The United States began its war against Iran on February 28 with the “Double Tap” attack on Shajare Tayebeh Elementary School in the city of Minab in southern Iran. Bombs rained down on the school, killing at least 170 people, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12.
This set the tone for an onslaught of US and Israeli bombings against Iranian education centers over the coming weeks. Ahead of the “ceasefire,” more than 30 other Iranian universities and 763 schools across the United States were reportedly bombed, including the Sharif University of Technology, also known as “Iran’s MIT,” which was reduced to rubble.
And it’s not just schools, but also libraries (the president of the Iranian Public Library Association announced on April 4 that at least 55 libraries have been damaged) and cultural heritage sites (at least 56 museums, historical buildings, and cultural sites have been damaged).
This applies to patterns. During the US war against Iraq, educational infrastructure was bombed to the Stone Age, as President Trump has so eloquently described, and US soldiers helped loot Iraq’s museums. In Gaza, Israel has repeatedly targeted educational sites as part of its genocide against Palestinians.
Israel has justified attacks on Iranian universities by claiming that research conducted on campuses contributes to the country’s military. And the rewriting of the Geneva Conventions continues.
But even Tel Aviv’s excuse feels incomplete, as the US and Israeli history of targeting schools and cultural institutions reveals a broader purpose, Satya Sagar explains:
Universities are not armories. It is a place where ideas are formed, discussed and contested. It is where society thinks about itself and its future. To target it, whether directly or through reckless indifference, is to strike at the possibility of thought itself. And doing so while claiming to protect civilization is a complete investment that borders on satire.
If the existence of scientific expertise in a country is the basis for suspicion, then the only “safe” world is one in which such expertise is monopolized. If the potential for abuse warrants pre-emptive destruction, all schools are potential targets.
This is a logic that, if taken seriously, can lead to absurdity and, even more dangerously, to brutality.
Perhaps the most disturbing possibility is that the fear is not due to weapons or “terrorism.” American and Israeli elites are fighting a war over equality. A world in which knowledge is widely distributed is a world in which power is less concentrated. It is a world where narratives can be challenged, technology is independently developed, and cultural influences are diverse.
This is worth remembering as we look at how America’s great financial and technological overlords (the same ones who aspire to the “trillion dollar opportunity” in Iran) continue to destroy education and cut off knowledge in the big cities.
Two recent reports from the nation’s largest metropolitan centers show how vast underclasses continue to be deprived of educational opportunities.
As homelessness increases among New York City children, report finds attending school is the biggest struggle
Rising numbers, declining resources: Students experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County UCLA School Transformation Center
Below is a snapshot of New York City.
Approximately 154,000 students in the city’s public schools will be homeless, meaning they are living in shelters or “cohabiting” with other families, according to the data, for the 2024-2025 school year, a record high for a student population that has continued to rise over the past decade amid the city’s affordability crisis.
The report found that 49% of students whose families lived in temporary housing with other family members or friends missed at least one out of every 10 school days last year. The percentage was even higher for students living in evacuation centers, at 63%.
…Homeless students also lag far behind their peers academically, with less than 33% scoring proficient in reading and less than 35% scoring proficient in math, a new report finds. By comparison, about 60% of my classmates in each subject live in stable housing.
The story is the same on the Golden State’s sunny shores, with 61,249 students experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County in the 2023-2024 school year, an increase of nearly 30% from the previous year.
Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer Americans are pursuing higher education, which is worth the astronomical cost when housing cannot even be provided during K-12.
Rising debt makes higher education less attractive
Opinion polls show that the importance of universities is at an all-time low.
why is that?
It is no longer a near-guaranteed path to the illusory “middle class.” The $1 trillion in student loan debt is great evidence of that fact.
Strictly from a money and feel perspective, it makes sense that higher education is becoming less attractive. Even more unfortunately, higher education has become primarily a place for financial training rather than a place for reflection, discussion, and expansion of worldviews.
While working-class students have come to believe that higher education is too risky as an “investment,” the wealthy can still afford to spend money and time on such philosophical pursuits, and what they discover may be newer and more creative ways to screw over the rest of humanity.
be looked down upon and sold at a high price
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was born into a wealthy family. He attended John Burroughs High School, a $38,000 private school outside St. Louis. He then attended Stanford University, where he earned $65,000 a year. There, he was able to leave after two years thanks to connections that helped him raise millions of dollars to start a so-called “geosocial networking” service.
Mr. Altman, now worth billions of dollars, said at BlackRock’s U.S. Infrastructure Summit in March:
“We’re looking at a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water, and people buy it at the meter. One of the most important things in the future is to create intelligence, to borrow an old energy industry phrase that didn’t work, ‘too cheap to meter.'”
Artificial intelligence may be far from intelligent, but the vision is clear. Make the serfs dependent on it. That’s because serfs have become stupid by using it, and they demand serfdom in other ways as the price of being a member of society, that is, forcing people to interact with serfs in places like education, medicine, and social welfare. As for what Altman’s vision tells us, Paris Marx said:
AI companies are stepping into societies already at war with critical thinking to take advantage of these trends and push them further for their own benefit.
Sam Altman’s proposal to literally measure intelligence is just the most egregious proposal of this anti-human industry. But he’s not alone in his desire to create a world where purchasing technology products is a requirement for full participation in society. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to create a society where people who don’t wear AI-powered smart glasses are at a disadvantage. In some ways, tech billionaires are already pushing us in that direction. In modern society, it has become difficult to live without a smartphone.
Altman’s gaffe at the Infrastructure Summit gives us a little more insight into how tech billionaires see the world and how much humanity is missing from their visions of the future. They will denigrate any aspect of society if they feel it will bring them one step closer to realizing their dreams of intelligent machines and science fiction. But each time they reveal more of that vision, it becomes more clear why everyone else must work together to stop it.
I’d like to replace “intelligent machines and their sci-fi dreams” with money and power, but it’s clear where they want to go. It’s the same as what’s happening in Iran. To return to Sagar:
A world in which knowledge is widely distributed is a world in which power is less concentrated.
poetic irony
Knowledge, or lack thereof, may be the failure of Altman’s plan to put points on it. This is because AI and financial engineering cannot yet create data centers and their power sources.
Water- and energy-intensive people are increasingly relying on gas for electricity, but there’s a problem. The gas industry is dominated by three companies, Mitsubishi, Siemens, and GE Vernova, and they cannot catch up. why? Shortage of skilled workers.
Mitsubishi Power is unable to find human resources due to a labor shortage in the energy construction field. In 2024, Siemens announced that it is using AI to overcome labor shortages. It bombed as expected. SupplyChain247 details:
Efforts to build AI infrastructure across the United States are facing a different kind of constraint. It’s not data or software. It’s the people.
New research from Randstad USA shows that demand for skilled trade workers is growing at a much faster rate than traditional professions as companies invest in data centers, automation and modern production facilities.
From 2022 to 2026, the number of robotics technician jobs more than doubled, increasing by 113%. Demand for HVAC engineers increased by nearly 78%, and industrial automation roles increased by 51%. Job openings for electricians, welders and other general trades also increased by about 30%, outpacing the broader job market.
That demand is directly tied to the physical aspects of the supply chain. Warehouses, manufacturing sites, and distribution networks all rely on skilled workers to build, install, and maintain the systems in which companies invest. At the same time, these workers are becoming harder to find.
Perhaps they should look to Iran, which has the best engineering program in the world.
