Writing in the London Daily, Nate White explains why the British don’t like Donald Trump. It’s not his politics; the Brits have elected conservative politicians repeatedly. It’s him they don’t like: his character, personality, and essence.
White writes:
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.
The Daily Beast posted startling news from a Sarasota police report. The Ziegler power couple sought out women for their threesomes. Bridget Ziegler was a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and an outspoken critic of LGBTQ+; Christian Ziegler was chairman of the state GOP. They liked threesomes.
Newly released documents say Moms For Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler and her GOP chairman husband went “on the prowl” in Sarasota bars to find women to have sex with.
Text messages quoted in a Sarasota Police Department (SPD) memo that was obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune revealed how Ziegler sent her husband, Christian, hunting for a third sexual partner at local bars and directed him to send photos of possible hits. She allegedly told him to pretend to take pictures of his beer while photographing the women so he wouldn’t get caught sneaking pictures of them…
The Zieglers, a local power couple in Florida Republican politics, were at the center of a sex abuse scandal after a woman alleged that Christian had raped her while she was involved in a three-way relationship with the pair. They were both ousted from their respective positions at the Florida GOP and the conservative Leadership Institute, although charges were never formally issued. Bridget Ziegler also faced a barrage of attacks for her “hypocrisy,” since she had taken a very public anti-LGBTQ+ stance but had engaged in sexual relationships with women.
Wary of what further revelations would cause for their torpedoed reputations, Bridget Ziegler had sued to keep the records kept by SPD and the State Attorney’s Office sealed from the public. That case is pending in Sarasota County, court records show.
I received this article from my friend James Harvey late last night. He remarked on the hypocrisy of some of the Christian Right’s moral leaders. There was Jerry Falwell, his wife Becki, and a 20-year-old pool boy. There was the president of the ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, George C. Roche III, who led the college for nearly three decades. He allegedly had an affair with his daughter-in-law over 19 years; she committed suicide. Hundreds, thousands of religious leaders—the people who are supposed to teach us about morality and ethics—have been accused of pedophilia (google “pastors or priests or rabbis accused of pedophilia” or “sex abuse”).
Judges and justices are supposed to be impartial arbiters of conflicting claims. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is not. The New York Times reported that an upside-down flag flew in front of Justice Alito’s home after the 2020 election. That symbolism was adopted as a protest by Trump’s zealous and disappointed fans. Alito was one of them. He blamed his wife, as if he had no decisions about what flag was flying in his front yard. How can he be expected to rule impartially on cases about that election?
After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.
One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.
The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.
While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.
As we approach the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a crucial question arises: Why are our nation’s schools experiencing increased segregation despite progress in neighborhood integration? A new study by Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California provides a startling answer—more than half of the blame is due to the expansion of charter schools.
While the courts’ lifting of desegregation orders played a role, the researchers’ analysis reveals that segregation would be approximately 14 percent lower if not for the expansion of charter schools.
In an article on the report, Laura Meckler of The Washington Post provided the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina as an example. Researchers scored segregation on a scale of 0 (matching district demographics) to 1.0 (complete segregation). In 1971, following a court-ordered desegregation plan, the district’s segregation score fell to 0.03. In 1991, it remained low at 0.10. Today, there are more than 30 charter schools in the district, and the district’s 2022 segregation score has risen to a whopping 0.44.
As the Network for Public Education, of which I’m the executive director, and dozens of national and local organizations reported to the U.S. Department of Education in 2021, North Carolina’s education department aided and abetted the expansion of “white-flight” charter schools using money it received from a grant program. One of the schools that received funding was a former white-flight private academy, Hobgood Academy, which is now a charter. Other grants went to North Carolina charters in disproportionately white suburbs of Charlotte that were attempting to self-segregate their schools from the more racially diverse Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.
And, as we demonstrated in our recent report, the expansion of right-wing charter schools like the Cincinnati Classical Academy, which received a federal grant to expand, increases segregation with website messaging that encourages the enrollment of white children from conservative families, resulting in racially imbalanced student demographics.
Do we see the same increases in segregation resulting from public school choice? Although the Reardon and Owens study did not explore that specific question, a separate study recently released by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA indicates that public magnet schools are far less segregated than charter schools.
The report, written by Ryan Pfleger and Gary Orfield, examined more than 100 districts and compared the student demographics of their charter and magnet schools. The findings were clear: The charter sector has a higher proportion of intensely segregated schools than the public magnet sector, and this gap is widening over time.
