All About Our Country

The Philippine Flag Our country is officially identified through our flag. The Philippine flag has three colors: white, blue, and red. White signifies purity; blue means hope and peace; and red denotes bravery. The three stars symbolize the three big groups of islands of our country-the Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The eight rays of the sun signify the eight provinces that first revolted against the Spaniards. These are Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, Nueva Ecija, Laguna, Batangas, Manila, and Cavite. We respect our flag to show that we respect our country. We should not treat it like an ordinary cloth because it symbolizes our country. An old flag should be burned and not be used as a rag. Title: National Hero Body text: Dr. Jose Rizal was from a middle-class family from Calamba, Laguna. He is regarded as a genius who fought the Spaniards through his writings, especially the novels "Noli Me Tangere" and "El Filibusterismo." The two novels exposed the anomalies and wrongdoings of the Spanish government against the Filipino people. He wrote the poem "Mi Ultimo Adios" the eve before his execution in Bagumbayan (now known as Rizal Park). National Fruit A mango is sour when it is green, but very sweet when it is ripe. This heart-shaped fruit symbolizes the kindness of the Filipinos. It has a big tree that bears fruits abundantly during summer. National Animal A carabao is a model of hard work and industry. It is the best companion of farmers in the field. It is black and looks like a tamaraw. A carabao is a very strong animal in terms of work. It symbolizes the Filipinos as hardworking and patient. National Bird The Philippine eagle, also known as haribon, stands over 5 feet (1.6 m) tall. It has a large, sharp, and aggressive beak and has powerful talons. Philippine eagles are excellent hunters, and live in tropical rainforests. These eagles lay just one or two eggs each year. National Tree The narra is a hardy tree that grows big and is found mainly in the Bicol Region, Mindanao, and Cagayan Valley forests. Most of the desks and tables in schools are made of narra. It signifies the strong personality of Filipinos in facing trials in life. National Flower The sampaguita has white, star-shaped petals with a sweet fragrance. It is made into garlands, which are given to visitors and special persons on occasions. It signifies purity and among Filipino women. National Fish Bangus or milkfish is our national fish. It grows in ponds or freshwater and tastes delicious. Its white, shiny scales signify our beautiful country. National Dance Cariñosa is a dance of love using a handkerchief and a fan. It symbolizes the true love expressed by Filipinos. National House A nipa hut is a small but beautiful house made from bamboo and sawali or cogon leaves. Filipinos used this kind of house during the olden times. At present, there are still people using this as a dwelling place, but most of the time, they use it as a rest place or cottage. National Costume Barong Tagalog is the national costume for Filipino men. It is made from pineapple fiber or other native materials. Filipinos wear this on special occasions such as formal events or weddings. Baro at Saya is the national dress for Filipino women. Most of them are made from jusi or pineapple fiber and other native materials. This dress shows the gracefulness of Filipino women. National Leaf Our national leaf is a palm tree. It is wide and narrow like an open fan. Farmers use this to protect their crops from the harsh sunlight and rain. It grows like a tree with thorns in its body. National Language Our national language is Filipino, which is based in Tagalog. Through the efforts of former President Manuel L. Quezon (known as the "Father of the National Language"), Filipino was widely disseminated and is now used in all parts of the country. With this, Filipinos in different cultures and native tongues can still communicate with each other. National Food Lechon (litson) is an important dish served at many occasions, especially on fiestas. Lechon is a suckling pig, slowly roasted over live coals to make it crispy and tasty. National Footwear Bakya is the national footwear of the Philippines. It was most popular from the 1950s to the 1970s before the introduction of rubber slippers. There are several colors and designs of bakya that suit the taste of most Filipinos. Valuing Our National Symbols Symbols represent a country and its people. We have to respect and value these symbols because they tell something about our country and of who we are as Filipinos. Here are some ways of valuing our national symbols: When singing the national anthem, stand straight and place your right hand on your left chest. Remove your cap or close your umbrella. Ask the people walking to stop while the flag is being raised. Tell other children to stop chatting while singing the national anthem. Most importantly, sing the national anthem wholeheartedly. Retirement of a Flag: A worn-out flag should be disposed of respectfully. It should be burned in a dignified ceremony, not thrown away or used for other purposes. Help in saving and conserving our forests. They serve as habitat of our national bird and other animals. You may also help organizations that promote reforestation, clean and green programs, and tree planting activities. Do not pick flowers when visiting parks. Instead, help in keeping these places clean and beautiful. Avoid throwing thrash in their surroundings. Patronize products that are made here in our country and made by Filipinos. Tell your family and friends to buy products of the Philippines especially those of which are our national symbol. Aside from patronizing our own products, let us use and love our national language. It is good to learn foreign languages, but do not forget to use our own language correctly and proudly.

Stars and Stripes Our flag has a story. The thirteen colonies that formed our country all had different flags. We needed one flag for all of the United States. We made a flag that had thirteen bright stars and thirteen bold stripes. We made our new flag in red, white, and blue. We called our flag the Stars and Stripes. Our country grew so we added two new stars and two new stripes. A famous song was written about this flag. Our country grew more and more. We needed to change our flag again. We went back to having thirteen stripes on the flag. The stripes show our country began with thirteen states. We added a star for each new state that joined our country. The star pattern changed as their numbers grew. Now our flag has fifty stars for our fifty states. Will there be another star added someday? June 14th is Flag Day. We fly our stars and stripes on Flag Day. We remember the story of our flag. It is a story that hasn’t ended yet!

