Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, claps hands at the opening of a Tesla factory in Germany.

Dear Commons Community,

Electric car manufacturer Tesla opened its first European factory Tuesday on the outskirts of Berlin in an effort to challenge German automakers on their home turf.

The company says its new “Gigafactory” will employ 12,000 people and produce 500,000 vehicles a year once it’s fully up and running. Initial production will focus on Tesla’s Model Y compact sport utility vehicle.  As reported by the Associated Press.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz attended the opening ceremony in Gruenheide, southeast of the German capital, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who performed an impromptu dance for fans as the first cars rolled out of the factory for delivery.

He later posted a comment on Twitter thanking Germany with the words “Danke Deutschland!” surrounded by German flags.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said the opening of the factory was “a nice symbol” that gasoline-powered cars can be replaced with electric vehicles at a time when Germany and other European nations are trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and wean themselves off Russian oil.

Tesla began building the vast facility less than three years ago, before it received official permits to do so. Had those permits not been issued, the company would have had to level the site.

“That’s a different company risk culture,” Habeck said, after being asked to compare Tesla’s approach with the slow pace of German construction projects such as Berlin’s nearby new airport, which opened with a nine-year delay.

Environmental activists have warned that the factory could affect drinking water supplies in the region.

Tesla has dismissed those warnings. The company refused most media access to the site and the ceremony Tuesday.

Elon Musk’s timing could not have been better!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The American Educator has an article in its current issue entitled,“Who Controls Online Courses?  How For-Profit Companies Are Harming Public Higher Education”  by Stephanie Hall.  It takes a look at the state of private education companies, referred to as online program managers (OPMs), that have proliferated in the past decade.  I have blogged about OPMs before but cautions in this article are worth repeating.  See (https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2021/11/09/erik-gilbert-op-ed-beware-predatory-opm-companies/  and https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/01/19/senate-democrats-elizabeth-warren-of-massachusetts-sherrod-brown-of-ohio-and-tina-smith-of-minnesota-probing-online-program-management-opm-companies/

 OPMs offer services from student recruitment, registration, video production, instructional design, etc. for those colleges looking to become more involved with online academic programs.  Hall cautions that in entering into agreements, some colleges have essentially outsourced and privatized their academic programs. Driven by financial difficulties, these colleges have turned to OPMs to jumpstart what they hope will be a revenue stream. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and the fine print in contracts generally favors the OPM.

Her conclusion (see below) includes nine questions that any administrator or faculty member should consider before entering into an OPM contract.

Good information!

Tony

—————————————————————-

While there is no such thing as an ideal outsourcing agreement, the better among them respect the rights of faculty and students, maintain faculty control over academic governance, protect students from predatory recruiting, and keep the public institution intact by maintaining a safe distance between the college or university and the contractor.

The Century Foundation has continued to acquire and analyze agreements between public colleges and universities and their OPMs. This became all the more important when the COVID-19 pandemic sent entire campuses into virtual classrooms. Additional analysis has made it clear that there are even more questions faculty should consider as they advocate for better arrangements when outsourcing cannot be avoided.