According to the study, “the proportion of intensely segregated charter schools, with less than 10 percent white students, increased from 45 percent to 59 percent from 2000 to 2021. A different trend was observed for magnets. The share of magnets that were intensely segregated was nearly the same in 2000 and 2021: 34 percent and 36 percent.”
If we hope to heal the racial, socio-economic, and political divides in our nation, public schools in districts with policies designed to increase integration among schools and within schools offer our best hope.
Unfortunately, charter schools, whether by chance or, in some cases, by design, are erasing the gains made by those who bravely fought for integration seventy years ago.
As young Georgians, we share the belief that all children should have the freedom to pursue their dreams and that our futures depend on receiving a great education. To get there, we must equip every public school with the resources to deliver a quality education for every child, no matter their color, their ZIP code or how much money their parents make.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves in yet another moment of massive resistance to public education with increasingly aggressive efforts on behalf of the state of Georgia to privatize our public schools and return us to a two-tiered system marked by racial segregation. As public school students in high schools across Georgia, we believe that the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is not just a cause for celebration but an invitation to recommit ourselves to the promise of a public education system that affirms an essential truth: Schools separated by race will never be equal.
Even as our country celebrates the anniversary of Brown this month, we know that our state actively worked to obstruct desegregation, which did not meaningfully take place for another 15 years. Seven years after the Supreme Court’s ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, the Georgia General Assembly revoked its school segregation law in 1961. Another 10 years later, a court-ordered desegregation plan finally took effect — in 1971.
In 2024, educators across Georgia, from Albany to Atlanta, from Valdosta to Vinings, from Dalton to Dublin, and everywhere in between, are working hard to provide students like us with a quality education, empowering us to build a brighter future in Georgia for all. Yet politicians in the Georgia Capitol seem dedicated to resegregating and privatizing our public schools by taking tax dollars meant to support all of the students in our communities and giving it to unaccountable voucher programs that favor the wealthiest few.
The long and shameful history of vouchers is something that politicians who forced them to become law this year don’t want us to know. In many cities, public education funding was funneled to private “segregation academies” where white children received better resources than children of color. Instead of making our public schools stronger and moving us all forward together, these politicians are defunding our public schools by more than $100 million and working to drag us backward to the days when Georgia was still resisting court-ordered desegregation.
We want our leaders to get serious about what works: fully funding our public schools so that we can improve our neighborhood schools. That’s where 1.7 million public school students in Georgia learn and grow, and where we all can have a say. Research all across the country shows that voucher programs will not improve student outcomes in Georgia, but we know what will best serve students.
Young Georgians like us need investments in our public schools so we have the opportunity to learn and thrive. Gov. Brian P. Kemp has $16 billion of unspent public funds — enough to cover the costs of funding our schools and investing in our communities. Georgia has one of the highest overall rates of child poverty in the nation. Yet our state is one of only six states that provides schools with no specific funding to support children living in poverty. By refusing to give our schools what they need, we are setting our schools and our students up for failure.
Politicians brag about Georgia’s teachers being among the highest paid in the South even though they know they have created a crisis around public education that puts our teachers, our parents and students like us in an impossible position. Right now, nearly every school district in Georgia operates with a waiver to avoid adhering to classroom size restrictions because they cannot afford to hire enough teachers. And though the American School Counseling Association recommends a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:250, Georgia mandates a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:450 students. Many schools cannot even meet that ratio because of a lack of funding. All of that is by design because politicians have refused to update Georgia’s school funding formula for nearly 40 years.
This year, as we celebrate 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education, we invite every Georgian to join us in our call for fully funded neighborhood public schools so that every Georgia student has an inviting classroom, a well-rounded curriculum, small class sizes and the freedom to learn.
The writers are members of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. Nia G. Batra is a sophomore at Decatur High School. Hunter Buchheit is a senior at Walton High School. Ava Bussey is a senior at Marietta High School. Keara Field is a senior at McDonough High School. Saif Hasan is a junior at Lambert High School. Jessica Huang is a senior at Peachtree Ridge High School. Shivi Mehta is a junior at the Alliance Academy for Innovation. Bryan Nguyen is a senior at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. Rhea Sethi is a senior at North Gwinnett High School. Maariya Sheikh is a senior at Campbell High School. Harrison Tran is a junior at Jenkins High School. Sharmada Venkataramani is a sophomore at South Forsyth High School. Thomas Botero Mendieta is a junior at Archer High School. Kennedy Young is a senior at Campbell High School.