When it was his turn to speak, Adam Malik, Presidium Minister for Political Affairs and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, recalled that about a year before, in Bangkok, at the conclusion of the peace talks between Indonesia and Malaysia, he had explored the idea of an organization such as ASEAN with his Malaysian and Thai counterparts. One of the “angry young men” in his country’s struggle for independence two decades earlier, Adam Malik was then 50 years old and one of a Presidium of five led by then General Soeharto that was steering Indonesia from the verge of economic and political chaos. He was the Presidium’s point man in Indonesia’s efforts to mend fences with its neighbors in the wake of an unfortunate policy of confrontation. During the past year, he said, the Ministers had all worked together toward the realization of the ASEAN idea, “making haste slowly, in order to build a new association for regional cooperation.” Adam Malik went on to describe Indonesia’s vision of a Southeast Asia developing into “a region which can stand on its own feet, strong enough to defend itself against any negative influence from outside the region.” Such a vision, he stressed, was not wishful thinking, if the countries of the region effectively cooperated with each other, considering their combined natural resources and manpower. He referred to differences of outlook among the member countries, but those differences, he said, would be overcome through a maximum of goodwill and understanding, faith and realism. Hard work, patience and perseverance, he added, would also be necessary. The countries of Southeast Asia should also be willing to take responsibility for whatever happens to them, according to Tun Abdul Razak, the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, who spoke next. In his speech, he conjured a vision of an ASEAN that would include all the countries of Southeast Asia. Tun Abdul Razak was then concurrently his country’s Minister of Defence and Minister of National Development. It was a time when national survival was the overriding thrust of Malaysia’s relations with other nations and so as Minister of Defence, he was in charge of his country’s foreign affairs. He stressed that the countries of the region should recognize that unless they assumed their common responsibility to shape their own destiny and to prevent external intervention and interference, Southeast Asia would remain fraught with danger and tension. And unless they took decisive and collective action to prevent the eruption of intra-regional conflicts, the nations of Southeast Asia would remain susceptible to manipulation, one against another. “We the nations and peoples of Southeast Asia,” Tun Abdul Razak said, “must get together and form by ourselves a new perspective and a new framework for our region. It is important that individually and jointly we should create a deep awareness that we cannot survive for long as independent but isolated peoples unless we also think and act together and unless we prove by deeds that we belong to a family of Southeast Asian nations bound together by ties of friendship and goodwill and imbued with our own ideals and aspirations and determined to shape our own destiny”. He added that, “with the establishment of ASEAN, we have taken a firm and a bold step on that road”. For his part, S. Rajaratnam, a former Minister of Culture of multi-cultural Singapore who, at that time, served as its first Foreign Minister, noted that two decades of nationalist fervor had not fulfilled the expectations of the people of Southeast Asia for better living standards. If ASEAN would succeed, he said, then its members would have to marry national thinking with regional thinking. “We must now think at two levels,” Rajaratnam said. “We must think not only of our national interests but posit them against regional interests: that is a new way of thinking about our problems. And these are two different things and sometimes they can conflict. Secondly, we must also accept the fact, if we are really serious about it, that regional existence means painful adjustments to those practices and thinking in our respective countries. We must make these painful and difficult adjustments. If we are not going to do that, then regionalism remains a utopia.” S. Rajaratnam expressed the fear, however, that ASEAN would be misunderstood. “We are not against anything”, he said, “not against anybody”. And here he used a term that would have an ominous ring even today: balkanization. In Southeast Asia, as in Europe and any part of the world, he said, outside powers had a vested interest in the balkanization of the region. “We want to ensure,” he said, “a stable Southeast Asia, not a balkanized Southeast Asia. And those countries who are interested, genuinely interested, in the stability of Southeast Asia, the prosperity of Southeast Asia, and better economic and social conditions, will welcome small countries getting together to pool their collective resources and their collective wisdom to contribute to the peace of the world.” The goal of ASEAN, then, is to create, not to destroy. This, the Foreign Minister of Thailand, Thanat Khoman, stressed when it was his turn to speak. At a time when the Vietnam conflict was raging and American forces seemed forever entrenched in Indochina, he had foreseen their eventual withdrawal from the area and had accordingly applied himself to adjusting Thailand’s foreign policy to a reality that would only become apparent more than half a decade later. He must have had that in mind when, on that occasion, he said that the countries of Southeast Asia had no choice but to adjust to the exigencies of the time, to move toward closer cooperation and even integration. Elaborating on ASEAN objectives, he spoke of “building a new society that will be responsive to the needs of our time and efficiently equipped to bring about, for the enjoyment and the material as well as spiritual advancement of our peoples, conditions of stability and progress. Particularly what millions of men and women in our part of the world want is to erase the old and obsolete concept of domination and subjection of the past and replace it with the new spirit of give and take, of equality and partnership. More than anything else, they want to be master of their own house and to enjoy the inherent right to decide their own destiny …” While the nations of Southeast Asia prevent attempts to deprive them of their freedom and sovereignty, he said, they must first free themselves from the material impediments of ignorance, disease and hunger. Each of these nations cannot accomplish that alone, but by joining together and cooperating with those who have the same aspirations, these