1. What are the short- and medium-term plans for using the services of the OPM? Faculty, through their governance structures, should reject arrangements with contract terms that go beyond the timeframe that represents one cohort of students.
2. What are the enrollment goals behind the arrangement and whose goals are they? How many colleges, departments, and programs will be implicated in the arrangement? What is the justification for hiring an OPM for the program(s) of interest? Faculty should require a holistic analysis of the local and beyond-local demand for the programs from sources other than enrollment data. Likewise, faculty should require a full-scale analysis of the institution’s existing internal capabilities and a plan for building internal capacity if needed.
3. What are the payment terms? Faculty should require evidence of revenue and expenditure modeling. If tuition sharing has been deemed necessary, it should be for a very limited time, the amount shared with the contractor should taper over time, and the contract should shift to fee-for-service terms within as short a timeframe as possible.
4. How quickly and with what resources will the new programs launch? Do the plan and timeline match the process that would be used for creating and offering new on-campus programs?
5. How many student start dates will be offered per year and why? Outsourced online programs have taken lessons from the for-profit college playbook, and some OPMs require their partners to offer multiple start dates per semester. To the prospective student, this is billed as a convenient feature that lessens the wait time between enrollment and the first day of class. However, there can be downsides to students, faculty, and the learning process when it comes to compressed semesters and quickly succeeding start dates. For the OPM, on the other hand, compressed schedules represent the ability to take in more cohorts (and revenue) per year and to move students through tuition cycles faster. Faculty groups should determine if they have a position on the number of start dates offered by their institution.
6. What is the source of instructional labor for the new programs? Specifically, is the college or university remaining in control of instructor recruitment, onboarding, and training? Will the programs be staffed in a way that matches on-campus program staffing? At what benefit or expense? One strategy to erode faculty control over these matters is for online divisions to use completely different sources of labor, including by recruiting instructors who live in states other than that of the main campus. Faculty groups should require full transparency of the staffing plan for proposed programs.
7. Are the outsourced programs replicas of programs that exist on campus already? Will the outsourced programs have parity with programs already offered on campus? Will instructors and students taking part in the online programs have access to the same resources as on-campus students? What is the plan for ensuring the new programs are as worthwhile to students as on-campus programs? These questions are important for faculty groups trying to determine whether the administration is creating access to an existing and worthwhile product or simply creating a potentially predatory, second-tier online campus with no meaningful connection to the institution.
8. Will the college or university remain in control over marketing strategy and content? The most egregious outsourcing agreements assume the OPM has control over which materials and messages are used in advertisements. For example, a contract between Southeastern Oklahoma State University and Academic Partnerships assumes the university has approved marketing materials so long as the OPM attempts to share them.⁴¹ Instead, the agreement should have been written to give clear control to the university, especially since the university suffers the consequences for advertising taken out in its name. In general, if the contractor is responsible for creating and placing ad content, a defined process for the college’s or university’s active review and approval should be included.
9. Student recruitment should be scrutinized. When services are paid on a tuition-sharing or commission basis, the inclusion of student recruiting is especially dangerous. Regardless of the payment terms, faculty should critically analyze the purpose of recruiting to fill virtual classrooms. If the documented demand for degrees, certificates, and other programs is real, could it be that online students would be just as likely to find their way to a physical campus as an online campus? Organic demand does not need to be drummed up. The reasons an online program might advertise go beyond organic demand. It could be that a college or university is specifically looking for students who do not live near the campus. This could be a losing game, since recent data indicate that 82 percent of online-only students who are enrolled in public colleges and universities live in the same state as their institution.⁴² Alternatively, if colleges and universities hope to pull students who might attend a for-profit college, faculty should ask the decision makers how their institution’s online degree offers something different to students who would otherwise enroll in a national for-profit. If the answer is that students get degrees bearing the public institution’s name, then the institution is complicit in renting out its own brand. Faculty groups from public and nonprofit colleges and universities should work to address this problem at its root by curbing spending on advertising and recruiting by the for-profit sector.

Unfortunately, faculty and students can exist on a campus without knowing they have tens of thousands of peers in the virtual space. Online students—and especially prospective online students—are invisible and easy to overlook, making them a prime target for profiteers who operate under the guise of providing a public service. This invisibility increases the sense that the public is truly on the losing end of so-called public-private partnerships in online higher education.

Until the public is reaffirmed as part of public-private partnerships, prospective students should assume there are private actors with incentives that run counter to the purpose of public higher education. Reclaiming the public aspect, even in contexts where outsourcing has been normalized, is essential to meeting public institutions’ democratic mission of education for the common good.

Dear Commons Community,

Disney employees staged an all-day walkout yesterday after a week of smaller break-time walkouts, all meant to call out the corporation — with much of the anger targeting CEO Bob Chapek — over its silence and inaction leading up to the approval of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, currently awaiting the signature of Gov. Ron DeSantis.  As reported by several media outlets.

