Sal jaywalks. Tom slips a candy bar in his pocket at a 7-11 and leaves without paying. Jim robs a bank. Chris kills someone in cold blood.

Sal, Tom, Jim and Chris are all criminals. They all broke the law.

So, if jaywalker Sal condemns killer Chris for the murder he committed, does it make sense to respond, "Oh yeah? You're a lawbreaker too, Sal. You're a fine one to talk!"

That is false equivalence at its essence: equating two things which share one quality but are far different in intensity. Offenses — whether they're related to crime, politics, lying, what have you — are not created equal. Pundits and politicians like to play the false equivalence game when someone is condemned for something they've done. "Oh yeah, what about ...?" Whenever that happens, we have to ask ourselves, are the two offenses close to the same in intensity? Or in frequency? A serial shoplifter is more deserving of condemnation than the one-time offender, just as a serial liar is a worse offender than the occasional liar. Here's the general rule of thumb when defining false equivalence: jaywalking and shoplifting aren't in the same league as bank robbery and murder.

Example. Recently, Trump lied more than a dozen times when he was talking to the press corps on the White House lawn. Lying is so reflexive with him, I'm not sure he can distinguish lies from the truth. A standard response from his supporters is, "Oh yeah, what about when Obama said you'll be able to keep your doctor if we pass the Affordable Care Act?" It's true, Obama lied when he said that, and he very likely knew he was lying in an effort to help pass the ACA. Do we have an equivalence here, Obama's ACA lie versus Trump's compulsive, corrosive, hateful, hurtful lying which he resorts to whenever he wants to "prove" his point or distort the reasons behind his policy? Absolutely not. Not by any reasonable standard of comparison.

But let's forget about Trump for a moment. When Obama was saying everyone could keep their doctor, which turned out to be true for many but not all people, Republicans were saying Obamacare included "Death Panels." "They want to pull the plug on grandma!" Republicans screamed. That lie was far more explosive and corrosive than Obama's, and it was never true. "Death Panels" was named Lie of the Year in 2009 by PolitiFact. Creating a "What about?" equivalence between Obama and Trump when it comes to lying is blatantly absurd. But even at the moment when the ACA was in the balance, the Republican lies about the program — there were many, "Death Panels" was the worst — far outstripped Obama's lie. They are not equivalent. Anyone who says they are is distorting the record.

This is a "Three posts for the price of one" special. Read them all, mix and match, your call. Here's the short version of the three topics.

• The Network For Public Education released an education privatization report card, the more school privatization, the lower the grade. Arizona earned an F, along with 16 other states. Arizona's is the lowest F of the lot.

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sunk over $200 million into an multi-year experiment looking at ways to improve teacher effectiveness. Its own analysis indicates it didn't work.

• Trump's Ed Sec Betsy DeVos's family has a stake worth between $5 million and $25 million in an education company which the National Advertising Review Board accused of making questionable claims about its ability to help with problems related to autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression.

Here are the details.

A major error in the historical narrative of this country's founders has been partly corrected at Monticello in Virginia.

The newly opened space at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s palatial mountaintop plantation, is presented as the living quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore the founding father’s children.

The life of Sally Hemings, a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson, is an essential part of an honest recounting of the history of slavery and its importance in the early history of the United States. The two hundred year denial of her sexual relationship with Jefferson and her bearing of six children with him is historical witness to the unwillingness of the white majority to face up to the truth concerning this country's original sin. The reconstruction of Hemings's separate and unequal living quarters on the grounds and its inclusion in the tours of Monticello are a partial, far-too-late correction of the historical record.

I've spent a considerable amount of time in the years since I retired from teaching trying to correct the weaknesses in my own education. For instance, I finally read James Joyce's Ulysses a few years ago. I own that omission. The book was there all along, I knew its place in the literary canon since I was in high school, but I simply never bothered to pick it up. But I take less personal responsibility for the alarming gaps in my knowledge of the history of minorities in this country. The primary responsibility for my ignorance is the gap in the historical record created by historians who put on blinders when they wrote their many thousands of books on American history, which should be shelved in libraries in a section named, "History As Told By the Winners." The historical record has begun to be corrected over the past few decades. I'm trying to catch up as fast as I can.

A few years ago I read The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed. It is a history of Sally Hemings and her family before, during and after they were owned by Thomas Jefferson. The book shifts the usual focus of narratives about our country's founders, putting the Hemings family front and center and making Jefferson a secondary character who is discussed as he relates to the slave family.

Here's the short version of Sally Hemings's story: When Hemings was 16, in Paris with Jefferson to take care of his children, Jefferson impregnated her with the first of the six children they would have together. Jefferson denied his parentage and kept Sally and their children slaves at Monticello, only granting the children their freedom when they became adults.

For the longer version, I'm going to employ an unusual approach, starting from last Saturday and working backwards to Sally Hemings's birth.