objectives become easier to attain. Then Thanat Khoman concluded: “What we have decided today is only a small beginning of what we hope will be a long and continuous sequence of accomplishments of which we ourselves, those who will join us later and the generations to come, can be proud. Let it be for Southeast Asia, a potentially rich region, rich in history, in spiritual as well as material resources and indeed for the whole ancient continent of Asia, the light of happiness and well-being that will shine over the uncounted millions of our struggling peoples.” The Foreign Minister of Thailand closed the inaugural session of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations by presenting each of his colleagues with a memento. Inscribed on the memento presented to the Foreign Minister of Indonesia, was the citation, “In recognition of services rendered by His Excellency Adam Malik to the ASEAN organization, the name of which was suggested by him.” And that was how ASEAN was conceived, given a name, and born. It had been barely 14 months since Thanat Khoman brought up the ASEAN idea in his conversations with his Malaysian and Indonesian colleagues. In about three more weeks, Indonesia would fully restore diplomatic relations with Malaysia, and soon after that with Singapore. That was by no means the end to intra-ASEAN disputes, for soon the Philippines and Malaysia would have a falling out on the issue of sovereignty over Sabah. Many disputes between ASEAN countries persist to this day. But all Member Countries are deeply committed to resolving their differences through peaceful means and in the spirit of mutual accommodation. Every dispute would have its proper season but it would not be allowed to get in the way of the task at hand. And at that time, the essential task was to lay the framework of regional dialogue and cooperation. The two-page Bangkok Declaration not only contains the rationale for the establishment of ASEAN and its specific objectives. It represents the organization’s modus operandi of building on small steps, voluntary, and informal arrangements towards more binding and institutionalized agreements. All the founding member states and the newer members have stood fast to the spirit of the Bangkok Declaration. Over the years, ASEAN has progressively entered into several formal and legally-binding instruments, such as the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia and the 1995 Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone. Against the backdrop of conflict in the then Indochina, the Founding Fathers had the foresight of building a community of and for all Southeast Asian states. Thus the Bangkok Declaration promulgated that “the Association is open for participation to all States in the Southeast Asian region subscribing to the aforementioned aims, principles and purposes.” ASEAN’s inclusive outlook has paved the way for community-building not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the broader Asia Pacific region where several other inter-governmental organizations now co-exist. The original ASEAN logo presented five brown sheaves of rice stalks, one for each founding member. Beneath the sheaves is the legend “ASEAN” in blue. These are set on a field of yellow encircled by a blue border. Brown stands for strength and stability, yellow for prosperity and blue for the spirit of cordiality in which ASEAN affairs are conducted. When ASEAN celebrated its 30th Anniversary in 1997, the sheaves on the logo had increased to ten – representing all ten countries of Southeast Asia and reflecting the colors of the flags of all of them. In a very real sense, ASEAN and Southeast Asia would then be one and the same, just as the Founding Fathers had envisioned. This article is based on the first chapter of ASEAN at 30, a publication of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in commemoration of its 30th Anniversary on 8 August 1997, written by Jamil Maidan Flores and Jun Abad.

Can you make a multiple choice of test questions regarding this information given which is Curriculum from Different Points of View There are many definitions of curriculum. Because of this, the concept of curriculum is sometimes characterized as fragmentary, elusive and confusing. However, the numerous definitions indicate dynamism that connotes diverse interpretations of what curriculum is all about. The definitions are influenced by models of thought, pedagogies, political as well as cultural experiences. Let us study some of these definitions. 1. Traditional Points of View of Curriculum In early years of the 20th century, the traditional concepts held of the “curriculum is that it is a body of subjects or subject matter prepaid by the teachers for the student’s to learn”. It was synonymous to the “course of study” and “syllabus” Robert M. Hutchins views curriculum as “permanent studies” where the rules of grammar, reading, rhetoric and logic and mathematics for basic education are emphasized. Basic education should emphasize the 3 Rs and college education should be grounded on liberal education. On the other, Arthur Bestor as an essentialist, believes that the mission of the school should be intellectual training, hence curriculum should focus on the fundamental intellectual disciplines of grammar, literature and writing. It should also include mathematics, science, history and foreign language. The definition leads us to the view of Joseph Schwab that discipline is the sole source of curriculum. Thus in our education system, curriculum is divided into chunks of knowledge we call subject areas in basic education such as English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies and others. In college, discipline may include humanities, sciences, language and many more. To Phoenix, curriculum should consist entirely of knowledge which comes from various disciplines. Academic discipline became the view of what curriculum is after the cold war and the race to space. Joseph Schwab, a leading curriculum theorist coined the term discipline as a ruling doctrine for curriculum development. Curriculum should consist only of knowledge which comes from disciplines which is the sole source. Thus curriculum can be viewed as a field of study. It is made up of its foundations (philosophical, historical, psychological and social foundations); domains of knowledge as well as its research theories and principles. Curriculum is taken as scholarly and theoretical. It is concerned with broad historical, philosophical and social issues and academics. Most of the traditional ideas view curriculum as written documents or a plan of action in accomplishing goals. 