“All eyes are on you Disney, how you choose to proceed will decide whether you remain culturally relevant or become a relic of the past. You don’t get to decide which lives do or don’t matter,” noted one employee in a Twitter thread of employee statements by Disney Walkout, the official account for the protests, also tied to the official website, Where is Chapek.

Noted another, “Disney would be nothing without its queer and trans employees.” And another: “Queer employees have been pushing for years to make this company better—it shouldn’t have taken all this for us to get the attention of people up the food chain. Our voices mattered before all this.”

 According to Variety, about 75 employees staged a walkout from Disney’s Burbank, Calif., studios, with Rachel Anderson, an employee in Disney Music Group who has a transgender son, telling the publication about Disney, “They are willing to take political stands when it generates money.” She added that the controversy has “been really painful and soul-crushing on a personal level.”

Raven-Symoné, along with the rest of the cast of the Disney Channel’s Raven’s Home, walked off the set yesterday. The star shared video of the walkout on her Instagram, explaining in a caption, “In support of our LGBTQ+ family and all of those who will be damaged by the ‘don’t say gay bill’ we the cast of Raven’s Home are walking out.”

Disney companies supporting the walkout — through which protestors are demanding that Disney permanently stop all campaign donations to any politician who created or supported the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, among other demands — include Hulu, ESPN and FX.

Official Disney accounts, including Disney+ and Disney Parks, posted words of support. But many say it’s too little too late.

“You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry,” Chapek said in a statement. “We are hard at work creating a new framework for our political giving that will ensure our advocacy better reflects our values. And today, we are pausing all political donations in the state of Florida pending this review. But, I know there is so much more work to be done.”

Critics have noted that, had Chapek spoke out earlier, with a firm stance, fear of economic repercussions could have possibly held sway.

A planned “media storm” in the midst of the walkouts, held at 11am PST yesterday and using hashtags including #DisneyDoBetter and #DisneySayGay, brought a flood of support, including from celebs George Takei and Kerry Washington — as well as a cavalcade of brave employees.

Disney started feeling the heat over this issue last month, when Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell dedicated his Feb. 25 piece to Disney’s alleged support of the politicians backing the controversial bill.

“The parks preach inclusion in their marketing campaigns. But Disney has given money to every single sponsor and co-sponsor of this year’s infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill,” Maxwell wrote. “Disney knows who these people are. The Senate sponsor, Ocala Republican Dennis Baxley, has backed anti-gay legislation for years — including laws to prevent gay couples from adopting kids who otherwise wouldn’t have a family at all.”

That prompted gay historian Eric Cervini to create a meme based on Maxwell’s article and post it to Instagram, where it went viral. “Please boycott, share (TAG DISNEY!), and use that saved subscription money to donate” to Equality Florida, he wrote. “LGBTQ+ kids’ lives are at stake.”

Also in response, the global nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation launched an ad campaign “demanding Disney speak out publicly against hateful Florida legislation.”

Cervini told Yahoo Life at the time, “It’s not too late for Disney — and other companies with a history of pinkwashing — to walk the walk and come out forcefully against the proposed legislation.”

On March 14, an organized group of anonymous Walt Disney Company employees — operating through the Where Is Chapek website and Disney Walkout twitter handle — released an open letter announcing the upcoming walkouts.

“We were sick of two things: our LGBTQIA+ community being attacked by our government and Disney’s continual failure to create a work environment that is safe for us,” the organizers said in a statement to Yahoo Life. “It’s been a lot of words with little action.”

