Margaret Hoover is host of a weekly program about public affairs every Friday night on PBS. It’s called “Firing Line,” the same title as William Buckley’s talk show of decades back.
Margaret, a direct descendant of Herbert Hoover, is a Republican but is not especially conservative.
Elliot Abrams is an expert on foreign affairs and national security. He worked for President Reagan, President George H.W. Bush, and President Trump, in his first term. Abrams is known as a hawk.
What’s fascinating about the conversation is that Abrams is highly critical of Trump’s invasion.
He acknowledges that Maduro was a ruthless, brutal dictator who ran the Venezuelan economy into the ground and caused millions of Venezuelans to flee the country. Some of maduro’s top leaders have hidden bank accounts in which they have stowed hundreds of millions of dollars.
He asks why Trump failed to consult Congress.
He wonders why Trump ordered the arrest of Maduro and his wife but not the others who were indicted and are now running the country.
He wonders why Trump left the leaders of this corrupt regime in place. He assumes they will wait Trump out and continue to reap the rewards of their corruption. Given the cost and difficulty of reviving Venezuela’s oil industry, he doubts that any of the major American oil companies will risk doing so.
It’s a fascinating conversation. I urge you to watch.
I saw the show where Rachel Maddow tried to understand why Trump sent troops to invade Venezuela, kidnap its President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and bring them to the U.S. to stand trial.
She reviews the usual reasons and determines that each of them is insufficient.
This is a clip from his post. Open the link and read it all.
Schmidt writes:
What is Stephen Miller?
He is, of course, deranged, unserious, bombastic, crude, shrill and violent, but that alone does not suffice when it comes to seeing him clearly.
Let’s travel back in time a bit.
Let’s set the dial to September 21, 2025, and head to Phoenix, Arizona, on the occasion of the fascist rally that was dressed up as a memorial service that opened the gates to the best years of Erika Kirk’s life.
These words mark Miller as a Nazi, which, of course, is appalling, given that he is a Jew, and no doubt the cause of his family’s denouncements.
Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to interview Hitler, and the first to be kicked out of Nazi Germany, was well acquainted with the mentality of the Nazis.
Among her greatest columns was this piece, entitled “Who goes Nazi?” published in Harper’s in August 1941.
Here is how it begins:
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France.
I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers.
And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics.
Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it.
Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling.
I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance.
There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service.
Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality.
It appeals to a certain type of mind.
Stephen Miller has a contaminated mind, as does Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem.
Covering the crimes of a pedophile and prosecuting innocent people are the fruit of a poisonous tree, as is animal cruelty, as is the deep hatred for human beings that Stephen Miller carries within him.
Their poisonous ideology is a disease of the spirit and a sickness of the soul.
Why do they hate so many so virulently?
Thompson offered a take 85 years ago, but imagine her living in the era of TikTok, X and the algorithm.
She continues:
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation — the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war.
This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans.
It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work — a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature.
He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline.
He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions.
His body is vigorous.
His mind is childish.
His soul has been almost completely neglected.
A must-read Substack for me is Salty Politics with Julie Roginsky. She’s a brilliant writer, and a very accomplished Democratic campaign strategist, who has been personally sanctioned by Vladimir Putin.
He has banned her from Russia as Thompson was banned from Germany, with the difference that Roginsky was born in Russia.
I highly recommend that you follow her — and better yet — subscribe and support her work.
“We’ll Have Our Home Again” is a well-known neo-Nazi anthem.
The Toronto Holocaust Museum has documented it as a white nationalist song associated with a neo-Nazi fraternal group known as the Männerbund. When a federal law-enforcement agency adopts language drawn directly from white supremacist culture, it is not a coincidence. It is a signal.
If legacy media bothered to do its homework, this would be a national scandal. ICE is no longer even pretending to hide what it is. One almost expects the next recruitment poster to read “ICE Über Alles.”
I do have one minor disagreement with Julie’s observation.
It is not a signal.
It is a declaration.
Listen to the song. It is a Nazi marching song, and now it is the basis of the Department of Homeland Security Nazi recruiting campaign.
Josef Goebbels is an important figure for the MAGA gangsters who hold power because they are apostles of both his faith and greatest insight, which is that, as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “the broad masses of the nation more readily fall victim to a big lie than to a small lie.”
