Politics Plus

Yesterday was another pretty quiet day. It was cold, and there was some snow, but I do have a working heater in place (as opposed to last week, when the one I had died), so i was just fine.

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Short Takes –

Daily Beast – Why Putin Is Itching to Get His Hands on This Ex-American Banker
Quote – [Bill] Browder, a financier who had once been the largest foreign investor in Russia, had long been a thorn in Moscow’s side before he was detained that day in May 2018. Years earlier, Browder had discovered that many of the companies he had invested in were being robbed by oligarchs and corrupt officials. Unwilling to let this fraud go unchallenged, Browder, as detailed in his 2015 bestseller Red Notice, decided to fight back.
Click through for the gist of the story. I expect that Freezing Order is quite some book. Every group has its exceptions, even bankers (I don’t mean bank employees, who are generally good pwople; I’m thinkinfg of management when I make that generalization.)

New Mexico In Depth – Money for abandoned uranium mine cleanup spurs questions about design, jobs
Quote – Uranium mines are personal for Dariel Yazzie. Now head of the Navajo Nation’s Superfund program, Yazzie grew up near Monument Valley, Arizona, where the Vanadium Corporation of America started uranium operations in the 1940s. His childhood home sat a stone’s throw from piles of waste from uranium milling, known as tailings. His grandfather, Luke Yazzie, helped locate the first uranium deposits mined on the Navajo Nation. His father was a uranium miner, then worked for Peabody Coal mine. Yazzie, Diné, heard the family stories about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scanning his family’s home for radiation in 1974, when he was 4 years old, finding several high contamination readings.
Click through for details and anecdotes. Cleaning up after fossil fuels is bad enough … but cleaning up after uranium is worse.

Want to improve student achievement? Hire a Black principal.
Quote – Researchers have found that principals of color yield multiple benefits for students of color. A University of Minnesota study published in January about the impact of Black women principals in secondary schools linked Black principals and higher math achievement for students. Black men make up a slight majority of Black secondary school principals, but the researchers suggest that Black women in these roles have a positive effect on student achievement and teacher investment in schools.
Click through for evidence. I don’t know that this would work in every school district, but in those where it wouldm it would do so like a champion.

Food For Thought:
Not a picture today, but a short quote from an email from Faithful America. Anyone not in the Christian faith tradition, please take this as confirmation of what you already know: far too many “Christians” don’t act Christian.

During Holy Week, the church remembers the final days of Christ’s earthly life and ministry. But we often forget just what it was that Jesus did to anger the religious and political authorities in the first place:

“Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers… He said to them, ‘It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer;’ but you are making it a den of robbers.'”

If we’re serious about following Jesus, we need to start flipping more tables ourselves.