The group’s demands included and still include: for the Walt Disney Company (TWDC) to “immediately and indefinitely cease all campaign donations to these politicians involved in the creation or passage of the ‘don’t say gay’ bill’; for TWDC to “publicly commit to an actionable plan” that protects LGBTQ employees from “hateful legislation,” such as stopping any efforts to move employees to Florida; to reaffirm the company’s commitment to advocating for LGBTQ staff, “even in the face of political risk”; to take responsibility “for their inaction to protect the rights of LGBTQIA+ children and their families” by substantially contributing to the Trevor Project and other human rights advocacy groups; to allocate content spending and outline how it will expand LGBTQ representation; and to create “an LGBTQIA+ brand” that focuses on queer creators and “underrepresented voices.”

Other related Disney drama in recent days included an announcement from Disney’s Pixar — following employees calling out the company for nixing “overtly gay affection” from previous Pixar films — that it was reinstating a previously-cut same-sex kiss in the animated Lightyear. Then, on Monday, Disney postponed its management retreat in the wake of the continued fallout.

 Mr. Chapek and Disney need to listen to their employees!

Tony

Mo Brooks with Donald Trump

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. Senate Republican hopeful Mo Brooks pledged on Monday to “fire” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, days after former President Donald Trump told an interviewer that he could pull his endorsement of the Alabama congressman.  As reported by Reuters.

“Today, I unveil my pledge to America, to fire Mitch McConnell. If elected to the Senate, I will not vote for Mitch McConnell for leader,” Brooks said in a 90-second digital ad.

“America can’t afford a Senate leader who is a weak-kneed, debt-junkie, open-border RINO Republican, and who – worse yet – sells out America for special interest group cash,” Brooks said, using one of Trump’s favorite slurs for those in his party he disagrees with, which stands for “Republican in name only.”

Brooks also urged fellow Republican Senate candidates across the country to make the same commitment, warning that McConnell and Trump were locked in “a war for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.”

Brooks is the third Senate Republican hopeful to oppose McConnell’s leadership, following Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and Eric Greitens in Missouri.

McConnell, the 80-year-old Kentucky Republican, is a favorite target of Trump, who has called repeatedly for his ouster as Senate party leader in a running war of words, as Republicans try to reclaim the Senate majority in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.

A McConnell spokesman had no comment on the Brooks video.

Brooks is locked in a tight three-way race to replace Senate Republican Richard Shelby, who is retiring. He is running in the party’s May 24 primary against Katie Britt, a former Shelby aide, and Michael Durant, a businessman and former Army helicopter pilot.

After becoming an early front-runner last year when he won Trump’s endorsement, Brooks has slipped in the polls and trails his rivals in campaign fundraising.

Trump, who falsely claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, has also expressed disappointment since Brooks told voters that it was time to move on from 2020 and look to future elections. The former president told the Washington Examiner last week that he could change his endorsement.

A Britt campaign spokesman dismissed the Brooks video, saying in a statement: “Mo Brooks has resorted to desperate gimmicks to try and win the people of Alabama’s support.”

I agree with Britt that Brooks sounds desperate!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A new coronavirus variant, first detected two months ago, is making its way across the U.S. and spreading more quickly in the Northeast and West, new data recently released shows.

The BA.2 variant appears to be on its way to becoming the dominant coronavirus strain, having roughly doubled each week for the past month, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

BA.2 is considered by the World Health Organization as a “sublineage” of the highly transmissible omicron variant. It’s a different version of omicron than BA.1, which was responsible for the surge that hit the Northeast late last year.

It has a different genetic sequence from BA.1 and was first dubbed the “stealth variant” because it wasn’t as easy to detect.

Around the world, infections are largely from the BA.2 version of omicron. In the U.S., BA.2 accounted for about a quarter (23.1%) of the cases for the week ending March 12, the CDC says. That’s up from 14.2% the week ending March 5.  Here are some questions reported yesterday by USA Today based on data from the CDC and other health organizations.

How fast is BA.2 spreading in the US?

BA.2 made up 39% of cases in New Jersey and New York, the week ending March 12, up from 25.4% the previous week, the CDC says. (Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are also included by the CDC in that region’s COVID-19 case breakdown.)

