We remain on indictment watch. Trump has received a target letter from Jack Smith, and has refused the invitation to tell his side of the story to the DC grand jury investigating January 6. An indictment could come any day. It’s tempting to speculate about what that indictment will say, and lots of commentators are giving in to that temptation. As I’ve often said before: Go ahead and speculate if that activity engages you, but you could also just wait and see.
Today’s two featured posts are sort of similar: They both involve me reading a document so you don’t have to. The documents are (1) the new Florida standards for teaching African-American history, and (2) the “Common Sense” booklet outlining the platform of the No Labels Party.
The Florida standards have gotten a lot of well-deserved criticism this week for a couple of egregious lines, but the real problem is in the document as a whole: It wants to tell a no-villains story of American history. So it presents racism as a vague, amorphous, impersonal force, against which heroic Americans of all races have been struggling for centuries. Who exactly they struggled against — other Americans? surely not! — is a big empty spot.
I’ll explain that in more detail in the first featured post, which should be out soon.
A lot of my readers will probably wonder why I’m wasting their (and my) time on No Labels. I believe most of you are on the progressive side of the progressive/moderate split in the Democratic Party, so you’re probably not tempted at all by a group that plans to run to Joe Biden’s right. But the false-equivalence argument that both parties are equally bad appeals to a lot Americans, and I think we’re going to need to understand it during the 2024 campaign.
So the second featured post dives into the No Labels proposals. My conclusion is that their target voter is a moderate Democrat who watches too much Fox News. So they have very real disagreements with MAGA Republicans (about gun control, global alliances, and immigration), and more-or-less imaginary disagreements (about things like the Twitter files, cancel culture, and voter fraud) with Biden. That should be out around 11 EDT.
The weekly summary will cover the actual news (as opposed to speculation) related to Trump’s legal situation, the culture-war skirmishes over “Try That in a Small Town” and the Barbie movie, and a number of consequential things happening in other countries: Russia attacking Ukraine’s wheat exports, Israel preparing to disempower its supreme court, and a few other things. That should be out between noon and 1.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
K African American History Strand
When you pick 1 subject from 100’s
SSKAA11 to SS912AA413 it certainly sounds absolutely horrible, to find something that benefitted a slave while being a slave, but as usual those who want to divide and not unite us, only focus in on one item (my ancestor was a slave under Russian Tsar). The dividers also find only deaths on hot days, data , never deaths from cold days, and this while comparing climate within 150 years. Even as Fahrenenheit thermometer was invented a bit earlier in Holland and Celsius in Sweden the tracking of temperature only started 150 years ago while human history 20,000 years ago and writing 4,000 years ago. The Antarctic Cold reversal deluge was 13,000 years ago and what caused the heat record 1903 that we now are approaching are never of equal interest. (13,000 years ago glaciers melted from underneath by volcanic activities at tectonic rifts at end of precession of equinoxes which next midpoint is 2100 in March and we can expect water levels changes of 1.5 meters ; 1903 no idea but if our contribution alone today brought us to near that record , what created the record?
(Solution is Malala Sahara Garden project to climate and all others past and current issues)
The splitting of the Democrat ticket in any way gives the election to another candidate but Biden. And the fear of course is Trump who expose how corrupt both our parties and the total political machinery is.
But what if Ramaswamy Gabbard became the ticket ? Fresh young faces ? My favorite is democratic Fulop running for Governor to run 8 years from now but these 80genians hmmm why can’t we produce fresh new ideas ?
> and this while comparing climate within 150 years. Even as Fahrenenheit thermometer was invented a bit earlier in Holland and Celsius in Sweden the tracking of temperature only started 150 years ago while human history 20,000 years ago and writing 4,000 years ago.
I suggest Prof Tom that you look up Paleo-climate reconstruction. It’s a very powerful tool for creating upper and lower bounds for climate modeling since we’re using past conditions to gauge the influence of different climatic actors.