On November 15, 2016, I wrote my first post after the presidential election. The headline was Trump Human Rights Erosion And Termination Watch (THREAT Watch). I was afraid of what this nation would become under a Trump administration. At the same time I hoped my fears would prove to be unfounded. I wanted to find, a year or so later, that I had been an alarmist.

Based on what is going on right now at the U.S./Mexico border, the Trump administration has gone beyond the threat of eroding and ending human rights in the country. It has moved into action. We are staring directly into the abyss.

Anyone who condones or rationalizes what the administration is doing at the border to infants, toddlers, boys and girls up to the age of 18, and to parents whose children are being torn away from them, is aiding and abetting the destruction of this country as we know it. I'm sorry, but if you claim that you can retain your sense of decency and not condemn what is being done to children and families in our name, you have already lost part of what makes you a decent human being. You share the guilt with the monsters who put this zero tolerance immigration policy into motion and the border guards who are implementing it.

I have to be honest and admit, as a citizen of this country, I share the guilt and shame as well, even though I condemn what is going on with every fiber of my being.

[Gulp!] OK, here goes.

I rarely find people I disagree with more fundamentally than John Huppenthal and the Koch Brothers. But sometimes the universe allows for rare moments of alignment. I'm putting these odd moments of agreement with Huppenthal and the Brothers Koch into one post even though they concern very different issues to amplify the weirdness of the moment (also to spare myself the task of doing this twice). And—this is a plus for me—I find our similar positions are at odds with people and organizations I disagree with as fundamentally as I usually disagree with Hupp and the Kochs.

First, John Huppenthal. A story on public radio station KJZZ talks about one of the major downsides of the letter grades Arizona gives to its schools, namely, schools with lower income students tend to get lower grades, which stigmatizes the students, the teachers and the schools. One of the few nearly undisputed facts in educational research is that no matter where you go, students from lower income families tend to do worse on standardized tests than students from higher income families.

Or, as John Huppenthal put it in the story,

"Here we have this letter grading system that comes in and is beating, to put it bluntly, beating the hell out of schools that are serving the most at-risk populations."

John, I couldn't have said it better myself. To be honest, you said it a hell of a lot better than I did.

Huppenthal's statement is followed by one from Lisa Graham Keegan, who thinks the grading system is not perfect but pretty good. Keegan, like Huppenthal, is an ex-Arizona lawmaker and education superintendent. She has continued to be a player in Arizona's education politics, pushing her destructive privatization/"education reform" agenda forcefully and successfully with a succession of Arizona governors and legislatures. So for a brief, happy moment, I find myself allied with Huppenthal against Keegan. (John, who is a regular commenter here, will most likely rain on my parade and explain how I'm distorting his and Keegan's positions, but I'll savor this rare moment of apparent confluence until the two of us lock horns again.)

Then there's the Charles Koch Institute, which — spoiler alert — is on the same side as I am, lined up against the Goldwater Institute. Imagine my surprise.

Your child's learning may soon be "personalized" by a computer algorithm created by people who know more about ones and zeros than they do about human beings.

I just read another one of those stories that scare the crap out of me every time I see them. The headline on the latest article in Education Week: "How (and Why) Ed-Tech Companies Are Tracking Students' Feelings." A few hundred words into the story, you learn that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla are sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into "whole-child personalized learning." Oh, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have decided to team up with the Zuckerbergs. For all I know, Mark and Bill's wives are genuine sentient beings, but the two men are beta version androids, strong on smarts but weak on understanding of what makes humans human. They'd most likely fail the human/replicant test in Blade Runner.

Here's how the Orwellian world of computerized "personalized learning" works. A student uses, say, an online math learning program. The software keeps track of the student's every keystroke, pause, fast forward and rewind, and of course every right and wrong answer. If the program is sophisticated and invasive enough, it may record facial expressions and eye movements as well. The information is stored in an individual folder on the company server. The next time the student logs on, the software uses what it has "learned" about that child to personalize the lesson to the student's academic and emotional learning style.

Best case scenario: The lessons are better suited to individual students, increasing their levels of interest and comprehension.

Worst case scenario: As the student interacts with educational programs in a variety of subjects, and maybe plays a few games and takes a few fun quizzes ("Which do you like better, playing video games or playing sports?") as a reward for time spent or points earned, the software company amasses a growing file of psychometric data. Year by elementary school year the data accumulates, creating an intimate, multi-dimensional personality profile. Humans come and go, but computer data lives forever. During their school years, young people's data and psychometric analysis can be used to make them "better" students — more attentive and interested maybe, but also more compliant and conforming. For the rest of their lives, it can be sold to people who think they can gain monetarily, or politically, from knowing what individual buttons to push on millions of human beings to elicit the desired responses.

Big Data Is Watching You. And Evaluating You. And Manipulating You.