In the Northeast (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont), BA.2 accounted for 38.6% of cases, up from 24% the previous week, according to the CDC.

In the West, which includes Arizona, California and Nevada, BA.2 accounts for 27.7% of cases, up from 17.1% the previous week. In the upper West, including Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, BA.2 made up 26.2% of cases, up from 16%, the CDC says.

BA.2 cases have risen in recent weeks in the rest of the U.S., accounting for 12% to 20% of cases in other states for the week ending March 12.

Does BA.2 spread faster? Is it more lethal?

Studies have shown that BA.2 is “inherently more transmissible” than omicron BA.1, according to the World Health Organization.

What’s not yet known is if BA.2 causes severe illness as did omicron BA.1 did, which prompted a rapid surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths for a month before plummeting just as quickly.

While omicron BA.1 was considered milder than the virus’ original strain and the delta variant, it led to a increase in deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S.: 60,000 in January 2022, twice the amount of deaths in November, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“We often don’t know until it’s too late,” said Stephanie Silvera, an infectious disease specialist at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. “That’s been the problem with managing these surges. Deaths are one of the last impacts we see.”

What impact is BA.2 having?

So far, it doesn’t look as if BA.2 is making a noticeable impact. But public health officials say they are closely monitoring its spread.

Key metrics such as cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to drop almost every day and are hovering around levels last seen in July before the delta variant surge.

Daily reported deaths have ranged from 1,685 to 2,076 in March after deaths of 3,000 or more a day for much of January and February.

The plummeting metrics have led to the lifting of state mask mandates – in schools and public buildings – in what officials consider a return to normalcy.

On Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he expects cases to rise in the state because of surges in parts of Asia and Europe. But he said he doesn’t expect to reinstate “universal statewide mandated protective measures.”

Health officials are uncertain what BA.2 will do, however.

“It’s difficult to predict how COVID-19 variants or any other emerging respiratory virus will evolve over time and what their specific impacts will be,” said Dr. Tina Tan, New Jersey state epidemiologist. “And it is hard to predict whether a surge in BA.2 will translate to increased hospitalizations or deaths at this time.”

Are vaccines and natural immunity effective against BA.2?

Vaccines were shown to be as effective against BA.2 as they were against omicron BA.1, according to British scientists. That means the vaccines may not prevent infection, but they work well in fending off severe illness.

If you were infected by omicron BA.1, you may also have good protection against BA.2, according to the World Health Organization.

While reinfection is possible, studies suggest that infection with BA.1 “provides strong protection” against reinfection with BA.2.

The hundreds of thousands of infections in New Jersey during the omicron surge “suggest that many residents may have some protection against BA.2,” Tan said.

What’s happening in other parts of the globe?

Europe and parts of Asia have seen a rise in cases in the past few weeks, but it’s not yet clear how much BA.2 is to blame.

The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Italy saw an upswing last week. Many European countries have begun treating the virus as a part of daily life and are forgoing full shutdowns.

China ordered a lockdown of residents in the city of Changchun, closed schools in Shanghai and urged the public not to leave Beijing last weekend amid a new spike.

Hong Kong has seen its worst spike in recent weeks after limiting COVID-19’s spread for almost two years with some of the world’s most stringent health mandates. Hong Kong has reported more than 700,000 infections and about 4,200 deaths, most of them in the past three weeks, according to Reuters.

Will other variants emerge?

The more times a virus replicates, the more chances it has to mutate into a stronger strain, as seen with delta and omicron.

That has some public health experts worried about the surge in Asia and elsewhere.

“I’m more worried that the sheer biomass of virus in these places that are now experiencing major waves of omicron will lead to the emergence of new strains, of which we in the U.S. have not yet experienced,” said Daniel Parker, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, Irvine. “That could certainly lead to spikes in cases like what we saw with delta and omicron.”