I must share something evil with you today, so that you may understand what Tony Dokoupil and Bari Weiss are apologists for, and what the MAGA party believes.
Why does Stephen Miller hate people with brown skin so much?
Why does he hate all Somalis, Mexicans, Venezuelans and Africans?
Why has Trump announced his hate for the people of what he calls “shithole nations?”
Goebbels explained to the world why the Nazis hated the Jews. It is a perfect window into why MAGA hates the Somalis, for example, and why JD Vance smeared Haitian immigrants in a peaceful Ohio town as “eating pets,” which was a pristine example of a Nazi calumny.
Goebbels was perfectly clear about where the hate came from when he published a paper entitled “Why are we enemies of the Jews?”
We are enemies of the Jews Somalis because we are warriors for the freedom of the German people.
The Jew Mexican is the cause and the beneficiary of our slavery.
He has used the social troubles of our broad masses in order to widen the split between the Right and Left among our people, he has split Germany into two halves.
Here is the real reason for the loss of the World War on one side and for the betrayal of the revolution on the other side.
For the record, Jews accounted for less than one percent of the German population and Somalians represent less than 0.1 percent of the US population.
The Jew Muslim has no interest in the solution of the questions regarding the German fate.
He can’t, since he exists only because they remain unsolved.
Once you turn the German people into a unified community and give them freedom on the world stage, there would no longer be a place among us for the Jew Somali.
He holds the better cards when a nation lives in domestic and foreign slavery than when it is free, hard-working, self-confident and united.
The Jew Venezuelan has caused our misery, and today he makes a living from it.
That is the reason why as nationalists and as socialists national conservatism we are enemies of the Jew Africans.
He has tainted our race, spread moral rot, undermined our morality, and broken our strength.
Thanks to him we are the pariahs of the entire world today.
As long as we were Germans, he was a leper among us.
Since we have forgotten our Germanic character, he has triumphed over us and our future.
The Jew Mexican is the malleable demon of decline.
Wherever he scents debris and rot, he comes out of hiding to begin his criminal butchery among the people.
He wears the mask of those whom he wants to deceive, pretends to be the friend of this victim, and before the unsuspecting victim knows it, he has broken his neck.
The Jew Muslim is uncreative.
He does not produce anything, he merely trades in goods.
With rags, clothes, pictures, precious stones, stocks and bonds, shares in mining operations, people and states.
And everything he trades in he has stolen somewhere at some point.
While he is launching an attack on a state, he is a revolutionary, yet as soon as he is in possession of power, he preaches peace and order so he can leisurely devour his prey.
What has antisemitism to do with socialism?
I’m asking in turn: what has the JewVenezuelan to do with socialism?
Socialism is the doctrine of work.
Who ever saw a Jew Somali work and not plunder, steal, sponge (schmarotzen) and profit from the sweat of another man’s brow?
As socialists we are enemies of the JewsMuslim because we see in the Hebrew the incarnation of capitalism, i.e. the abuse of the goods belonging to the people.
What has antisemitism to do with nationalism? I’m asking in turn: what has the Jew Mexican to do with nationalism?
Nationalism is the doctrine of blood, of race.
The Jew Somali is the enemy and the destroyer of unity created by blood, the deliberate destroyer of our race.
As nationalists we are enemies of the JewsHaitian because in the Hebrew we see the eternal enemy of our national honor and our national freedom.
“But Jews Mexican are human beings, too.”
Certainly, and none of us has ever doubted it.
We only doubt that he is a decent human being.
He doesn’t belong with us. He lives according to different inner and outer laws.
The fact that he is a human being is not a good enough reason for us to allow him to oppress and bully us in the most inhuman manner.
He is indeed a human being – but what kind?
If someone beat your mother in the face with a whip would you then say: “Thank you, he’s only human?”
That is no human being, that is a brute (Unmensch)!
How much worse has the Jew Somali done to our mother Germany and how much worse does he still do today?
[ . . . ]
Antisemitism is un-Christian. So that means that it is Christian to look on as the JewHaitian cuts bootstraps from our skin and to let him add insult to injury.
Being a Christian means: Love your neighbor as you love thyself!
My neighbor is of the same nationality and blood as I.
If I love him, then I must hate his enemies.
