IN THE NEWS

Schultz:
Strange, and I always thought of you as an Aryan.

A Jewish barber:
I’m a vegetarian

-“The Great Dictator” (1940)

Outrage after White House accidentally texts journalist war plans: ‘Huge screw-up’

Joseph Gedeon © The Guardian
March 24, 2025

A catastrophic security leak is triggering bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that senior Trump administration officials accidentally broadcast highly sensitive military plans through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.

On the Senate floor on Monday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time” and urged Republicans to seek a “full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created and how we can avoid it in the future”.

“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally,” the Delaware senator Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”

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Remember my words. Your cause is doomed to failure because its built on the stupid, ruthless persecution of innocent people. Your policy is worst than a crime. It’s a tragic blunder!

Adenoid Hynkel:
Traitor! Traitor! You’re nothing but a doubley-eyed Democrat!

-“The Great Dictator” (1940)

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you’ve had a prior training in book culture.

-Camille Paglia

Meet the Educational Entrepreneurs Who Want to Teach a New Generation of Elon Musks

Anna Merlan © Mother Jones
March 21, 2025

In February, Elon Musk tweeted a warning shot. “When not wasting money on bureaucracy,” he wrote, “The Department of Education has been funding anti-Americanism, gender nonsense and anti-meritocratic racism.”

By the end of the month, the department had been stripped to the bone, dismantled by Donald Trump and Musk’s DOGE. And on Thursday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who has said her agency’s “final mission” would be to send education programs “back to the states,” was on hand as the president signed an executive order to begin eliminating what remained of the department.

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A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them. When we find ourselves in that position, without a story, without our moorings, a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good.

-Naomi Klein

Adolescence reveals a terrifying truth: smartphones are poison for boys’ minds

Martha Gill © The Guardian
March 23, 2025

Every so often, a television drama comes along that has the power to change things. Last year, it was ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, in which the plight of subpostmasters was rendered with such success that it actually hastened in real-world legislation to compensate them.

And now we have Netflix’s Adolescence, which looks at the online radicalisation of young boys by men’s rights activists (MRAs) such as Andrew Tate. Last week, Keir Starmer told the Commons he had been watching the series with his family and that it portrayed an “emerging and growing problem” that needed to be tackled. Now MPs are examining ideas to address the issue with greater urgency.

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I’m a fan of the kind of political correctness that is about not promoting prejudice. But some people in America are offended by equality because when you’ve had privilege for so long, equality feels like oppression.

-Ricky Gervais