Steve Suitts wrote an important essay on the continuity between the “school choice” movement of today and its roots in the fight against the Brown decision in the 1950s.
Charter schools and vouchers are not innovative. Their most predictable outcome is not “better education,” but segregated schools.
Suitts’ essay delves into the issue, state by state. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full. I skipped over large and important sections. Read them.
He begins:
Overview
On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—the US Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools—Steve Suitts reveals an emerging, seismic shift in how southern states in the United States are leading the nation in adopting universal private school vouchers. Suitts warns that this new “school choice” movement will reestablish a dual school system not unlike the racially separate, unequal schools which segregationists attempted to preserve in the 1960s using vouchers.
INTRODUCTION
On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish publicly financed, dual school systems—one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children. This seismic shift in how states fund K–12 education through universal vouchers isn’t confined to the South. But it is centered among the states that once mandated racially separate, unequal schools and where segregationists in the 1960s attempted to use private school vouchers to evade the watershed US Supreme Court decision.
More than thirty-five states have created voucher programs to send public dollars to private schools. At least nineteen, including most in the South, have adopted or are on a path to enact legislation making state-funded “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs)—the newest type of voucher approach—available to all or most families who forego public schools. These families can use the funds to send their children to almost any K–12 private school, including home-schooling, or purchase a wide range of educational materials and services, such as tutoring, summer camps, and counseling.
In recent times, private school vouchers were pitched to the public for the purpose of giving a targeted group of disadvantaged children new educational options, but legislatures are now expanding eligibility and funding for vouchers to include advantaged students. By adopting universal or near universal eligibility for ESAs, states will be obligating tens of billions of tax dollars to finance private schooling while creating a voucher system for use by affluent families with children already attending or planning to attend private school.
States are rushing to enact ESAs while they still have the last of huge federal COVID appropriations to distribute among public schools. This timing allows ESAs’ sponsors—Republican legislative leaders and governors—to entice once-reluctant, rural legislators to support vouchers. It also camouflages the severe fiscal impact this scheme will have on routinely underfunded public schools after the special federal funds run out.
The states adopting ESAs are also structuring this emerging, publicly funded, dual system so that private schools and homeschooling remain free of almost all regulations, academic standards, accountability, and oversight. These sorts of rules and regulations are always imposed by state legislatures on public schools and are understood as essential to protect students and to advance learning. Even as legislatures are adding restrictive laws on how local public schools teach topics involving race, sex, ethnicity, and gender they are providing new state funding for private schools and home-schooling that will enable racist, sexist, and other bigoted teaching.
If state legislatures succeed in establishing and broadening this dual, tax-funded system of schools, the tremors will transform the landscape of US elementary and secondary education for decades to come. Calling for “freedom of choice,” a battle cry first voiced by segregationists who fought to overturn the Brown decision,1 predominantly white Republicans will take states back to a future of separate and unequal education.
THE UNIVERSAL VOUCHER SYSTEM
By the seventieth anniversary of Brown, five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) have enacted ESA programs that allow all or a vast majority of families with school-age children to send their children to private schools with state funds that equal or closely match the states’ per pupil expenditures for public schools. South Carolina adopted a “pilot” ESA last year, and a bill making its program permanent has already passed one chamber. The lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a bill for a statewide universal ESA program to start next year, but the state senate is likely to delay adoption for another year to confirm estimated costs. Both states have governors who are likely to push adoption again next year.2
The Tennessee legislature adjourned in April without passing either of two pending universal ESA bills—only because Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders failed to agree on which voucher bill to enact. They vow to pass legislation next session. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott used campaign funds from a Pennsylvania billionaire in the state’s Republican primary to defeat a handful of legislators who blocked his ESA bill last year. Abbott expects to defeat the two remaining state house members who failed to vote for his legislation—giving him the number he needs to pass his bill, while sending a political message that will keep his supporters in line…3
The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but three of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.9
The fiscal impact of this rush to fund private schooling will be devastating to public schools. In 2018, all fifty states allocated $2.6 billion to finance private school vouchers. In 2021, legislatures increased the total amount to $3.3 billion and more recently to over $6 billion. If the eleven southern states enact the bills currently adopted or pending in their legislatures, their total funding for vouchers will be as much as $6.8 billion in 2025–26 and, according to independent estimates, as much as $20 billion for private schooling in 2030. This sum would equal the total state funds to public schools among six southern states in 2021.10
In 1950, about 400,000 students in the South attended private schools. By 2021-22, the number of private school students was about 1.8 million.
