reality that there exist a people driven entirely by religion, animus, vengence and anti-westernism. It exists, we need to get used to this fact.
D.A.
NYC
Re: your fourth para., it appears that what little daylight has existed is being darkened by Hamas executions of Palestinians not conforming to every jot and tittle of their Hamas masters’ requirements.
As expected, the Apologists are blaming the executions on Israel however they can but rumour has it they went after the influers too. A bunch of them made a mint cooking stones or eating leaves and Hamas wants their cut (I assume all of it!).
Mr. FAFO was murdered in cold blood (Jews blamed too, of course!) and others have disappeared per the grapevine.
David, maybe of interest to you:
The mirage of statehood
Palestine is unrecognisable on the ground. The Economist, Sept 18, 2025
The UN stands up a state that is disappearing from view
https://archive.ph/X5bMj
The Free Press had an article by Amit Segal emphasizing how the Israeli strike on Qatar was a turning point:
The Inside Story of the Gaza Deal
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-inside-story-of-the-gaza-deal
Thanks for calling our attention to Coel’s article and reminding me to review your Skeptical Inquirer article. As I age, it seems that I can no longer recall material like I used to and periodic reviews/re-reading of the paper is required…at least I am assuming that aging is the main cause. But Coel’s article is new to me as is deBoer’s … either new or have totally faded from memory. I look forward to studying them, but here just wanted to remind readers that in addition to addressing the learning process and success of individuals, we not forget about making sure the content that they learn is appropriate for the students’ time, which is now and fifty or so years hence.
In the STEM fields, though dated to when I was active from around 2000 to 2016, at the state level, where K12 policy is made, there seemed to be little to no political will by education policy-makers to challenge the status quo. In Virginia, STEM curriculum content review panels, which met every seven years, were dominated by educationalists: teachers, administrators, schools of education faculty with science, math, or engineering subject matter experts being a very rare exception. Engineering, to the extent it existed in the curriculum at all, was taught as Career & Technical Education by Vocational education teachers with very limited science and math background, having gotten their degrees in schools of education rather than arts and sciences or engineering. In 2007, I led several panels of subject matter experts drawn from universities, government research labs, and industry (and several high school teachers) in a review of Virginia’s physics, chemistry, and engineering high school curriculum content. One of our most important findings was that the content was severely outdated…we called it Sputnik-era science. So we recommended several content updates. We also recommended (per Leon Lederman’s “physics first” ideas), that the traditional order of teaching biology, chemistry, physics be inverted with chemistry in particular, preceding and preparing students for 21st century biology. The original order came out of the 1894 Committee of Ten Report and was based entirely on late 19th century math preparation…and when biology was simply the classification of plants and animals from botany and zoology, not today’s biochemistry.
In any case, while some content changes were accepted by the education policy-makers, more substantive changes such as subject matter expertise on a standing STEM curriculum review panels, changing the order in which science courses are taught, and integrating some engineering design into science courses were not.
Jim, At least you can still recall which articles you had read–and thus need to reread!
Well, sometimes, Doug….sometimes!
Sampling bias. The articles one does not recall having read aren’t considered.
🙂
Thank you for your thoughtful reflections/observations. In hopes of determining why education policy-makers were not inclined to accept and execute the recommendations of your last para., I was prompted to search a bit, e.g., pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1964524/. (I hope to get through it by the end of the day.)
Would you care to specify a couple of examples what was outdated about the content of high school curriculum? If “Sputnik-era” science is outdated (my grandfather named one of his foxhounds Sputnik), whither acquiring fundamental science knowledge in 2025? Isn’t that worth knowing, and is it just a matter of updating science textbooks and other sources and not leaving out the past? Or must one be relegated to reading history and philosophy of science tomes to learn this? (After all, the occasional student might be interested in what came before.) Was it a matter of dated illustrations and photographs? Lack of relevant contemporary cultural connections? Perhaps I’m misapprehending.
Back in the “Ancient Days” (1969-73), I had “General Science” Freshman year, descriptive biology Sophomore year, with the standard frog dissection, Junior year was Chemistry (and Biology II. See below.) Physics senior year.
In General Science, I was confronted with the equations converting temperature F to C and the opposite. It was a matter of memorizing BOTH equations. (Had a bit of Algebra been introduced, one would only need to memorize one equation, equipped to derive the other form. Of course, a knowledge of negative numbers would have been necessary. Re: -40F = -40C) It would have been more enlightening to have been presented a graphic comparison of the Fahrenheit and Centigrade/Celsius scales and tasked with deriving the relationship between the two scales. ( But I doubt that at the time that was in the “educationalist”-approved curriculum/lesson plan. I.e., in the principal’s evaluation of the teacher, the principal would say that the teacher “did not always follow the [prescribed and scripted] lesson plan.”)
From my high school experience, I heartily endorse the physics-chemistry-biology progression/sequence as physics and chemistry inform and enlighten the study of biology (effectively biochemistry). (During college years I noted in the catalog “physical chemistry” and “chemical physics” and contemplated the essential difference between them.)
