In China, robots are slowly taking over the physical labor to free up people to do more interesting things. #China #Robots
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The Japan Times (@japantimes) posted at 1:05 am on Sun, Mar 02, 2025:
An artificial intelligence-driven humanoid robot called AIREC is a prototype future “caregiver” for Japan’s rapidly aging population and chronic shortage of aged-care workers.
https://t.co/Rbh1o7FOVi
(https://x.com/japantimes/status/1896003994629075405?t=0nQSmJxs_zt9ugjpdWA-eg&s=03)
·
Don’t believe Team Biden’s “unprovoked invasion” narrative. In three words (10-minute video), Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University, compellingly explains the origin of the war in #Ukraine: Reckless NATO expansion! https://x.com/ivan_8848/status/1852163971501166661/video/1
2nd March 2025
The next time a Ukrainain “Leader” turns up at the
to start lecturing the US President They should be aware that this administration knows exactly whats happened in Ukraine and what’s happening there now. The US is “Under new Managment”
2nd March 2025
Bishop Athanasius Schneider speaks very clearly: “They are not refugees, they are invaders who want to Islamize Europe! They want to destroy historical culture in Europe!”
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Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, shakes U.S. President Donald Trump’s hand at a reception honoring Black History Month in the East Room of the White House, Feb. 20, 2025. Credit: Molly Riley/White House.
(Feb. 28, 2025 / JNS)
“The task force’s mandate is to bring the full force of the federal government to bear in our effort to eradicate antisemitism, particularly in schools,” stated Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights and a member of the task force. “These visits are just one of many steps this Administration is taking to deliver on that commitment.”
The federal task force plans to meet with leaders of and impacted students at Columbia University, George Washington University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, University of Minnesota, University of Southern California and the University of California’s campuses in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Berkeley.
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Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and a former U.S. assistant secretary of education, told JNS that the visits are likely to have quick impacts.
“The Justice Department has the power to bring original actions against colleges or universities as well as to intervene in pending matters, but they haven’t done much of this in recent years,” he said. “They’ve been particularly quiet about campus antisemitism throughout the Biden administration, which led to criticism of Merrick Garland’s Justice Department.”
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“It’s astonishing that the Justice Department was silent for so long, and this is a welcome change,” he told JNS. “Unlike the Office of Civil Rights, the Justice Department rarely gets involved in campus antisemitism matters outside of desegregation, but when they do, it has a disproportionately large impact.”
“There’s nothing that gets a university president’s attention like a call from the Justice Department,” he added. “It has an immediate impact.”
The prospect of a Justice Department task force visit could serve as a warning sign to campuses facing ongoing antisemitism, such as Barnard College—which has a historic relationship with Columbia—prompting the schools to address in a timely fashion, according to Marcus.
“But that’s what’s been happening,” he said. “Now, those who were unresponsive to Jewish students and organizations will likely get a more forceful response from the Department of Justice than they would have if they had been more proactive.”
Task forces can be about more talk than action, according to Marcus.
“They’re good at press releases but weak on follow-through,” he said. “But this is the Department of Justice bringing investigative power, and I expect it to be more than symbolic.”
Ari Shrage, head of Columbia’s Jewish Alumni Association, told JNS that this action by the Justice Department could be a watershed moment for Jewish college students.
“I hope that this and other government actions finally force the university to protect its Jewish students who simply want to go to school,” he added.
February 28, 2025
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“In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority in 1927’s Buck v. Bell, the state could—and should—”prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Forced sterilization, the court held, was not only legal but laudable.
“There’s a very different standard being applied to disabled people’s autonomy.”
To this day, 31 states and Washington, DC, still have laws on the books that allow for the practice—and just two, Alaska and North Carolina, have laws that fully ban the nonconsensual sterilization of disabled people, according to a 2022 report from the National Women’s Law Center. There’s no official account of just how many disabled people have been sterilized under those laws.
Some of these laws aren’t even that old. In 2019, Iowa and Nevada passed new forced sterilization laws that applied to people under guardianship. Both bills passed unanimously, and the end result is consistent with laws on the books in other states. There was no discourse among politicians—let alone objections—about the ethics of sterilizing disabled people without their consent.
Sterilization and Social Justice Lab co-director and founder Alexandra Minna Stern said that early IQ tests, which sought to measure intelligence in part on the basis of class- and culture-based questions involving Beethoven’s sonatas, the early United States, and college athletics, were “used to categorize people who would then be targeted for sterilization,” generally those who were “marginalized or maligned in some way”: in California and the Southwest, often Mexican Americans; nationwide, Black, Indigenous and poorer white Americans, particularly women. The people behind the tests, Stern says, were “white, elite men who wanted to create a certain type of society in their own image.”