In sum, we need to keep our guard up regarding COVID.  It appears that variants will continue to evolve for years to come.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ohio Valley University Board of Trustees voted in December to close its doors after more than 60 years in operation. Leading up to the decision, even basic transactions had become a struggle: Students couldn’t get copies of their transcripts, and some employees hadn’t been paid for months.

Spurred by those complaints, the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission announced that it would convene on December 10 to determine OVU’s future. But three days before that meeting would take place, OVU’s board elected to shut down the university rather than have the State of West Virginia do it for them. And so, after decades of increasingly desperate attempts to stay alive, Ohio Valley University was finally dead.

Like so many institutions that have closed or sought to merge with another university in recent years, Ohio Valley was doomed by shrinking enrollments and unsustainable debts. But few colleges — if any — have ever gone to the lengths that OVU did to try to save themselves from extinction. In time, though, this dedication to OVU’s survival would come to justify an untenable reliance on increasingly complex, unconventional, and risky financial vehicles — vehicles that would eventually leave the institution more and more vulnerable. All the while, Ohio Valley, one of the few remaining academic bastions of the Churches of Christ, left its students in the dark about its financial state. Indeed, OVU’s torturous struggle to stay alive stands in contrast to the mathematical models that very likely would have forecast its closure years ago — a stark reminder that it’s not spreadsheets but the human beings serving on governing boards and in regulatory offices who ultimately decide when to kill colleges and universities.

The perilous state of the institution’s finances was clear to its leaders and investors as early as 2019, when OVU pleaded with its creditors to sell off its debt at a steep discount to a set of benefactors aligned with the university. “If we do not receive a positive response from substantially all of the bondholders,” an OVU representative warned in a letter dated June 12 of that year, “it will prevent OVU from continuing as an institution and likely force bankruptcy or receivership, resulting in substantial receivership costs and a ‘fire sale’ leaving little for the bondholders.”

Ultimately, those bondholders did not accept the offer, and in September 2019, the university began defaulting on its debt and had no choice but to close its doors!

A more extended analysis of OVU’s decision can be found here.

Tony

General David Petraeus

Dear Commons Community,

In a small positive sign in the Ukraine War, the reported deaths of five Russian generals is a sign of trouble for the Kremlin’s invasion, retired U.S. Gen. David Petraeus told Jake Tapper on CNN yesterday.

“This is very, very uncommon. This is in the first three weeks,” said Petraeus. “These are quite senior generals.”

Petraeus said reports of four of the deaths have already been confirmed.

“I think the fifth we’ll hear today,” he added.

Petraeus attributed the deaths to a variety of factors, including Ukrainians jamming Russian communications, skilled snipers and a Russian military structure that keeps decisions in very few hands.

“The bottom line is that their command and control has broken down. Their communications have been jammed by the Ukrainians,” Petraeus said. “Their secure coms didn’t work. They had to go to a single channel that’s jammable ― and that’s exactly what the Ukrainians have been doing to that.”

Without communication options, the military column gets stopped. And when an impatient general heads to the front to find out what’s going on, he’s shot and killed.

“The Ukrainians have very, very good snipers and they’ve just been picking them off left and right,” Petraeus added.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, also said the Russians were in trouble in Ukraine.

“Russian generals are running out of time, ammunition and manpower,” Hodges wrote in an assessment last week for the Center for European Policy Analysis. “That’s not based on any inside intelligence — it’s clear from open source information and my own experience.”

In the latest blow to Russian military leadership, officials confirmed yesterday that navy commander Andrei Paly was killed in fighting in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, Agence France-Presse reported. Paly, 51, was the deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

BRAVO to the Ukrainians!

Tony

Steve Bannon, Rick Scott, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson

Dear Commons Community,

During an interview on Face the Nation yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sharply dismissed lawmakers in his own party who are bashing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and supporting Russian leader Vladimir Putin, disparaging them as the “lonely” fringe.