Re: Biology II: this was where we did some hands-on practical “lab” work with fruit flies and made use of the “Chi-Squared Test.” (If memory serves me, the test determined the probability that, if one conducted an experiment over and over – ad infinitum? – one’s results would be different.) This class was created by our teacher (who taught Bio I, Bio II and physics and also some years later Chemistry I heard) who had a master’s in radiation biology and had done some work on his PhD, during which at some point he decided that he wanted a more people-interactive job. So, he became a public school teacher instead of continuing on at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (No doubt at the cost of a significant lifetime earnings/benefits cost.) My perception was that teaching high school was a piece of cake for him. (In his Bio I class, if one misspelled, say, lepidoptera, the answer was wrong. Imagine the adolescent human primate outrage response to that today. We did not utter one syllable of opposition to that.) But he inescapably had to take those “educationalist” pedagogical and psychological courses in order to become certified and licensed. (How is it that a STEM PhD with university research and teaching experience is not qualified to teach STEM high school classes? I’ve yet to see a satisfying answer to that question. Is it because presumably college students are no longer juveniles and are no longer insufficiently pre-frontal cortex-developed?)
A beef with Algebra I (I skipped “General Math,” which in retrospect perhaps wouldn’t have hurt me to take): when presented with (allegedly “relevant”) real world practical problems involving solutions and mixtures (e.g., what concentration of milk fat solution results from mixing a 2 liter 5% milk fat solution with 0.4 liter 0.5 percent milk fat solution?), units were not used (as with later chemistry and physics). (As if 21st Century high school students are much concerned with milk fat as opposed to the number of hits on their X accounts.)
So, in the throes of solving a given problem, it was easy enough to become confused remembering what quantity was associated with what quality (mass, distance, speed, time, rates, etc.). This made my eyes glaze over and did not increase my affinity to and enthusiasm for math. I subjectively (not unreasonably?) perceived that there was a (theologically-/ideologically-inspired?) conspiracy in math not to use units and that the use of units was beneath the dignity of mathematicians.
Thanks for this reply. I will try to answer some of the questions. “Sputnik era” were things such as teaching cathode ray tubes and the tv picture tube being the central element of a tv set (still in 2007) rather than transistors, plasmas, and integrated circuits. Because of the standards movement, each state has a minimum list of what must be taught in each course, so we thought t that SOME 21st century stuff was appropriate…e.g. quarks in addition to protons, neutrons, and electrons; nanotechnology and its manufacturing aspects. We proposed modeling and simulation be added to lab activities in all science courses so that kids will understand how predictions depend on the model employed and measured data.
With respect to licensing: As a teacher with an MS in physics and double BS (math/physics), I was given a three-year non-renewable provisional level teaching certificate, which I had to upgrade to professional level by taking 12 specified semester hours of pedagogy college level coursework. I was endorsed to teach math, chemistry, and physics. Interestingly, an engineering major was not certified to teach engineering without taking 12 hours of vocational ed courses because Virginia had no endorsement document for engineering which was taught by shop teachers. One of our accomplishments was to get an engineering endorsement passed as new policy….it took six years of lobbying but it got done…now shop teachers or engineers are allowed to teach high school engineering courses in VA! We also proposed that Alg 1 be restructured a bit to be Alg 1 with applications to chemistry, so that all the math a student needs for chem would be taught in Alg 1 rather than two years later in Alg2, allowing the student to take chem earlier, before biology. We created a freely available, software based “flexbook” in collaboration with Nehru Khosla’s CK-12 Foundation, with each chapter explaining one of our 21st century physics recommendations. The book was developed in just five months by volunteer high school teachers and the wonderful support of CK-12. Our state Sec of Technology was the lead of this effort to move to online material to supplement textbooks in a more timely way than the seven years it took to bring changes to the traditional printed textbook.
Well, that’s enough for now I think. But will be glad to try to think of more if you want to give me some additional specific direction. Oh, for example I can talk a bit about the reasons (read excuses) for not changing the order of the science courses.
Democrats failed to get their message across? I don’t think so. The more Kamala Harris talked, the dumber she became. Stupid was the message and it got across just fine.
Yes, I do believe that the Arab states need to step up in the governance of Gaza. But will they? Is any Arab state with rational leadership really eager to step into the wreckage that is Gaza? It’s a heavy lift, and I expect that significant pressure from the U.S.—as well as substantial incentives—will be needed before there is any momentum toward meaningful, Hamas-free, governance.
Finally, thank you for citing my earlier comment, above.
Everybody knows, or thinks he does, that black people in the New World as they define themselves as a group aren’t as smart as white people as they define themselves as a group, and that this explains the social dysfunction of the underclass which in America is almost entirely black. Even that small fraction of the underclass that gets fabulously wealthy from hip hop or basketball is still dysfunctional, because not very bright. (Black people aren’t even at the very wealthy top of the drug trade.)