NWLC senior counsel for health equity and justice Ma’ayan Anafi, who is also disabled, told Mother Jones that “forced sterilization laws are a really powerful example of how violations of disabled people’s bodies and rights are baked into our legal system today.”
Plenty of Democratic-led states, including Massachusetts and Oregon, continue to allow disabled people to be sterilized against their will. “In many states, we’re seeing laws that generally affirm reproductive rights existing side-by-side with these forced sterilization laws,” Anafi continued. “There’s a very different standard that’s being applied to disabled people’s autonomy.”https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/O7WON/2/
Eugenics already figured into Trump’s first term, particularly in his and his advisors’ rhetoric criminalizing migrants of color. Trump has, moreover, reportedly expressed support for letting disabled people die. But eugenics is now taking center stage even more, with Trump emboldened by his “mandate” to punish immigrants without papers while welcoming, specifically, white South Africans. The addition of productivity-obsessed Elon Musk, who espouses harmful rhetoric about “abuse” by disabled Medicaid users and has an ugly record on disability, further reinforces Trump’s eugenicist turn.
Efforts to rectify the harms of forced sterilization have also often fallen flat, both historically and in the present day. Following a 2013 Reveal investigation showing that incarcerated women in California were being sterilized without their consent, the state passed a bill to ban the practice behind bars. However, Victoria Valenzuela reported for Bolts, around four in five applications for compensation from people forcibly sterilized in California prisons were rejected.
Importantly, nonconsensual permanent contraception still has some backing from the American medical establishment, at least as an option. An October 2024 clinical report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, for instance, calls nonconsensual permanent contraception a “violation of [the] interests” of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities—unless a court finds that they lack decision-making capacities. In that case, the authors argue, sterilization could still be chosen by guardians (though it is not the only option). But even the most experienced judges, as Holmes demonstrated in 1927, can fail appallingly in making that call.
“Courts routinely fail to understand disability…and they may act in a paternalistic manner.”
Disabled attorney Marissa Ditkowsky of Tzedek DC does not believe anyone should be sterilized without their consent, and says that “people who are legally deemed to lack capacity can still express their wishes or personal values”; she hopes appointed guardians will also support people under guardianship who do seek permanent contraception. Additionally, Ditkowsky says, “courts routinely fail to understand disability and the spectrum of capacity, and they may act in a paternalistic manner”—again on display in Buck v. Bell.
Monika Mitra, Brandeis University’s Lurie Institute for Disability Policy director, believes that opposing forced sterilization means reckoning with how disabled people are viewed as parents. After all, more than 40 states allow disability to be used as grounds for parental termination, and disabled parents are at a higher risk of being monitored by Child Protective Services.
“If you can call out eugenics, and if we can call out sterilization [and] institutionalization,” Mitra said, “we can think about how we as a society view whether disabled people should be pregnant and whether disabled people should be parents.”
This story was published with the assistance of the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) Health Journalism Fellowship, supported by the Commonwealth Fund.
Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.
And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.
It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.Donate Now
Feb 28, 2025 The GoodFellows | Conversations From the Hoover Institution
A one-week window into the Trump administration’s worldview—the president blaming Ukraine for Russia’s invasion; his vice president taking to social media to accuse a Hoover scholar of “historical illiteracy”; the US then refusing to join other UN members in condemning Russian aggression—raises the question: Is the Trump brand of confusion and controversy mere happenstance or a calculated means to an end? Recorded on February 27, 2025. Learn more about this episode: https://www.hoover.org/publications/g…
ABOUT THE SERIES GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast, features senior fellows John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, and H.R. McMaster discussing the social, economic, and geostrategic ramifications of this changed world. They can’t banter over lunch these days, but they continue their spirited conversation online about what comes next, as we look forward to an end to the crisis. For more on this series, visit: https://www.hoover.org/goodfellows?ut…
February 27, 2025
The cooling tower of the Isar II Nuclear Power Plant in Bavaria, Germany. Imago/ZUMA
This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.
Germany’s conservatives won the national election on Sunday, while the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party nearly doubled its share of the vote from the last election to secure a strong second-place finish.
Nuclear energy may be the big winner.
Europe’s largest economy shuttered its last reactors two years ago in what was meant to be an irreversible exit from atomic energy. But surging energy prices and electricity demand are driving calls to revive Germany’s nuclear power industry.
As the victorious Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, wrote in their party manifesto, “We are resolved to stick with the nuclear energy option, counting on research on nuclear energy in its 4th and 5th generation, small modular reactors, and fusion reactors. We are assessing the resumption of operation of the recently-shut-down nuclear power plants.”
The CDU’s leader and Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said last month he regrets withdrawing from nuclear power. “We are examining whether we should build these small modular reactors—perhaps together with France,” Merz told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel.
