Tony Rose for Little Rock School Board, Zone Four

Posted on 17 October 2024 by RobertLovesPi

My friend Tony Rose is running for the school board in the Little Rock, Arkansas School District. Please vote for him if you live there. Here is his campaign statement:

My name is Tony Rose, and I am running for LRSD School Board, Zone 4. I have multiple degrees from UALR in mathematics and history. I am currently semi-retired and do work as a private scholar, mostly writing history.

I think that the current board has ceded its authority to the superintendent with the resolution of September 26. I find that document to be a combination of the outrageous and the ridiculous. Any time that simple human courtesy and politeness must be mandated, there is simply no respect on the part of either party for the other.

I have the experience necessary for efficient and effective board meetings. I served on the board from 2000-2006 and was the president of the board in 2005. I am certified by the Arkansas School Boards Association as a Master Board Member, exceeding the required training by some 50-odd hours of training. I know the district’s history and culture.

I am, and have been, a staunch supporter of the Little Rock Education Association. I opposed the “end around” that was used by the Walton education group to experiment with performance pay in the district in the early 00s. I was one of the two votes against the program. At the time, I didn’t think of their efforts as union-busting, but an effort by an archly conservative group attempting to woo the largest district in the state into joining their business-forward approach to education. My wife was one of the “Little Rock 69” and I vigorously supported her in what was a very nerve-wracking few days.

I ardently oppose the LEARNS Act and the Ballinger Act. I will urge the board to pursue legal remedies to these efforts to destroy public schools. There are state and US constitutional questions that need to be addressed. On the issue of public employers not being allowed to negotiate with a union, I hope that the LREA might join the district in pursuit of the rights of the board and the union to free speech and free association.

I understand that learning requires a safe environment, for both students and teachers. But, we can’t make changes or know what to change without some light being shined on the situation. I will call for a monthly report of security calls, police calls, and arrests in our schools. I will also ask for a monthly report detailing theft and vandalism of district property. Once those reports begin to come in, it will most probably become clear where we need to put safety and security efforts.

A clean environment, while not essential, is preferred by all of us. I know that for some schools this is not a problem, but for others, it is. This is just an example of the district’s long-time situation: some school get a lot, and some school get a little.

Directly related to the above paragraph, I think we have to re-think our curriculum, as much as the state will allow. Former board member Dr. Jim Ross has said on several occasions that the LRSD has failed African-American students for 70 years. I whole-heartedly agree. I think that it goes a bit further than failure: the LRSD has betrayed African-American students through repeatedly buying educational programs that not only cost money, but don’t work. The salesmen of these programs tout their records of success. I am of the opinion that those programs did work at the right school, with the right teachers, and with the right students under the right circumstances. I know that there is no cure-all. But I will strongly support curriculum reform aimed at making ALL students college-ready at graduation. I know that many graduates will not attend college, but making them ready for college will not hurt them as they pursue employment and careers. If you have questions about how this can be accomplished, I recommend that you look at Bob Moses’s Algebra Project and similar initiatives.

My opponents is, no doubt, an honest man who wants to make the district better for all. However, he a priori cedes the education side of the board’s oversight to the administration. That is a mistake. The administration needs strong leadership from the board on all facets of oversight. I am not suggesting that the board meddle in teachers’ business. I am saying that something different has to happen or we are continuing our betrayal.

There is still racism in the district. I am not the one, as a white man, to describe it, but I think most of it is subconscious and can be attributed to soft expectations. I don’t have a magic wand, however I know some things have to change.

Most of you have golden memories of your own public education. But that era, real or rose-tinted, is not where we are. I dare say that most of the LRSD’s graduates of the last 40 years do not have those sorts of warm fuzzies that many of us have about school. I am not suggesting that we try to create situations that will lead to lovely nostalgia. I’m suggesting that we create an LRSD where the graduates look back and know that they were given their rights and were exposed to the best work that the board, admin, and teachers could do. I want LRSD to create an environment gives all students the tools they need to students achieve their highest aspirations.

