Alamogordo Public Schools Superintendent Kenneth Moore said at the regular Alamogordo Public School board of Education meeting on Jan. 19 that he asked for 30 National Guardsmen to be deployed to Alamogordo to help with substitute teaching as COVID-19 infections rose among educators. The request came after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced this week a call for state workers and National Guardsmen to help substitute teach at schools and childcare facilities after recent spikes in COVID-19 infections left many school staff and educators unable to work. “This would be a tremendous help to have additional adult supervision in our schools,” Moore said. “We did ask for 30. We have no timeline yet on when or if those National Guard substitutes will arrive.” Lujan Grisham announced the Supporting Teachers and Families (STAF) initiative in a Wednesday news release in which she asked superintendents across the state how many National Guardsmen or state workers they would like to help offset the effects of COVID-19 on the teaching population on New Mexico school campuses. She hoped by deploying additional personnel, schools and childcare facilities would be able to stay open despite staffing shortages brought on by the pandemic. “The initiative encourages state workers and National Guard members to volunteer to become licensed as substitute pre-K-12 teachers and/or childcare workers and work where they are needed to keep doors open for in-person learning and childcare,” the news release states. The state workers and National Guardsmen must complete the same prerequisites that regular substitute teachers and childcare workers complete including background checks and completing an online workshop through the New Mexico Public Education Department, read the release. “The state will also ensure that the needs of schools and the state are balanced to ensure that state services are not affected by this effort.” Lujan Grisham said the move would maintain a sense of “stability” for New Mexico youngest students during the health crisis. “Our schools are a critical source of stability for our kids

The Actual Impact Of Bitcoin On War Authored by Matthew Pines via BitcoinMagazine.com, The impact of Bitcoin on war will not simply be the eradication of violence, a problem of humanity since the dawn of time… As bitcoin has appreciated and seen increased global adoption, it has emerged as a macroeconomically relevant phenomenon. This has turned formerly theoretical debates into live, practical questions on how Bitcoin will affect geopolitical relations. The current balance of global power is defined by complex arrangements of military alliances, trade flows, ethnic and religious affinity, cultural influence, linguistic agreement, and, of course, national borders. In this author’s view, it is hubris to expect Bitcoin to singularly override or sweep away the accumulated weight and historical inertia of this tightly-bound matrix of interlinked forces. Of course, it is tempting to smooth over this irreducible complexity and hypothesize a “saved” world, where bitcoin is that “one weird trick” to fix all that’s wrong with human civilization. This temptation to “immanentize the eschaton” is common among totalizing belief systems and becomes an emotionally attractive picture of the future, especially in an era where formerly trusted verities of common belief are losing their stabilizing force. And yet, we can still, and increasingly must, analyze the question of violence – especially state violence – in a future world order where Bitcoin is a major, if not the dominant, economic and political force. Some reason that Bitcoin will positively adjust the calculus of violence by which states decide how and where to project power and secure their respective interests. By shifting a large portion of national wealth from easily seized and vulnerable tangible assets into digital form, the incentives to violent conflict – as a means of confiscating this wealth – are substantially reduced. This moves the locus of inter-state conflict