Two of the world's most unpredictable leaders are meeting in Singapore, each with an olive branch in one hand, a nuclear missile in the other. Our Narcissist-in-Chief cozies up to autocrats while he alienates our natural allies. The country and the world are tip-toeing along the edge of a treacherous cliff. The United States is bracing for the possibility of a dangerous, even irreversible transformation. Some look forward to it with anticipation. Others of us live in dread.

I hear ominous echoes of words and events from a century ago, almost to the year, in the poem by W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming," which I've reproduced at the end of the post.

We are a country built on a constitution and a system of laws, but they aren't enough to hold us together. We depend on the gravitational pull of societal customs and norms to keep us from falling prey our worst tribal, anti-democratic instincts. With Trump's constant stream of lies and half truths, with his condemnation of every branch of government which isn't under his absolute control, with his willingness to go it alone without guidance from governmental traditions or responsible advisors, he is pulling us ever further from our gravitational center.

If Trump and his enablers continue to spiral out of control, carrying us further from the established norms of the executive branch, they will break free from the force which binds this country, as imperfect and as wrong-headed as it often is, together. Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature, the great president's plea that we use the Constitution to help us form a more perfect union, will become so many pretty words piled on the ash heap of discarded ideals.

The center is barely holding. We're falling apart, with no way of knowing what form the shattered bits and pieces of our country will take when they're reassembled.

When I write these T.H.R.E.A.T. Watch posts, which I began the week after Trump's election, I watch the comments section fill with paeans to Trump and his accomplishments and scorn for anyone who thinks differently. The passionate intensity of Trump's supporters jumps off the page with an untamed energy which makes a response nearly impossible. Most readers who agree with what I write remain silent. A few try arguing with the Trump acolytes, but they find themselves shouted down. They're left with the choice of swapping insults with the Trumpists or leaving the field.

I'm seeing lots in the news these days about the "Tax the Rich" ballot measure, the Invest in Education Act. The problem is, lots of us tax-math impaired folk don't understand how the added tax would work if the measure passes. I went and talked to some people who know more about taxes than I do, and I have a better understanding of how it works. Now, I'm taking it upon myself to explain what the new tax would mean to the one percenters who would pay it, in a way even I can understand.

First, the basics. If the Invest in Education Act passes, an individual making more than $250,000 or a couple making more than $500,000 will pay a higher state tax rate than the rest of us. If an individual makes $500,000 or a couple makes $1 million, the tax rate is even higher. The extra taxes go toward funding education.

Arizona's current personal income tax rate is 4.54 percent. It would go up to 8 percent when an individual's income hits $250,000 or a couple's hits $500,000, then 9 percent at $500,000 for an individual or $1 million for a couple.

So what does that mean in terms of money for the one percenters? Let's use a couple for this explanation, just so I don't confuse things by trying to include figures for individuals and couples.

Let's begin with what the tax measure doesn't mean. It doesn't mean a couple making $499,999 pays 4.54 percent on all their income, but add a dollar and they pay 8 percent on the whole $500,000. Uh uh. Not at all. Adding that one dollar doesn't bring a tsunami of new taxes down on their heads. The rate on the first $500,000 is the same as everyone else's: 4.54 percent. Every dollar above that is taxed at the higher rate.

Let's say our hypothetical couple makes $500,100. Their added tax will be—get ready for it—$3.46. That's right. If the Invest in Education Act passes, they'll pay three dollars and forty-six cents more than if it fails.

See, the new 8 percent rate is 3.46 percent higher than the current 4.54 percent rate, and 3.46 percent of $100 is $3.46. If the couple buys one less Cafe Latte Grande at Starbucks that year, they'll come out even.

Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the United States and its democracy.
Discuss.

"When Trump dog-whistled about globalists, I didn't realize he was talking about Jews until after the election." "The monstrous nature of the Jewish people must be known to the public." “I propose a government that makes counter-Semitism central to all aims of the state."
Patrick Little, Republican, California, running for U.S. Senate. His campaign poster: END JEWISH SUPREMACY OVER U.S. POLITICS & SOCIETY.

"I consider myself a white racialist." "Six million Jews [killed in the Holocaust]? Ridiculous!"
Arthur Jones, Republican, Illinois, former member of the American Nazi Party, ran in an uncontested primary for Congress in Chicago, received 20,000 votes.

"It's not because we're racists. It's because we feel marginalized. We're the ones who are being oppressed."
Arthur Jones supporter

“Armed machine gun turrets every 300 yards [on the border]. And you can automate those. Anyone who approaches that barrier will be treated as an enemy combatant. Man, woman or child.” "Jews…commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings.”
Paul Nehlen, Republican, Wisconsin, running for a congressional seat.

Called Virginia Democratic and Republican candidates for governor "cuck" and "cuckservative." ("Cuck" is short for "cuckhold." In alt right parlance, it refers to a white man who watches his wife having sex with a black man.)
Corey Stewart, Republican, Virginia, running for governor. He came within one percentage point of winning the Republican primary against Ed Gillespie by devoting his campaign to defending Confederate monuments.