2. Progressive Points of View of Curriculum On the other hand, to a progressivist, a listing of school subjects, syllabi, course of study, and a list of courses or specific discipline do not make a curriculum. These can only be called curriculum if the written materials are actualized by the learner. Broadly speaking, curriculum is defined as the total learning experiences of the individual. This definition is anchored on John Dewey’s definition of experience and education. He believed that reflective thinking is a means that unifies curricular elements. Thought is not derived from action but tested by application. Caswell and Campbell viewed curriculum as “all experiences children have under the guidance of teachers”. This definition is shared by Smith, Stanley and Shores when they defined “curriculum as a sequence of potential experiences set up in the schools for the purpose of disciplining children and youth in group ways of thinking and acting”. Marsh and Willis on the other hand view curriculum as all the “experiences in the classroom which are planned and enacted by the teacher, and also learned by the students”. Points of View on Curriculum Development From the various definitions and concepts presented, it is clear that curriculum is a dynamic process. Development connotes changes which are systematic. A change for the better means any alteration, modification or improvement of existing condition. To produce positive changes, development should be purposeful, planned and progressive. This is how curriculum evolves. Let us look at the two models of curriculum development and concepts of Ralph Tyler and Hilda Taba. Ralph Tyler Model: Four Basic Principles. This is also popularly known as Tyler’s Rationale. He posited four fundamental questions or principles in examining any curriculum in schools. These four fundamental principles are as follows: 1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? 2. What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? 3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? 4. How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained or not? In summary, Tyler’s Model show that in curriculum development, the following considerations should be made: (1) Purpose of the school, (2) Educational experiences related to the purposes, (3) Organization of the experiences, and (4) Evaluation of the experiences. On the other hand, Hilda Taba improved on Tyler’s Rationale by making a linear model. She believed that teachers who teach or implement the curriculum should participate in developing it. Her advocacy was commonly called the grassroots approach. She presented seven major steps to her model where teachers could have a major input. These steps are as follows: 1. Diagnosis of learner’s needs and expectations of the larger society. 2. Formulation of learning objectives. 3. Selection of learning content. 4. Organization of learning content. 5. Selection of learning experiences. 6. Organization of learning activities. 7. Determination of what to evaluate and the means of doing it. Thus as you look into curriculum models, the three interacting processes in curriculum development are planning, implementing and evaluating. Types of Curriculum Operating in Schools From the various concepts given, Allan Glatthorn(2000) describes seven types of curriculum operating in the schools. These are (1) Recommended curriculum- proposed by scholars and professional organizations. (2) Written Curriculum- appears in school, district, division or country documents. (3) Taught Curriculum- what teacher’s implement or deliver in the classrooms and schools. (4) Supported Curriculum- resources-textbooks, computers, audio- visual materials which support and help in the implementation of the curriculum. (5) Assessed Curriculum- that which is tested and evaluated. (6) Learned Curriculum- which the students actually learn and what is measured and (7) Hidden Curriculum- the unintended curriculum. 1. Recommended Curriculum- Most of the school curricula are recommended. The curriculum may come from a national agency like the Department of Education, Commission on Higher Education (CHED), Department of Science and Technology (DOST) or any professional organization who has stake in education. For example the Philippine Association for Teacher Education (PAFTE) or the Biology Teacher Association (BIOTA) may recommend a curriculum to be implemented in the elementary or secondary education. 2. Written Curriculum- This includes documents, course of study or syllabi handed down to the schools, districts, division, departments or colleges for implementation. Most of the written curricula are made by curriculum experts with participation of teachers. These were pilot-tested or tried out in sample schools or population. Example of this is the Basic Education Curriculum (BEC). Another example is the written lesson plan of each classroom teacher made up of objectives and planned activities of the teacher. 3. Taught Curriculum- The different planned activities which are put into action in the classroom compose the taught curriculum. These are varied activities that are implemented in order to arrive at the objectives or purposes of the written curriculum. These are used by the learners with the guidance of teachers. Taught curriculum varies according to the learning styles of students and the teaching styles of teachers. 4. Supported Curriculum- In order to have a successful teaching, other than the teacher, there must be materials which should support or help in the implementation of a written curriculum. These refer to the support curriculum that includes material resources such as textbooks, computers, audio-visual materials, laboratory equipment, playgrounds, zoos and other facilities. Support curriculum should enable each learner to achieve real and lifelong learning. 5. Assessed Curriculum- This refers to a tested or evaluated curriculum. At the duration and end of the teaching episodes, series of evaluations are being done by the teachers to determine the extent of teaching or to tell if the students are progressing. This refers to the assessed curriculum. Assessment tools like pencil-and-paper tests, authentic instruments like portfolio are being utilized. 6. Learned Curriculum- This refers the learning outcomes achieved by the students. Learning outcomes are indicated by the results of the tests and changes in behavior which can either be cognitive, affective or psychomotor. 7. Hidden Curriculum- This is the unintended curriculum which is not deliberately planned but may modify behavior or influenced learning outcomes. There are lots of hidden curricula that transpire in the schools. Peer influence, school environment, physical condition, teacher-learner interaction, mood of the teachers and many other factors made up the hidden curriculum.