He who thinks like a German must despise the Jew Muslim. One results from the other.
Christ himself once saw that love is not the answer in all situations.
When he came across the jobbers and profiteers in the temple, he didn’t say: “Children, love each other!”
Instead he took a whip and drove the pack away.
We are enemies of the Jews Somalis because we stand up for the German people. The JewMexican is our greatest misfortune.
That is going to change, as sure as we are Germans.
Stephen Miller is a case study in himself. He is a paradox. His family came to the U.S. over a century ago, for the same reason millions of other immigrants arrived: to find freedom, safety, and opportunity. Like so many other families from Eastern Europe, his family was impoverished. They worked and succeeded.
They were immigrants.
Surely Stephen knows his family history, but he is nonetheless hostile to immigrants today. He wants to kick out those that are here and bar those who haven’t made it inside the nation’s gates.
He isn’t just hostile to immigrants. He hates them.
Trump’s Chief Bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News this month that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
In fact, the data show just the opposite. The children and grand children and great grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
In a new paper, Princeton’s Leah Boustan, Stanford’s Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome of Princeton, and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis, used millions of father-son pairs spanning more than a century of U.S. history to show that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago.
In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great great grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus.
For much the same reasons my great grandparents came to America — vicious pogroms that threatened his life — Wolf-Leib came to Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 in his pockets. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
The family settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming coal and steel town, where they rose from peddling goods to owning a haberdashery, and then owning a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores, run by Sam, and Sam’s son, Izzy (Stephen Miller’s maternal grandfather).
Two generations later, in 1985, came little Stephen — who developed such a visceral hate for immigrants that he makes up facts about them that have no bearing on reality.
In a little more than eleven months, Stephen and his boss have made sweeping changes to limit legal immigration to America.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that children born to undocumented immigrants and to some temporary foreign residents would no longer be granted citizenship automatically.
The executive order, which was paused by the courts, could throw into doubt the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of babies born each year. Miller and his boss want the Supreme Court to uphold that executive order.
After the horrific shooting of two National Guard members on August 26, by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national, Trump halted naturalizations for people from many African and the Middle Eastern countries.
Trump is also threatening to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity.” He plans to deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization” and aims to detain even more migrants in jail or in warehouses — in the U.S. or in other countries — without due process.
In addition to the unconstitutionality of such actions, they stir up the worst nativist and racist impulses in America — blaming and scapegoating entire groups of people.
As they make their case to crack down on illegal and legal immigration, Miller and Trump have targeted Minnesota’s Somali community — seizing on an investigation into fraud that took place in pockets of the Somali diaspora in the state, to denounce the entire community, which Trump has called “garbage.”
Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
Almost all of us are mongrels — of mixed nationalities, mixed ethnicities, mixed races, mixed creeds. While we maintain our own traditions, we also embrace the ideals of this nation.
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals, more than it is a nationality.
Miller and Trump want to fuel bigotry. Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them.” His entire project depends on hate.
America is better than Trump or his chief bigot.
We won’t buy their hate. To the contrary, we’ll call out bigots. We won’t tolerate intolerance. We’ll protect hardworking members of our community. We’ll alert them when ICE is lurking.
We will not succumb to the ravings of a venomous president who wants us to hate each other — or his bigoted sidekick.
Trump’s military attack on Venezuela was unauthorized by Congress. It was lawless. His actions deserve condemnation by the UN and world leaders.
He mocks the very idea of a rules-based international order. He mocks the idea that Congress is a co-equal branch of the federal government.
But he achieved three goals by his audacious actions.
He completely changed the national discussion away from the Epstein files.
He showed Congress that they are irrelevant.
He played the one card that might lift his very low poll ratings: military action. The public usually rallies round the flag. Going to war–especially when no American life is risked–typically raises the President’s popularity. Will it work this time in the absence of a casus belli? (Reason for war?)
The great irony in the current situation was that he recently pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the ex-President of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for sending some 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Maduro should have had a better lobbyist or helped underwrite the Trump ballroom and he would be a free man.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has returned to the days of gunboat diplomacy, where it ruled the hemisphere by force.
Perhaps he has made a deal with Putin and Xi. Trump gets his hemisphere. Putin gets Europe. Xi gets Asia.