In 2021-22, 38.9% of white students attended public schools, and 63% enrolled in private schools.
AS VOUCHERS SPREAD, BROWN’S PROMISE DIES
During the last seventy years, the nation’s public schools have struggled in meeting the promise of Brown, despite clear proof that racially integrated, well-funded schools improve outcomes for Black children.39 This promise has been especially important to the South, where the states’ first education laws prohibited Black persons from being taught to read or write; where racially segregated schools offered children of color an inferior education across more than a half century. Due to stubborn, racially defined housing patterns, increasing class disparities, adverse, even hostile Supreme Court decisions, a lack of local, interracial community support, and, as recent research confirms, the growth of school choice, public schools continue to face far too many hurdles in providing all children with a good education.40
Mural by Michael Young celebrating the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision, in the Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansa, May 23, 2019. Photograph by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The South’s new dual school system renounces and annuls the mandates and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education. As universal vouchers spread, Brown’s promise dies. By their design, vouchers are an abandonment of Brown’s goal of equality of educational opportunity.
Reestablishing a dual school system will damage the prospects of a good education for all who attend public schools—not just low-income and minority children. The southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation, even though Black students received a pittance of funding. Today that inability remains. The South continues to be far behind the rest of the nation in state and local funding of public schools. The new schemes of universal Education Savings Account vouchers will exacerbate the lack of sufficient funds for all except those higher-income families whose school-age children can attend private schools or home-schools and enjoy the enhancements and enriching experience that vouchers will subsidize.
Parents, grandparents, and others who support public schools and the democratic promise of public education must raise our voices against this reactionary movement and in furtherance of the importance of public schools. Like democracy itself, public schools may be the worst system for delivering all children an equal opportunity for a good education—except for all the others. We must not betray or abandon public education if we are committed to the democratic goal of a more perfect union and a good society for all.
After Spectrum News reported that millions of dollars had been sent from Texas charter schools founded by Mike Miles to Colorado charter schools in the same chain, parents and students demanded Miles’ resignation as superintendent of Houston Independent School Disttrict. Elected officials have called for an investigation but recognize that neither the State Commissioner (Mike Morath) nor Governor Abbott are likely to criticize Miles, whom they appointed.
In the letter dated May 15, the Congresswoman refers to recent news stories that reported Ector ISD near Midland, Texas allegedly sent state funds from Texas to Third Future Schools, a charter school operated in Colorado. She requested that an audit be conducted on Ector ISD.
A Spectrum News Texas report highlighted a pair of million-dollar-plus checks allegedly sent from Third Future Schools in Texas to its campuses in Colorado. The report accused Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Milesof sending Texas tax dollars out of state.
Miles has issued a statement responding to the report, saying the report “either intentionally or through gross incompetence, mischaracterized commonplace financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them.”
Garcia expressed concerns over the financial stability of HISD following last year’s takeover by the state of Texas. This comes after widespread layoffs were announced leading to protests from those affected and HISD families.
The congresswoman also requested the issuance of federal funds by the state from the pandemic that were to be used to supplement public education at HISD be audited.
“It pains me that my home school district has been taken over and is seemingly being intentionally run into the ground and (I) request any additional assistance you can provide to protect our schools and our students,” Garcia said in the letter.
Garcia went on to claim that the state is punishing HISD.
“Houston is a vibrant and diverse community, and our state government is punishing us for that; we need your help,” she said in the letter.
Good afternoon, fellow Americans, from the interior of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain. I am a parasitic worm. You might be wondering how I got here, or perhaps not! Most people who learned that a piece of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain was missing because a worm ate it responded with what I would characterize as “disappointment but not exactly surprise.”
Maybe you heard about me from the New York Times. Or possibly you got the news directly from the Kennedy campaign announcing that the worm that ate part of the candidate’s brain and then died in there would not affect his ability to serve as president. You know what they say: no such thing as bad publicity! Indeed, RFK Jr. has gone so far as to offer to eat five more brain worms. This is not the first time one of his statements have given me pause.