MYTH The British helped the Jews displace the native Arab population of Palestine. FACT Herbert Samuel, a British Jew who served as the first High Commissioner of Palestine, placed restrictions on Jewish immigration “in the ‘interests of the present population’ and the ‘absorptive capacity’ of the country.”1 The influx of Jewish settlers was said to force the Arab fellahin (native peasants) from their land. This was when less than a million people lived in an area that now supports more than nine million. The British limited the absorptive capacity of Palestine when, in 1921, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill severed nearly four-fifths of Palestine—some thirty-five thousand square miles—to create a new Arab entity, Transjordan. As a consolation prize for the Hejaz and Arabia (which are both now Saudi Arabia) going to the Saud family, Churchill rewarded Sharif Hussein’s son Abdullah for his contribution to the war against Turkey by installing him as Transjordan’s emir. The British went further and placed restrictions on Jewish land purchases in what remained of Palestine. By 1949, the British had allotted 87,500 acres of the 187,500 acres of cultivable land to Arabs and only 4,250 acres to Jews. This contradicted Article 6 of the Mandate which stated that “the Administration of Palestine…shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency…close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not acquired for public purposes.”2 Ultimately, the British admitted that the argument about the country’s absorptive capacity was specious. The Peel Commission said, “The heavy immigration in the years 1933–36 would seem to show that the Jews have been able to enlarge the absorptive capacity of the country for Jews.”3 MYTH The British allowed Jews to flood Palestine while Arab immigration was tightly controlled. FACT The British response to Jewish immigration set a precedent of appeasing the Arabs, which was followed for the duration of the Mandate. The British restricted Jewish immigration while allowing Arabs to enter the country freely. Apparently, London did not feel that a flood of Arab immigrants would affect the country’s “absorptive capacity.” During World War I, the Jewish population in Palestine declined because of the war, famine, disease, and expulsion by the Turks. In 1915, approximately 83,000 Jews lived in Palestine among 590,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs. According to the 1922 census, the Jewish population was 83,000, while the Arabs numbered 643,000.4 Thus, the Arab population grew exponentially while that of the Jews stagnated. In the mid-1920s, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased primarily because of anti-Jewish economic legislation in Poland and Washington’s imposition of restrictive quotas.5 The record number of immigrants in 1935 (see table) was a response to the growing persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The British administration considered this number too large, however, so the Jewish Agency was informed that less than one-third of the quota it asked for would be approved in 1936.6 The British gave in further to Arab demands by announcing in the 1939 White Paper that an independent Arab state would be created within ten years and that Jewish immigration was to be limited to 75,000 for the next five years, after which it was to cease altogether. It also forbade land sales to Jews in 95% of the territory of Palestine. The Arabs, nevertheless, rejected the proposal. Jewish Immigration to Palestine7 1919 1,806 1931 4,075 1920 8,223 1932 12,533 1921 8,294 1933 37,337 1922 8,685 1934 45,267 1923 8,175 1935 66,472 1924 13,892 1936 29,595 1925 34,386 1937 10,629 1926 13,855 1938 14,675 1927 3,034 1939 31,195 1928 2,178 1940 10,643 1929 5,249 1941 4,592 1930 4,944 By contrast, throughout the Mandatory period, Arab immigration was unrestricted. In 1930, the Hope Simpson Commission, sent from London to investigate the 1929 Arab riots, said the British practice of ignoring the uncontrolled illegal Arab immigration from Egypt, Transjordan, and Syria had the effect of displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants.8 The British governor of the Sinai from 1922 to 1936 observed, “This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.”9 The Peel Commission reported in 1937 that the “shortfall of land is…due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.”10 MYTH The British changed their policy to allow Holocaust survivors to settle in Palestine. FACT The gates of Palestine remained closed for the duration of the war, stranding hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe, many of whom became victims of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” After the war, the British refused to allow the survivors of the Nazi nightmare to find sanctuary in Palestine. On June 6, 1946, President Truman urged the British government to relieve the suffering of the Jews confined to displaced persons camps in Europe by immediately accepting 100,000 Jewish immigrants. Britain’s foreign minister Ernest Bevin replied sarcastically that the United States wanted displaced Jews to immigrate to Palestine “because they did not want too many of them in New York.”11 Some Jews reached Palestine, many smuggled in on dilapidated ships organized by the Haganah. Between August 1945 and the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, sixty-five “illegal” immigrant ships, carrying 69,878 people, arrived from European shores. In August 1946, however, the British began to intern those they caught in camps on Cyprus. Approximately 50,000 people were detained in the camps, and 28,000 remained imprisoned when Israel declared independence.12 MYTH As the Jewish population grew, the plight of the Palestinian Arabs worsened. FACT In July 1921, Hasan Shukri, the mayor of Haifa and president of the Muslim National Associations, sent a telegram to the British government in reaction to a delegation of Palestinians that went to London to try to stop the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. Shukri wrote: We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre, and Nazareth where no Jews reside are steadily declining.13 The Jewish population increased by 470,000 between World War I and World War II, while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000.14 The permanent Arab population increased by 120% between 1922 and 1947.15 This rapid growth of the Arab population was a result of several factors. One was immigration from neighboring states—constituting 37% of the total immigration to pre-state Israel—by Arabs who wanted to take advantage of the higher standard of living the Jews had made possible.16 The Arab population also grew because of the improved living conditions created by the Jews as they drained malarial swamps and brought improved sanitation and health care to the region. Thus, for example, the Muslim infant mortality rate fell from 201 per thousand in 1925 to 94 per thousand in 1945, and life expectancy rose from 37 years in 1926 to 49 in 1943.17 The Arab population increased the most in cities where large Jewish populations had created new economic opportunities. From 1922–1947, the non-Jewish population increased by 290% in Haifa, 131% in Jerusalem, and 158% in Jaffa. The growth in Arab towns was more modest: 42% in Nablus, 78% in Jenin, and 37% in Bethlehem.18 MYTH Jews stole Arab land. FACT Despite the growth in their population, the Arabs continued to assert they were being displaced. From the beginning of World War I, however, part of Palestine’s land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. About 80% of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads, and Bedouins.19 Jews went out of their way to avoid purchasing land in areas where Arabs might be displaced. They sought land that was largely uncultivated, swampy, cheap, and—most important—without tenants. In 1920, Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion expressed his concern about the Arab fellahin, whom he viewed as “the most important asset of the native population.” He insisted that “under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them.” Instead, he advocated helping liberate them from their oppressors. “Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement,” Ben-Gurion added, “should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.”20 Jews only began to purchase cultivated land after buying all the uncultivated territory. Many Arabs were willing to sell because of the migration to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.21 When John Hope Simpson arrived in Palestine in May 1930, he observed, “They [the Jews] paid high prices for the land and, in addition, they paid to certain of the occupants of those lands a considerable amount of money which they were not legally bound to pay.”22 In 1931, Lewis French conducted a survey of landlessness for the British government and offered new plots to any Arabs who had been “dispossessed.” British officials received more than 3,000 applications, of which 80% were ruled invalid by the government’s legal adviser because the applicants were not landless Arabs. This left only about 600 landless Arabs, 100 of whom accepted the government land offer.23 