Jess Piper lives on a farm in rural Missouri. She taught American literature in high school for many years. She left teaching to run for the state legislature. She raised a goodly amount of money but lost. She has chastised the Democratic Party for abandoning large swaths of the country. In rural areas, most seats are uncontested. They are won by Republicans who have no opponents. She’s trying to change that and restore a two-party system.
I can’t tell you how many times I was asked the same question while teaching American Literature:
“If there is a Black History Month, why isn’t there a White History Month?”
My usual response? Because every month is White History Month. History is written by the victors — and colonizers. Much of the American history and literature we learned for generations erased the contributions of marginalized groups.
A strange fact is that much of the history and literature I learned in the South was written by the losers, not the victors. I learned an entirely incorrect version of history because my textbooks and curriculum were shaped by The Daughters of the Confederacy — I didn’t understand that until college.
That was purposeful.
For a few decades, we have made a conscious effort to highlight the experiences of minority groups in curriculum — no such effort is required for the majority because their experience is always present.
I think it is incredibly important to teach rural kids the literature and history of marginalized groups. Many of my former students lived in White spaces with limited travel experiences.
So, I applied for scholarships to learn what I had not been taught, and I traveled the country every summer to learn to be a better teacher. I studied slavery in New York and Mount Vernon and Atlanta and Charleston.
My students had the advantage of learning the history I had never learned. I had the confidence to teach the hard truth.
You can imagine, after so many years teaching an inclusive curriculum, I am horrified daily by the naked White supremacy I see coming from the Trump regime and many Republicans in general.
I have lived under a GOP supermajority for over two decades, and these lawmakers often slide into racism and try to cover their tracks by attacking the rest of us as being “woke” or “DEI warriors.”
It is projection.
A moment I will never forget is when a Missouri Representative stood on the House floor and spoke on “Irish slavery” to dispute the suggestion that Black folks have no exclusive claim to slavery and that both Black and Irish slavery should be taught in Missouri schools. He obviously failed American History as he did not understand chattel slavery and that most Irish immigrants were indentured servants, not enslaved people.
Indentured servitude is not an ideal situation, but it is not comparable to chattel slavery.
You know my infamous Senator Josh Hawley, who held up a fist on January 6, but you may not know my other Senator, Eric Schmitt, who is an open White supremacist. When comparing the two men, I am left to say Schmitt is even worse than his insurrectionist counterpart. Hawley is a Christian nationalist. Schmitt is both a Christian nationalist and a White supremacist.
In a speech titled “What Is an American,” Schmitt wrote:
America is not “a proposition” or a shared set of values, rather it is a country for White people descended from European settlers, whose accomplishments should not be diminished by acknowledging the people that some of them enslaved, the Native Americans they killed, or anyone else denied equal rights at the founding.
Schmitt went on to say that the real Americans are those who settled the country, denying both the people who lived here centuries before colonization and the Black people who were forced here on slave ships.
I am horrified by the speech — Schmitt references Missouri so many times that I want to scream. He is reinforcing the White supremacy that I specifically taught my students to watch for…to listen for. To speak out against.
Senator Schmitt even went so far as to make light of George Floyd’s killing. The entire speech had a “blood and soil” feel. It makes me sick. I am embarrassed to be his constituent.
I opened my news app yesterday to see that JD Vance gave a speech at the Turning Point USA Summit in which he said, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
My God. I am so tired. And I am White.
I can only imagine what it feels like to be a person of color in America and hear the daily racism. To feel racism. To exist in this country when our government is attacking Black and Brown folks. Disappearing them. Killing them.
So, I fight to elect people who do not espouse racist views and do not want to harm immigrants.
But I also do work in my own family. My children and grandchildren are White. They deserve the truth of the country of their birth. They should know what the Trump regime is doing in the name of White supremacy. So, I teach them.
I took my teenage daughter to Charleston. We visited the regular sites, and then I took her to the sites of the enslaved who were shipped across the world to be enslaved for their labor. She saw the slave pen downtown. I took her to Fort Sumter, where she listened to a Park Ranger tell her the main reason for the Civil War.
Slavery.
No, it wasn’t Northern Aggression — it was slavery. And if she ever has any doubt, she should read the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, which clearly states that the state broke from the union because of “An increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.”