I would appreciate any of you sharing this post to your own Facebook pages. I would appreciate donations, which can be made at https://trrosegarden.blogspot.com/. There you will find a couple of pieces about book banning and a vague paper about math civil rights and curricular reform.

But more than that, I would appreciate the votes of any of you reading this that are in Zone 4. I encourage all of you vote, regardless of your politics and choices. Democracy works best when voters vote.

Thank you for your attention, your support, and your votes.

President-elect Donald Trump, and President Vladimir Putin

Posted on 18 December 2016 by RobertLovesPi

putin-and-trump

Source of quote: The Washington Post, online edition, December 14, 2016: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-kremlin-likes-the-hacking-attention-but-not-the-blame/2016/12/14/65279738-c177-11e6-92e8-c07f4f671da4_story.html?utm_term=.fc453119c6fd.

Fiona Hill co-authored the 2015 book Mr. Putin: Operative at the Kremlin, available here, on Amazon. She is also (according to the Washington Post story linked above, written by David Filipov) a scholar at the Brookings Institution. Here’s the headline, taken from a screenshot.

moscow

For those who do not know, The Washington Post is the newspaper which blew open the Watergate scandal, and that, in turn, brought down the Nixon administration.

These are facts.

Is This What’s Going On? A Set of Questions of Global Concern.

Posted on 17 July 2016 by RobertLovesPi

Is This Whats Going On

I have a set of conjectures, and want input from my friends and blog-followers about them. How much of this has actually happened over the past months, weeks, and days?

1. The Chinese have been buying huge amounts of silver, thus driving up its price, because…

2. The political and business leaders in Greater China are, themselves, sick of living in an environmental nightmare based on decades of high consumption of oil and dirty coal, and are working on building enormous numbers of solar panels to get away from fossil fuel consumption, using lots of silver, which has the highest reflectivity of any element. China’s silver buying-spree is being misinterpreted, globally, because China is not well-understood, outside China.

3. These leaders of China have to breathe the same air, for one thing, as many Chinese people with much less power, and going green is the pragmatic thing to do. It is quite Chinese to be pragmatic. Living in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, or other population centers, air quality is a major issue, as is global warming and other environmental concerns — all issues which many Americans are in the habit of ignoring.

4. As the Chinese phase themselves out of the human addiction to fossil fuels, total global oil consumption drops. Evidence: gasoline prices fell. I was buying for under $2 a gallon a week ago.

5. Falling oil prices have led to severe economic problems in the oil-producing countries of the Middle East. Higher-than-usual amounts of political stability have rippled through the Middle East through the last five years, and this has intensified further in recent months. The latest such development has been in Turkey, often seen as the most politically stable country in the Muslim world, is going through an attempted(?) coup, on the far side of the Middle East from China.

6. In the USA, one of the people running for president is a reactionary xenophobe, as well as a populist demagogue, and is running against an opponent with little to no ethical principles who is winning by default because she’s running against Trump. Donald Trump and his people (and he has a lot of people) have been spewing Islamophobia and Sinophobia, and they’ve been doing it loudly.

7. Many people all over the world are reacting to the Trump Trumpet o’ Hate, and freaking out. Various end-of-the-world scenarios are been floated publicly, especially in cyberspace. People are getting “off the grid” if they can, either because it’s a good idea, or because they’re panicked. In some places, efforts are actually being made to use the force of government to stop people from weaning themselves off the services of utility companies.

8. Few people realize that a lot of this is a set of unintended consequences of China (of all nations) leading the charge to do the right thing regarding oil addiction, from an environmental and ecological point of view, plus having a lunatic run for the White House.

9. The rising price of silver, panic-in-advance about a widely-expected coming collapse of fiat currencies, and the pronouncements and predictions of Ron Paul and his ilk, are all feeding off each other, in an accelerating spiral. In the meantime, the political instability in Turkey is capping off a slight rise in gas prices over recent lows, just in the last week.