In April 1936, a new outbreak of Arab attacks on Jews was instigated by local Palestinian leaders who were later joined by Arab volunteers led by a Syrian guerrilla named Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the commander of the Arab Liberation Army. By November, when the British finally sent a new commission headed by Lord Peel to investigate, 89 Jews had been killed and more than 300 wounded.24 The Peel Commission’s report found that Arab complaints about Jewish land acquisition were baseless. It pointed out that “much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased…There was at the time of the earlier sales little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to develop the land.”25 Moreover, the Commission found the shortage was “due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.” The report concluded that the presence of Jews in Palestine, along with the work of the British administration, had resulted in higher wages, an improved standard of living, and ample employment opportunities.26 It is made quite clear to all, both by the map drawn up by the Simpson Commission and by another compiled by the Peel Commission, that the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping (emphasis in the original). —Transjordan’s king Abdullah27 Even at the height of the Arab revolt in 1938 (which began in April 1936 with the murder of two Jews by Arabs and the subsequent murder of two Arab workers by members of the Jewish underground28), the British high commissioner to Palestine believed the Arab landowners were complaining about sales to Jews to drive up prices for lands they wished to sell. Many Arab landowners had been so terrorized by Arab rebels they decided to leave Palestine and sell their property to the Jews.29 The Jews paid exorbitant prices to wealthy landowners for small tracts of arid land. “In 1944, Jews paid between $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine, mostly for arid or semiarid land; in the same year, rich black soil in Iowa was selling for about $110 per acre.”30 By 1947, Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. Approximately 45,000 were acquired from the mandatory government, 30,000 were bought from various churches, and 387,500 were purchased from Arabs. Analyses of land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 73% of Jewish plots were purchased from large landowners, not poor fellahin.31 Many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including members of the Muslim Supreme Council, and the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem, and s sold land to the Jews. As’ad el-Shuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Ahmed Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land. Even King Abdullah leased land to the Jews.32 MYTH The British helped the Palestinians to live peacefully with the Jews. FACT In 1921, Haj Amin el-Husseini first began to organize fedayeen (“one who sacrifices himself”) to terrorize Jews. El-Husseini hoped to duplicate the success of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey by driving the Jews out of Palestine just as Kemal had driven the invading Greeks from his country.33 Arab radicals gained influence because the British administration was unwilling to take effective action against them until they began a revolt against British rule. Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, former head of British military intelligence in Cairo, and later chief political officer for Palestine and Syria, wrote in his diary that British officials “incline towards the exclusion of Zionism in Palestine.” The British encouraged the Palestinians to attack the Jews. According to Meinertzhagen, Col. Bertie Harry Waters-Taylor (financial adviser to the military administration in Palestine 1919–23) met with el-Husseini in 1920, a few days before Easter, and told him that “he had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world…that Zionism was unpopular not only with the Palestine administration but in Whitehall.” He added that “if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, both General [Louis] Bols [chief administrator in Palestine, 1919–20] and General [Edmund] Allenby [commander of the Egyptian force, 1917–19, then high commissioner of Egypt] would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish Home. Waters-Taylor explained that freedom could only be attained through violence.”34 El-Husseini took the colonel’s advice and instigated a riot. The British withdrew their troops and the Jewish police from Jerusalem, allowing the Arab mob to attack Jews and loot their shops. Because of el-Husseini’s overt role in instigating the pogrom, the British decided to arrest him. He escaped, however, and was sentenced to ten years in absentia. A year later, some British Arabists convinced High Commissioner Herbert Samuel to pardon el-Husseini and to appoint him Mufti (a cleric in charge of Jerusalem’s Islamic holy places). By contrast, Vladimir Jabotinsky and several followers, who had formed a Jewish defense organization during the unrest, were sentenced to 15 years. They were released a few months later.35 Samuel met with el-Husseini on April 11, 1921, and was assured “that the influences of his family and himself would be devoted to tranquility.” Three weeks later, riots in Jaffa and elsewhere left forty-three Jews dead.36 El-Husseini consolidated his power and took control of all Muslim religious funds in Palestine. He used his authority to gain control over the mosques, the schools, and the courts. No Arab could reach an influential position without being loyal to the Mufti. His power was so absolute that “no Muslim in Palestine could be born or die without being beholden to Haj Amin.”37 The Mufti’s henchmen also ensured he would have no opposition by systematically killing Palestinians who discussed cooperation with the Jews from rival clans. As the spokesman for Palestinian Arabs, el-Husseini did not ask that Britain grant them independence. On the contrary, in a letter to Churchill in 1921, he demanded that Palestine be reunited with Syria and Transjordan.38 The Arabs found rioting an effective political tool because of the lax British response toward violence against Jews. In handling each riot, the British prevented Jews from protecting themselves but made little effort to prevent the Arabs from attacking them. After each outbreak, a British commission of inquiry would try to establish the cause of the violence. The conclusion was always the same: The Arabs feared being displaced by the Jews. To stop the rioting, the commissions would recommend that restrictions be placed on Jewish immigration. Thus, the Arabs learned they could always stop the influx of Jews by staging riots. This cycle began after a series of riots in May 1921. After failing to protect the Jewish community from Arab mobs, the British appointed the Haycraft Commission to investigate the cause of the violence. Although the panel concluded the Arabs had been the aggressors, it rationalized the cause of the attack: “The fundamental cause of the riots was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to political and economic causes, and connected with Jewish immigration, and with their conception of Zionist policy.”39 One consequence of the violence was the institution of a temporary ban on Jewish immigration. The Arab fear of being “displaced” or “dominated” was an excuse for their attacks on Jewish settlers. Note, too, that these riots were not inspired by nationalistic fervor—nationalists would have rebelled against their British overlords—they were motivated by economics, the radical Islamic views of the Mufti, and misunderstanding. In 1929, Arab provocateurs convinced the masses that the Jews had designs on the Temple Mount (a tactic still used today to incite violence). A Jewish religious observance at the Western Wall, which forms a part of the Temple Mount, served as a pretext for rioting by Arabs against Jews, which spilled out of Jerusalem into other villages and towns, including Safed and Hebron. Again, the British administration made no effort to prevent the violence, and, after it began, the British did nothing to protect the Jewish population. After six days of mayhem, the British finally brought troops in to quell the disturbance. By this time, most of Hebron’s Jews had fled or been killed. In all, 133 Jews were killed and 399 wounded in the pogroms.40 After the riots, the British ordered an investigation, resulting in the Passfield White Paper. It said the “immigration, land purchase and settlement policies of the Zionist Organization were already or were likely to become, prejudicial to Arab interests. It understood the mandatory government’s obligation to the non-Jewish community to mean that Palestine’s resources must be primarily reserved for the growing Arab economy.”41 This meant it was necessary to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases. MYTH The Mufti was not a Nazi collaborator. FACT In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, fled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and other Nazi leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program to the Arab world. The Mufti sent Hitler fifteen drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East. One called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine. He also asked the Axis powers to “accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the interest of the Arabs, and by the same method that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”42 In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti’s requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches.” He added, “The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely…the Jews.” Hitler told the Mufti he opposed the creation of a Jewish state and that Germany’s objective was destroying the Jewish element in the Arab sphere.43 In 1945, Yugoslavia sought to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting twenty thousand Muslim volunteers for the SS, who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary. He escaped French detention in 1946, however, and continued his fight against the Jews from Cairo and later Beirut where he died in 1974. MYTH The bombing of the King David Hotel was part of a deliberate terror campaign against civilians. FACT British troops seized the Jewish Agency compound on June 29, 1946, and confiscated large quantities of documents. At about the same time, more than 2,500 Jews from all over Palestine were arrested. A week later, news of a massacre of 40 Jews in a pogrom in Poland reminded the Jews of Palestine how Britain’s restrictive immigration policy had condemned thousands to death. In response to the British provocations, and a desire to demonstrate that the Jews’ spirit could not be broken, the United Resistance Movement planned to bomb the King David Hotel, which housed the British military command and the Criminal Investigation Division in addition to hotel guests. The Haganah pulled out of the plot and left it up to the Irgun. Irgun leader Menachem Begin stressed his desire to avoid civilian casualties and the plan was to warn the British so they would evacuate the building before it was blown up. Three telephone calls were placed on July 22, 1946, one to the hotel, another to the French Consulate, and a third to the Palestine Post warning that explosives in the King David Hotel would soon be detonated. The call to the hotel was received and ignored. Begin quotes one British official who supposedly refused to evacuate the building, saying, “We don’t take orders from the Jews.”44 As a result, when the bombs exploded, the casualty toll was high: 91 killed and 45 injured. Among the casualties were 15 Jews. Few people in the main part of the hotel were injured.45 For decades, the British denied they had been warned. In 1979, however, a member of the British Parliament provided the testimony of a British officer who heard other officers in the King David Hotel bar joking about a Zionist threat to the headquarters. The officer who overheard the conversation immediately left the hotel and survived.46 In contrast to Arab attacks against Jews, which Arab leaders hailed as heroic actions, the Jewish National Council denounced the bombing of the King David.47 1 Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World, (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970), p. 172

“There’s No Such Thing as Sound Science” by By Christie Aschwanden was a lead science writer for FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight, Science, Dec. 6, 2017 Science is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again. In a move ostensibly meant to reduce conflicts of interest, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has removed a number of scientists from advisory panels and replaced some of them with representatives from industries that the agency regulates. Like many in the Trump administration, Pruitt has also cast doubt on the reliability of climate science. For instance, in an interview with CNBC, Pruitt said that “measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do.” Similarly, Trump’s pick to head NASA, an agency that oversees a large portion the nation’s climate research, has insisted that research into human influence on climate lacks certainty, and he falsely claimed that “global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago.” Kathleen Hartnett White, Trump’s nominee to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a Senate hearing last month that she thinks we “need to have more precise explanations of the human role and the natural role” in climate change. The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science. This other movement strives to produce more robust, reproducible findings. Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence. These are the arguments underlying an “open science” reform movement that was created, in part, as a response to a “reproducibility crisis” that has struck some fields of science.1 But they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it. What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests. “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.” Calls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer. A 1992 Environmental Protection Agency report identified secondhand smoke as a human carcinogen, and Philip Morris responded by launching an initiative to promote what it called “sound science.” In an internal memo, Philip Morris vice president of corporate affairs Ellen Merlo wrote that the program was designed to “discredit the EPA report,” “prevent states and cities, as well as businesses from passing smoking bans” and “proactively” pass legislation to help their cause. The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions. Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.” The tobacco industry’s brilliant tactic was to turn this baked-in uncertainty against the scientific enterprise itself. While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since, said Stanford University science historian Robert Proctor. The sound science push is no longer just Philip Morris sowing doubt about the links between cigarettes and cancer. It’s also a 1998 action plan by the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron and Exxon Mobil to “install uncertainty” about the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. It’s industry-funded groups’ late-1990s effort to question the science the EPA was using to set fine-particle-pollution air-quality standards that the industry didn’t want. And then there was the more recent effort by Dow Chemical to insist on more scientific certainty before banning a pesticide that the EPA’s scientists had deemed risky to children. Now comes a move by the Trump administration’s EPA to repeal a 2015 rule on wetlands protection by disregarding particular studies. (To name just a few examples.) Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know, Proctor said.2 In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?” said Karen Levy, researcher on information science at Cornell University. But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money. Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research and the executive director of ClimateDepot.com, in the documentary “Merchants of Doubt” (based on the book by the same name). Morano’s site is a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.” Some of these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said. But what’s most telling about the Data Quality Act is how it’s been used, Levy said. A 2004 Washington Post analysis found that in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate. Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3 is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration. That might sound perfectly reasonable, and in many cases it is, Goodman said. But sometimes there are good reasons why researchers can’t conform to these rules, like when the data contains confidential or sensitive medical information.4 Critics, which include more than a dozen scientific organizations, argue that, in practice, the rules would prevent many studies from being considered in EPA reviews.5 It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’” Nosek said. Most scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement. Michael Carolan, who researches the sociology of technology and scientific knowledge at Colorado State University, wrote in a 2008 paper about why objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,” Carolan writes. The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them. Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it. While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,” she said in the documentary. These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence. For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations. Both approaches have critics, but the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated? In other words, under what circumstances do we agree to act on a risk? How certain do we need to be that the risk is real, and how many people would need to be at risk, and how costly is it to reduce that risk? Those are moral questions, not scientific ones, and openly discussing and identifying these kinds of judgment calls would lead to a more honest debate. Science matters, and we need to do it as rigorously as possible. But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.