When I first arrived here, I was so excited to discover all the knowledge that the human brain must hold. But when I looked around, all I saw were conspiracy theories and mercury poisoning. Candidly, if you had said, “What do you recommended the holder of this brain do next?” I would not have said, “Run for president.” I would have said, “Get somebody else to do that. This person should go sit down.”
That is why, today, I have an announcement to make. I am eliminating the middle man and running for president myself. Yes, I am the worm that ate part of RFK Jr.’s brain, and I’m asking for your vote. I am the only candidate brave enough to say: I am a parasitic worm, and I don’t understand what is best for the country.
To those who ask, “Why should I vote for you? You are a worm somewhere around one-third of an inch in length with a knob-like attachment at one end called a scolex that sometimes is mistakenly referred to as its head!” I say: That is more medical transparency than you are going to get from any of the other candidates! I bet they have not even disclosed whether they have body cavities. (I don’t! I’m an acoelomate!)
To those who reply, “We don’t actually know that! That’s just what the symptoms are consistent with! We haven’t done a complete examination of the exact type of worm that died in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain after eating part of it,” I say: That is fair, and I am worm enough to grant it to you. Thank you, and I hope to receive your vote in November. Please just write in “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s WORM, NOT THE MAN, THE WORM” on your ballot. As long as you are throwing away your vote, throw it away on a worm. That’s also my slogan.
There are many issues on which people are basing their votes in this election. Bodily autonomy. Keeping our democracy a democracy. Do you want to know my stance on the issues? I will tell you: I have no stance! I am a worm who died no later than 2012. I do not possess higher brain functions, although I have attended several, at which I feasted.
And that is exactly the sort of plenty I promise you will enjoy under rule by worm. Just look at life under Leto II, God Emperor of Dune! Jabba the Hutt (an honorary worm) ran Tatooine with very few problems for a very long time until the intervention of a rude woman in a metal bikini.
If there are worms in the brains of the other candidates, I hope they will join me in issuing statements of their own. Perhaps a simple statement covering whether they exist and whether they consider what they may or may not have eaten to be mission critical.
RFK Jr. has justified his candidacy by saying that people are overwhelmingly frustrated with the options presented to them and need a third choice. Well, I see that third choice and raise you a fourth choice: a candidate you can trust not to have any brain worms because that candidate is a brain worm. I am also not currently under indictment for any reason.
So, good people of these United States, I exhort you: Ask not what this parasite can do for you. Ask what you can do for your parasite!
Here’s a simple fact: There will be a Palestinian state.
The reason: There are many Palestinians.
Location of the Palestinian state: Palestine.
Everything we Israelis experience right now, this whole “situation,” the lingering despair of “now what?,” this dead end we’re caught in, the helplessness, this immense human tragedy – this entire situation is nothing but the outcome of our sheer stupidity. Yes, we are unfortunately terribly stupid. Smart, but also really dumb.
We are infantile, soon to be 76 years old but still just babies. Where’s the breast? Where’s the milk bottle? Mama, I’m hungry!
I say we are dumb because we refuse to accept the obvious. We refuse to see what the whole world sees. We continue to act like children who close their eyes and believe that if they don’t see anything, reality doesn’t exist. We’re in the infantile stage. We are infantile, soon to be 76 years old but still just babies. What’s ridiculous is that we’re sure we’re really smart.
But only a fool doesn’t understand that eventually there will be a Palestinian state.
Only someone infantile doesn’t understand that there will be a Palestinian state in Palestine. Here, right next to us, five minutes away from the city of Kfar Saba.
An old baby
When you think of the so-called Israeli right you realize that it represents nothing more than the infantile side of us all. It’s the omnipotent side – the part of us that thinks we’re all-powerful and if we only imagine a certain reality, it will indeed be realized.
When a toddler behaves like this, the parents give him or her a pacifier and try to calm things down. When an adult behaves like this, it’s called psychosis.
National Missions Minister Orit Strock is infantile and suffering from psychosis. Orit Strock is a baby. A baby who has been living for many years now. An old baby.
On Wednesday, Strock said that we shouldn’t stop the war “to save 22 people or 33 people.” It’s madness and a disconnect from reality.
From a theoretical, almost philosophical perspective, we should have felt sorry for her. We might have tried to trace back to the roots and branches out of which such rotten leaves grew and such bleak words sprang. We could have also tried to understand what happened – how a person becomes less of a person; what makes one’s heart harden and one’s soul darken; how sadness stiffens into a rage and how compassion turns into anger.