10. Most Americans don’t know much about a lot of this because we’re at a point in the current, nasty election cycle that America as a people has simply forgotten (again) that the world outside the United States actually exists. Ignorance about the Middle East, economics, environmental science, and Greater China is widespread in the best of times. Thanks to (a) the “Donald and Hillary Show” playing 24/7 on cable news, (b) civil unrest at home (brutality on the part of some, but not all, police), and (c) a backlash against Black Lives Matter, with horrible behavior from some, but not all, of the protesters on all sides, and (d) an anti-or re-backlash against BLM is in “full throttle” right now, and (e) unrest abroad (Turkey, etc.), these certainly aren’t the best of times.

I invite anyone to weigh in on the subject of which of the above conjectures are valid, and which are invalid. I have deliberately cited no sources, yet, because I am asking for independent peer review, and so do not wish to suggest sources at this point. In addition to “Which of these statements are correct, and which are wrong?” I am also asking, “What am I missing?”

Have you noticed what silver’s been doing lately? The price of silver is literally on fire!

Posted on 10 July 2016 by RobertLovesPi

Because of the price of silver being literally on fire, they will not be buying and selling troy ounces of metallic silver when the markets open in New York tomorrow morning. Instead, they will be selling “oxide ounces” of silver oxide, in sealed-plastic capsules of this black powder, with an oxide ounce of silver oxide being defined as that amount of silver oxide which contains one troy ounce of silver.

A troy ounce of silver is 31.1 grams of that element, which has a molar mass of 107.868 g/mole. Therefore, a troy ounce of silver contains (31.1 g)(1 mol/107.868 g) = 0.288 moles of silver. An oxide ounce of silver oxide would also contain oxygen, of course, and the formula on the front side of a silver oxide capsule (shown above; information on the back of the capsule gives the number of oxide ounces, which can vary from one capsule to another) is all that is needed to know that the number of moles of oxygen atoms (not molecules) is half the number of moles of silver, or (0.288 mol)/2 = 0.144 moles of oxygen atoms. Oxygen’s non-molecular molar mass is 15.9994 g, so this is (0.144 mol)(15.9994 g/mol) = 2.30 g of oxygen. Add that to the 31.1 g of silver in an oxide ounce of silver oxide, and you have 31.1 g + 2.30 g = 33.4 grams of silver oxide in an oxide ounce of that compound.

In practice, however, silver oxide (a black powder) is much less human-friendly than metallic silver bars, coins, or rounds. As you can easily verify for yourself using Google, silver oxide powder can, and has, caused health problems in humans, especially when inhaled. This is the reason for encapsulation in plastic, and the plastic, for health reasons, must be far more substantial than a mere plastic bag. For encapsulated silver oxide, the new industry standard will be to use exactly 6.6 g of hard plastic per oxide ounce of silver oxide, and this standard will be maintained when they begin manufacturing bars, rounds, and coins of silver oxide powder enclosed in hard plastic. This has created a new unit of measure — the “encapsulated ounce” — which is the total mass of one oxide ounce of silver oxide, plus the hard plastic surrounding it on all sides, for a total of 33.4 g + 6.6 g = 40.0 grams, which will certainly be a convenient number to use, compared to its predecessor-units.

# # #

[This is not from The Onion. We promise. It is, rather, a production of the Committee to Give Up on Getting People to Ever Understand the Meaning of the Word “Literally,” or CGUGPEUMWL, which is fun to try to pronounce.]

A Serious Government Reform Proposal for the State of Arkansas

Posted on 16 April 2015 by RobertLovesPi

News item (http://www.thv11.com/story/life/2015/04/15/slide-the-city/25859617/): giant Slip-‘n’-Slide may be coming to downtown Little Rock, Arkansas. Here’s a photo from the news story.

To reform state government, I think we should have this event come here every time the state legislature is in session, and have it on the capitol grounds, right here in Little Rock. Why? That’s simple: if Arkansas lawmakers spent each session on a Slip-‘n’-Slide, they’d do a lot less harm.

“Antisemitism” has become an inherently confusing word. Here’s how to fix this problem.