There is even a selection mechanism, a just-so story, to explain this effect. When weaker (dumber) tribes in Africa had to provide tribute to stronger ones in the currency of slaves, they selected their dumbest of the dumb to be sold down the river, thence to a life of labour in the Americas as they had overland for centuries to Arabia. If there had been a strong selection mechanism to ensure the propagation of the top 2.5th percentile of intelligence through assortive mating, then a black or mixed-race intelligentsia could have developed. But for many reasons this never arose in black culture, not before and not after Emancipation. So here we are.
If academics don’t want to study this for “ethical” reasons, fine, although I think it’s more fear of racial unrest than ethics. The government, in charge of keeping order, maybe should prohibit it. But that just confirms for the rest of us that our slavery hypothesis is true, because no one in academe produces any evidence to refute it. They just try to silence us. And we all know the harder you try to suppress unpopular ideas, the more they flourish. If we can’t talk about it, they shrug, all we can do is turn our voters’ backs quietly against further costly redistributive efforts to specially educate black people out of the underclass, and generally have as little to do with them as we possibly can. A policy can’t be beyond the pale just because “the black community” calls it racist. Identifying individual talent is another matter, although not necessarily popular among the “community” who prefer enforced norms of government-supported mediocrity.
Are there socio-cultural reasons for this state of affairs? (Assuming socio-cultural differences are not manifestations of genetics) Re:
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life – Richard Hofstadter
Amusing Ourselves to Death – Neil Postman
The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby
Andrew Sullivan:
“. . .Trump did something else as well: finally pissed off enough, he told Arab leaders that if they backed his Gaza deal, the US would prevent Israel from formally annexing the West Bank, despite the vicious campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing Netanyahu was unleashing there.”
A “vicious campaign of violence” and “ethnic cleansing” ? Really?
Sullivan just lost all credibility with me. 440,000 Israeli settlers are carrying out ethnic cleansing against 3.4 million Palestinians ? Sullivan’s previous writings indicate that he has swallowed the Palestinian/ UN narrative about the West Bank hook, line and sinker.
The entire supposed big issue of settler violence is a farce. (Yes, there is an occasional incident by Israeli settlers. But these are swamped by violence by Arabs against Israelis). The UN compiles really spurious statistics about this, and then amplifies the issue in an echo chamber with anti-Israel NGOs. Just to give you an idea of how corrupt are these statistics – road crews doing normal paving are listed as incidents of settler violence. 19% of the total incidents listed in the database involve no settlers, no assaults, no injuries, no Arabs – they are Israeli tourists and hikers accused of “trespassing” and counted as – yup – “settler violence”. According to the Regavim report below, 90% of the incidents in the UN database are irrelevant to the topic.
https://www.regavim.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/RegavimSilufEng0406digital.pdf
A perspective contrary to the one of Chris Hayes:
Yascha Mounk: The Dems Are Lying to Themselves About Why They Lost. Sept 26, 2025
And that will make it much harder for them to turn the ship around.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-dems-are-lying-to-themselves
Also remember this?
Musa al-Gharbi: A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives. Nov 11, 2024
All the prominent but obviously false narratives about the 2024 election prepared for burial in one convenient post.
(Freely available on al-Gharbi’s substack.)
I also recommend:
Ruy Teixeira & John B. Judis: Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2023
Ruy Teixeira: The Decline of the Democratic Coalition, 2012-2024. May 22, 2025
Farewell to the “rising American electorate.”
(On Teixeira’s free substack The Liberal Patriot)
Ruy Teixeira: The Democrats’ Class Gap Problem. Oct 2, 2025
It’s not going away.
(On Teixeira’s free substack The Liberal Patriot)
Shane Goldmacher: How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape. New York Times, May 25, 2025
“To conduct this analysis, The New York Times reviewed the results in every county from the four most recent presidential elections — 2012, to provide a base line, and then the 2016, 2020 and 2024 campaigns, in which Mr. Trump was the Republican nominee — and zoomed in on only those counties where the results grew steadily more Republican or steadily more Democratic.
This distillation reveals the most profound voting and demographic shifts, which can otherwise be obscured by fluctuations in many other counties from one election to the next.”
Matt Grossmann & David A. Hopkins: Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2024
John Halpin: The Sociology of Party Decline. March 26, 2025
Democrats are having trouble with working-class voters because many of them don’t come from these communities or occupational backgrounds.
(On Teixeira’s free substack The Liberal Patriot)
John Halpin: The Psychology of Party Decline. May 28, 2025
Negligence, indifference, and groupthink among Democrats.
(On Teixeira’s free substack The Liberal Patriot)
I can’t stand it, the Hamas, Israeli conflict is a fucking religious war, like the intelligence shenanigans “keep your eyes lowered for you might see it as it is”. Jihadi goals are for ALL infidels, tribalism fat! Israelis are not exempt as far as extremist go either no pop. group is. Israel though are unfortunately locked in with this 7th century perversion useless to humanity because we now know how that works but ok if you want to support you fav football team. Pacifying this beast long term I doubt Trump will manage that.
If you’re an intelligence snob, bully for you but who’s gonna fix your toilet. The one you spend a year sitting on.
Intelligence is knowing your not… Albert.
He did his thing and others followed to expand and the toilet? It keeps you healthy to do your intelligence.
Cease bleat, fix deck.