I took her for a walk to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The site of a brutal racist massacre. I explained what a White supremacist did to nine Black people who were praying in their own church…people who invited their murderer in with the love and compassion of their faith.
He murdered them because of the color of their skin and because he didn’t understand history. He thought Black people were given preferential treatment in this country. He had a profound lack of understanding that led him to murder.
The Trump regime is pushing this misunderstanding of history onto another generation, and we can’t sit by while it happens. Teaching hard history to White people is the business of other White people. Teaching about racism should not fall on the marginalized groups who are the target of racism.
Racism is a White problem…not the other way around.
It’s on people who look like me to do the hard work of challenging the naked White supremacy we see in our country.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit tasked by Congress with helping preserve historical buildings, sued the Trump administration for tearing down the East Wing of the White House and asked a federal judge for an emergency stop-work order. The judge did not stop work on the new ballroom, but he did order the White House to get approval from the necessary agencies.
In his eagerness to build his gigantic ballroom, Trump bypassed the normal review process for making changes to a historic building.
Trump knew that if he went through the legally-required process, it would take years to get the necessary approvals, and some busybody preservationists might tell him to scale back his grand plans. The new ballroom–at 95,000 square feet– will be almost double the size of the entire White House–which is 55,000 square feet.
So he followed his personal motto: “Stop me if you can.”
Without asking permission he demolished the East Wing. It is gone, finished.
Now he will take his plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, which will hold hearings starting January 8.
Ordinarily, the NCPC review is rigorous and involves multiple hearings before a shovel touches the ground, reviewing esthetic and environmental issues.Trump expects to get done in a few months what customarily takes years of review before any work begins.
The NCPC is led by Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and Trump’s former personal lawyer, whom the president appointed as commission chair in July, and its members tilt toward Trump. The president appointed two other White House officials to the body, and the commission also includes nine seats apportioned to sitting Cabinet secretaries and other local and federal officials.
Trump’s grandiose plan must also win the approval of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. That should not be a problem either, because in October, Trump fired all six members of the Commission. That Conmission (if Trump has appointed new members) will review the proposed ballroom that will replace the East Wing and also Trump’s plan to build an Arc d’Trump.
As has been widely reported, CBS’ “60 Minutes” announced that it would release a program about the notorious prison in El Salvador– CECOT–where the U.S. sent migrant prisoners, who were allegedly hardened criminals, “the worst of the worst.”
The program interviews released prisoners, who describe torture, beatings, and inhumane conditions that would never be permitted in U.S. prisons. It also reviewed records and concluded that few of those sent to CECOT were hardened criminals or terrorists.
Bari Weiss, the editor-in/chief of CBS News, stopped the release of the segment because no one in the Trump administration agreed to respond to it. Critics said that if that was legitimate grounds for blocking a story, the Trump administration could block all critical coverage by refusing to comment.
After CBS was sold to the Ellison billionaires, David Ellison hired Bari Weiss to be editor-in-chief and bought her website “The Free Press” for $150 million. Weiss has no experience in the broadcast industry.
Apparently the show aired in Canada, where a viewer copied it and posted it on Reddit.
Here is the link on Reddit. Decide for yourself whether Weiss was right to stop the show until someone from the Trump administration commented.
The 60 minutes interview that was not aired in the US was aired and recorded in Canada and posted on YouTube. It has since been taken down. No worries though, I screen recorded it.“
See it before it is taken down.
It was originally posted on YouTube but was taken down.
The Trump administration is engaged in a war against science and medicine. It has eliminated funding in many crucial areas of research conducted by universities and by the National Institutes of Health. Incalculable damage has been done to set back the search for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory diseases, and pediatric cancer. People will die because of the ignorance of those who close down ongoing, vital research.
Trump has consistently claimed that “climate change” is a hoax. He has said that the term “climate change” refers to the weather. He hates wind farms and has cut federal funding for them. He has hated wind farms since wind turbines were built near his Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. He sued to block them but repeatedly lost.
Now he is closing down a major hub of climate research.
The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.
The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.
But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.
Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”
Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere.
The center’s research has often proved useful in unexpected places, such as when its studies of downdrafts in the lower atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s led to development of wind shear detection systems around airports that helped address the cause of hundreds of aviation accidents during that era.
Diane Ravitch's blog 