Posted on 13 July 2014 by RobertLovesPi

When referring to the Holocaust, it never caused confusion to refer to Nazis as “antisemitic.” German is not a Semitic language, and the non-Semite Nazis were trying to exterminate an ethnoreligious group, the Jews, who are a Semitic people. In that context, the word “antisemitism,” in a European setting, is not difficult to understand. This is also true of antisemitism earlier in European history.

Decades later, and outside of Europe, however, the situation has changed, and the word “antisemitism” is now far less clear in its meaning. The one nation most closely identified with the Jewish people is Israel, and Israel is not in conflict with Germany. Israel is, of course, currently in an active conflict with an organization, Hamas, which has been firing rockets from nearby Gaza across the border, into Israel. In response, Israel has been retaliating, using even greater force than that wielded by Hamas. In this current conflict, there have been numerous deaths of noncombatants, including many children, in Gaza, but no deaths (so far) in Israel. For this reason, some people have raised their voices in criticism of the actions of the Israeli government in the current conflict. Predictably, but not logically, those who are criticizing Israel’s actions are now being accused of antisemitism.

When the word “antisemitic” gets thrown around, in the context of conflicts in the Middle East which involve Israel, it doesn’t help anyone understand anything. The word is actually an impediment to understanding. The reason for this is that “Semite” does not mean what many people think it means. For one thing, most Semites are not Jews.

“Semites” refers to a collection of ethnolinguistic groups — people who speak, or are descended from those who spoke, any of a large collection of languages known as the Semitic languages . . . and one of the Semitic languages is Arabic. Are Jews Semites? Yes, they are, but so are Arabs. The current conflict in the Middle East is a conflict between two different groups of people, both of whom are Semitic. To throw the emotionally-charged word “antisemitic” into the middle of the fray, therefore, makes no sense. It increases confusion, and clarifies nothing. The word also further enflames the emotions of those arguing and fighting, on both sides, in a situation where the exact opposite is needed.

It doesn’t help that many Westerners believe a fallacy related to Arabs, using “Arab” (which refers to an ethnic group) interchangeably with “Muslim,” which is not an ethnic term at all, but one that simply refers to anyone who practices the religion known as Islam. In reality, there are many Arabs who are not Muslims, and there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are not Arabs. For example, consider the people who live in Iran. The governments of Israel and Iran are often hostile to each other, and Iran has very few Arabs, despite being a nation where an overwhelming majority practice Islam.

When Israel has conflicts with other nations (or organizations, for Hamas is not a nation) in the Middle East, those conflicts are political in nature, with religion playing a strong role as well. Israel is associated with the religion of Judaism (even though much of its Jewish population is only ethnically Jewish, not Jewish in the religious sense of the term), and is often in conflict with others in the Middle East who are associated with the religion called Islam. “Antisemitic,” used as a synonym for anti-Jewish bigotry, is an unfortunate misnomer, but there are alternatives which are better, in the sense that they are more specific, and therefore more clear. There is already a word in common use for fear and hatred of Islam and/or Muslims: “Islamophobia.” The corresponding term for fear and hatred of Judaism and/or Jews, including those who are Jewish only in the ethnic sense of the word, is “Judeophobia.” Most of the time, when people use the word “antisemitism,” they actually mean Judeophobia. Since Arabs are, themselves, a subset of the Semites, it would be illogical to refer to a specific person who is both an Arab, and a hater of Jews, as an “antisemitic Arab.” To describe that person as a “Judeophobic Arab,” on the other hand, makes perfect sense.

Finally, it must be recognized that there are numerous people, within both Judaism and Islam, who do not have within them the blind, furious hatred of the other group that has caused so much death and destruction in the Middle East since the founding of the modern nation of Israel, in the years following World War II. I am referring, of course, to non-Islamophobic Jews, and non-Judeophobic Muslims. One does not often see them featured in the news, especially when conflicts such as the current one are raging, but such people do exist, and their existence should give all people who prefer peace over war hope for the future. May their numbers increase.