“The vast majority of the Republican Party writ large, both in the Congress across the country, are totally behind the Ukrainians and urging the president to … take steps [to help Ukraine] quicker. Yeah, to be bolder. There may be a few lonely voices off the side. I wouldn’t pay much attention to them.”

McConnell was responding to a question from CBS host Margaret Brennan, who quizzed him about what Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) has called the “Putin wing of the Republican Party.”

Brennan asked: “Think she’s referring to Congressman Cawthorn, who called Zelenskyy a thug? Marjorie Taylor Greene said the U.S. should not fund a war the Ukrainians cannot possibly win.”

McConnell acknowledged “lonely voices out there that are in a different place.” But he added: “Looking at Senate Republicans. I can tell you that I would have — had I been the majority leader — put this Ukraine supplemental [aid] up by itself. I think virtually every one of my members would have voted for it.”

Cawthorn was just scolded last week by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for calling Zelenskyy a thug when he also baselessly insisted the Ukrainian government was “incredibly corrupt and incredibly evil.” (The comments, dubbed in Russian, have made Cawthorn a propaganda star on state-sponsored Russian TV.)

“Madison is wrong,” McCarthy said at a press conference. “If there’s any thug in this world, it’s Putin.”

As for Greene, she last week lashed out at a reporter who asked if her remarks and actions “represent a sympathy for Russia and the Kremlin” in its invasion of Ukraine.

“I don’t have any sympathy for Putin and Russia,” Greene insisted. Yet just last month, Greene was a key speaker at a white nationalist conference where Russia was given a post-invasion “round of applause,” and the audience chanted Putin’s name.

She has also attacked “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine, parroting Putin’s broad characterization of the country in a vain attempt to justify his invasion. She was also one of only eight lawmakers in the House last week to vote against legislation to revoke normal trade relations with Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

We need more prominent Republicans speaking our against its “Putin Wing”.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading  Kingdom of Characters:  The Language Revolution that Made China Modern  a new book by Jing Tsu,  professor of languages and literature at Yale University.  The main theme is that China owes a good deal of its “meteoric rise” as a world power to overcoming its linguistic challenge to make the formidable Chinese language accessible for the our world of global trade and digital technology.  Tsu provides a good deal of detail in this book and a reader comes away with an education in the difficulties of converting tens of thousands of traditional Chinese characters to pinyin and Unicode.

I found Kingdom of Characters,  an interesting read and came away with tremendous respect for the language pioneers who helped in making the transition as well as for those who wanted to maintain respect for the Chinese traditions.  I also did not realize the important role that Mao Zedong played in modernizing the language.  If you do not have a background in languages especially Chinese, you will find yourself rereading paragraphs and pages but it is worth it!

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS
The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
By Jing Tsu

One summer’s evening in 1916, 27-year-old Zhou Houkun stepped up to a podium to unveil a marvelous invention: a new kind of Chinese typewriter. Zhou had recently returned home to Shanghai from M.I.T., where a chance encounter with an American Monotype machine had spurred him to create a Chinese version. But American typewriters, with their QWERTY keyboards, were designed for alphabetic languages like English; with just 26 letters, you could type anything from a shopping list to Shakespeare. The Chinese script is character-based, each character roughly equivalent to what we mean by an English word. Designing a relatively portable machine that could type 4,000 individual characters had been a monumental task, and people gathered in the July heat to hear Zhou speak.

But Zhou’s first message to his audience seemingly had nothing to do with typewriters. Instead, he pulled an American factory worker’s outfit over his suit. “I have one phrase to impart you with today,” he told the crowd. “Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty.” The Chinese, he said, “shun all activities concerning industry and artisanship, which has made the learned inept at anything practical, and the peasants ignorant of real knowledge.” Instead, they celebrated the literati over honest laborers. And yet, in America, even President Roosevelt’s relatives were woodworkers. Zhou wore a uniform from his stint interning at an American factory, to emphasize that however “shabby and filthy these clothes may be, I don’t abandon them, because they bear the marks of a worker.”