But we’re not in a theoretical or a philosophical world. We’re in reality, in actual being. We’re in life, death, pain and blood; we’re in longing, in the urge to save others, and every word is a word, every letter is a letter and every syllable has its own weight, significance and meaning.
Strock said “22 or 33.” The difference between 22 and 33 is 11. And in this case, 11 means 11 hostages held in Gaza.
That’s 11 people. 11 lives. Every “1” was once a baby who had chicken pox and woke up in the middle of the night. Every “1” is “Did you see? She’s walking!” and “Did you hear? She said dada,” and then she had a fever, and you got the nebulizer and then ran with her to the emergency room, and the fear you felt, and “I hope it will be all right.”
The wisdom of the fools
On March 26, 2018, during a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the deputy head of Israel’s Civil Administration, Col. Uri Mendes, provided the following figure to the lawmakers: about 5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This number didn’t include the residents of East Jerusalem and the Israeli Arabs who – according to the Central Bureau of Statistics – numbered 1.8 million. According to the bureau, about 6.5 million Jews lived in Israel at that time. These figures show that more Arabs than Jews lived between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Following the presentation of this data, an uproar broke out among right-wingers. They listened to the bits of reality presented to them at the Knesset and began to employ the foolish sages’ favorite weapon: an infantilization of reality. Lawmaker Moti Yogev of Habayit Hayehudi claimed that Mendes was inflating the numbers since – according to Yogev – in 2016 “about 80,000 births and 8,000 deaths were reported, which is a life expectancy that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.”
This is what the wisdom of the fools looks like. They go into the forest of numbers and find undocumented trees or over-documented bushes, then declare: “There is no forest!” Like in “The Naked Gun,” when Leslie Nielsen stands with the whole city burning behind him and tells the people, “Nothing to see here!” The same goes for the infantile right: It looks at millions of Palestinians and says: “Go home, there’s nothing to see here, there are no Palestinians.”
Stupidity has a price. An expensive one. Dead people, wounded, mutilated, kidnapped. And then there’s a sense of futility, of existential anxiety and clinical depression. Then come brutalization, madness, ranting, bragging and crashing.
There will be a Palestinian state. It’s not up to us and it’s not about us. It’s about reality. The only question is whether we’ll enter reality or continue to live in fantasy; if we’ll come to our senses at the last moment, or if we’ll continue being so utterly stupid.
Helaine Olen wrote in The Atlantic about the quiet transformation of veterinary care. You may have noticed that vet bills are high. She blames it on the takeover of large number of independent veterinary practices by private equity. Many once-local vets are now part of big corporate chains.
I see an analogy to privatization in education. Granted, independent vets are private, not public. But I think it’s only a matter of time until private equity invests in charter chains and religious schools. They are a safe investment, backed by a steady stream of government revenue. Private investors will look for ways to cut costs and maximize profits. One obvious path: replacing teachers with computers and AI. Machines don’t care about pensions or healthcare or working conditions.
Olen writes:
As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed. According to data provided to me by PitchBook, private equity poured $51.6 billion into the veterinary sector from 2017 to 2023, and another $9.3 billion in the first four months of this year, seemingly convinced that it had discovered a foolproof investment. Industry cheerleaders pointed to surveys showing that people would go into debt to keep their four-legged friends healthy. The field was viewed as “low-risk, high-reward,” as a 2022 report issued by Capstone Partners put it, singling out the industry for its higher-than-average rate of return on investment.
In the United States, corporations and private-equity funds have been rolling up smaller chains and previously independent practices. Mars Inc., of Skittles and Snickers fame, is, oddly, the largest owner of stand-alone veterinary clinics in the United States, operating more than 2,000 practices under the names Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl. JAB Holding Company, the owner of National Veterinary Associates’ 1,000-plus hospitals (not to mention Panera and Espresso House), also holds multiple pet-insurance lines in its portfolio. Shore Capital Partners, which owns several human health-care companies, controls Mission Veterinary Partners and Southern Veterinary Partners.
As a result, your local vet may well be directed by a multinational shop that views caring for your fur baby as a healthy component of a diversified revenue stream. Veterinary-industry insiders now estimate that 25 to 30 percent of practices in the United States are under large corporate umbrellas, up from 8 percent a little more than a decade ago. For specialty clinics, the number is closer to three out of four.
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