There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. This is where we are today. Zero is what we need to aim for. To stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change, humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. This sounds difficult, because it will be. Every country will need to change its ways. Virtually every activity in modern life – growing things, making things, getting around from place to place – involves releasing greenhouse gases, and as time goes on, more people will be living this modern lifestyle. That’s good, because it means their lives are getting better. Yet if nothing else changes, the world will keep producing greenhouse gases, climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will be catastrophic. But “if nothing else changes” is a big If. I believe that things can change. We already have some of the tools we need, and as for those we don’t yet have, we can not only invent, but also deploy them, and, if we act fast enough, avoid a climate catastrophe. Two decades ago, I would never have predicted that one day I would be talking in public about climate change. My background is in software, not climate science. Things changed for me when I met with two former Microsoft colleagues who were starting non-profits focused on energy and climate. They brought along two climate experts who were well versed in the issues, and the four of them showed me the data connecting greenhouse gas emissions to climate change. I kept learning everything I could about climate and energy, agriculture, oceans, sea levels, glaciers, power lines, and more. One thing that became clear to me was that our current sources of renewable energy – wind and solar, mostly – could make a big dent in the problem, but we weren’t doing enough to deploy them. It also became clear why, on their own, they aren’t enough to get us all the way to zero. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things: 1. To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero. 2. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. 3. We need to create breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.

By the late 1800s, the Spanish were losing control of Cuba. Concerned about insurrection in the countryside, they moved rural Cubans to “reconcentration” camps where the Spanish claimed they would be better able to protect them. U.S. Consul-General Fitzhugh Lee forwarded the following account of the conditions of the camps to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State on November 27, 1897. Lee said the author of the note was “a man of integrity and character.” “[W]e will relate to you what we saw with our own eyes: “Four hundred and sixty women and children thrown on the ground, heaped pellet-mell as animals, some in a dying condition, others sick and others dead. . . . “There is still alive the only living witness, a young girl of 18 years, whom we found seemingly lifeless on the ground; on her right-hand side was the body of a young mother, cold and rigid, but with her young child still alive clinging to her dead body; on her left-hand side was also the corpse of a dead woman holding her son in a dead embrace. . . . “The circumstances are the following: complete accumulation of bodies dead and alive, so that it was impossible to take one step without walking over them; the greatest want of cleanliness, want of light, air, and water; the food lacking in quality and quantity what was necessary to sustain life. . . . From all this we deduct that the number of deaths among the reconcentrados has amounted to 77 per cent.” Source: Unsigned note that was included in a telegram sent by Fitzhugh Lee, U.S. Consul-General in Cuba, to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State November 27, 1897. consul-general: a government official living in a foreign country charged with overseeing the protection of U.S. citizens and promoting trade pell-mell: state of disorder accumulation: pile want: lack reconcentrados: the reconcentration camp prisoners; The following is an excerpt from Albert J. Beveridge’s speech, delivered September 16, 1898. Beveridge gave this speech while he was campaigning to become a senator for Indiana. The speech helped him win the election and made him one of the leading advocates of American expansion. “Fellow citizens, it is a noble land that God has given us; a land that can feed and clothe the world;. . . . It is a mighty people that he has planted on this soil . . . It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon his chosen people; . . .a history of soldiers who carried the flag across the blazing deserts and through the ranks of hostile mountains, even to the gates of sunset. . . . “The Opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent. I answer: The rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government. I answer, We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent. “They ask us how we will govern these new possessions. I answer: If England can govern foreign lands, so can America. If Germany can govern foreign lands, so can America. . . . “What does all this mean for every one of us? It means opportunity for all the glorious young manhood of the republic, the most virile, ambitious, impatient, militant manhood the world has ever seen. It means that the resources and the commerce of these immensely rich dominions will be increased. . . . “In Cuba, alone, there are 15,000,000 acres of forest unacquainted with the axe. There are exhaustless mines of iron. . . . There are millions of acres yet unexplored. . . . It means new employment and better wages for every laboring man in the Union. . . .

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