In an interview last week on CNBC, Klaus Wiener, a CDU lawmaker in the Bundestag, called the country’s nuclear phaseout “a huge mistake.”
“They were technically sound, they were doing well, and safe—but the government has, for ideological reasons, decided to shut them down,” he said. “We should have used them longer. That would have made a big difference in energy prices and supply.”
Yet Wiener cautioned that turning the shuttered plants back on was unlikely, echoing statements Germany’s biggest utilities made in recent calls with investors. “Now unfortunately, three years down the road, these nuclear power plants, they can be recovered but that would be very hard,” he said. “It takes three to five years, possibly, and it’ll take a lot of money. If we want to reengage again with nuclear energy, it will not be about this generation of nuclear power plants.”
That the CDU—the party once led by former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who oversaw the nuclear exit—is now willing to support atomic energy is a major shift. A poll taken in 2022 found 53 percent of Germans opposed quitting nuclear. By the eve of the final shutdowns the following April, 59 percent said the phaseout was “wrong.”
While it’s likely only a small factor in its sobering rise to power, the AfD—whose ties to neo-Nazis and defenses of the Gestapo proved too radical even for their former political allies in France (though not for Elon Musk or Vice President JD Vance) has long been the lone party representing that majority view. Founded two years after the Fukushima disaster, the AfD previously stood as the only party to oppose the phaseout pushed by everyone from the center-right, which initiated the shut-downs, to the center-left and Greens—under whose leadership the last plants closed.
Now the AfD is pushing to completely reverse the closures and undo policies that support renewables such as wind and solar power. (Nuclear is not renewable, because the uranium fuel is spent in the power-generation process.)
“What our government is doing…they’re destroying—they’re blowing them up—our nuclear plants,” Beatrix von Storch, an AfD member of the Bundestag, said in an interview on Deutsche Welle last month. “We can see our energy is no longer stable. It’s far too expensive.”
Merz has ruled out any coalition government with the AfD. Last month, however, the German parliament narrowly approved a nonbinding resolution Merz put forward to call to turn away more migrants, thanks to support from AfD lawmakers.
The big question now is whether Merz will lower his “firewall” against working with the AfD to bring back nuclear power.
Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.
And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.
It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.Donate Now
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Photo Credit: Ukraine Presidential Press Service
When President Trump was running for election in 2024, he said he’d end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. That hasn’t happened. Lately, he’s called Ukraine President Zelensky a dictator and even blamed him for starting the war with Russia. It seems he’s tilting toward Russia in his attempt to negotiate an end to the war.
President Trump wants a personal victory in that dispute, and for him, a victory would be the end of the war. It matters little to him whether the war ends with Russia pulling out and leaving Ukraine with its old boundaries, or with Russia taking full control of Ukraine, or something in between. He isn’t taking Russia’s side, or Ukraine’s side. He wants a win for himself.
At least some of his recent negative comments about Ukraine were intended to lower Zelensky’s expectations about the war’s outcome. That’s the art of the deal. Push for a hard bargain that gives negotiators much less than they would expect so that you can make concessions to make everyone feel like they got a good deal.
If Putin thinks the war could go on forever, it will put more strain on the Russian economy and cause unrest at home. He may also worry that Russia will have to pull out without gaining land. At the same time, Zelensky may fear that Ukraine could lose all the territory that Russia claims. Because of these concerns, there is a chance for both sides to negotiate a deal that is better than these outcomes.
Meanwhile, President Trump wants to declare a victory by seeing the war end, regardless of its outcome. He has repeatedly stated his goal of ending the war and never stated what he thought would be a just outcome.
From a foreign policy standpoint, President Trump may be leaning toward Russia to strengthen Russia’s ties to the US and weaken the bond between Russia and China. But that may not be realistic, especially because everyone—including President Trump—knows that four years from now, someone else will be residing in the White House.
The big problem with allowing Russia to keep any of the occupied territories is that it sends a message to Putin that he can use the Russian military to take territory from other sovereign nations, but President Trump apparently does not see it this way.
The best outcome from the standpoint of global security would be for NATO to agree that Ukraine can never join in exchange for Russia agreeing to Ukraine’s original boundaries. That may be a tough sell, but President Trump, the deal-maker, could make it appear to be a victory for both sides.
The bottom line: President Trump wants a deal, and when it happens, he will declare it a victory for himself, regardless of the terms of the deal.
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Randall G. Holcombe is Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University, past President of the Public Choice Society, and past President of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Virginia Tech, and has taught at Texas A&M University and Auburn University. Dr. Holcombe is also Senior Fellow at the James Madison Institute and was a member of the Florida Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors.
