State of the Discussion

I suppose I can see how, if everybody who knows how to read** has a phone/computer in their hip pocket, knowing basic arithmetic might be less critical than it once was. I'm not convinced, mind, but I can see that it might be.
** At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well. The reactionaries will no doubt be delighted if illiteracy once again becomes the norm. /snark

New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
The trouble with New Math was that it was (apparently) designed by mathematicians. Mathematicians who had forgotten that a) you have to build the foundations (mechanics, as Michael says) first. And that b) normal people are not mathematicians -- and that's 99.99% (or more) of the population. They neither care nor need to know the theoretical underpinnings. They just need to know how to do basic arithmetic reliably.

I'm not sure if I'd be so harsh on the Roman alphabet. You don't want a system that encodes everything.
Something that floors my students is when I teach them about an abcedary, which is a chart that represents the letters by giving them a word that has the sound (A is for apple, etc) Because Japanese kana are the sound they represent, there is no need to create one.
About Michael's question, I think it would work in romanized Japanese because it is essentially creating an anglicized version of Japanese and the consonants plus the context can give enough clues to read them. However, Japanese don't process near as much text in roman letters, so that would be an issue.

"it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight."
There are always stories about how miraculous various programs and phonics in particular are in teaching reading. But surely such programs would have been adopted by now and thus must have been producing undeniable results somewhere. Wouldn't phonics have been adopted in red states (there is an obvious partisan divide on this) and shouldn't those states now be much better in reading performance?
Spanish is almost perfectly phonetic so why do international comparisons put reading performance in Spain below that in the US? Can Japanese and Chinese (who do well on the international comparisons) only learn to read after seeing the romanized versions? Surely people in China were able to read before it was exposed to the West.
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words. Most children can learn new words both audibly and in symbols very fast, but some may require more help from phonetics.
By the way the Roman alphabet is very poor for most languages (including English), which typically have more sounds. Few languages have only five vowels sounds, like Spanish and Italian (and presumably Latin). Phonetics is presumably helpful in deciphering foreign words, but the simple Roman alphabet will never describe them (except Spanish, etc) accurately even with code books. However some alphabets, such as Arabic, may be even simpler, omitting vowels altogether at times.

A couple of things about reading. It's a bit like second language acquisition, in that no one is guaranteed to acquire reading. There is a basic idea that reading is a interactive process that bounces back and forth between bottom up and top down, but beyond that, there is not much. There is an notion of orthographic depth, but it's often by speakers of one language (usually English) projecting onto other languages.
I tend to think of it a lot like umwelt, which is the unique subjective experience that an organism has that can not be understood by any other organism. Though it doesn't use the word, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel gets at that point. I'll leave it to Harmut to explain umwelt, along with merkwelt and wirkwelt in Uexküll's biosemiotic theory and I've never heard of any linguist taking this up, but I definitely will in another life where I am multi-lingual...

wj, imo English de facto has composite words, just not writing them as such (keeping the parts separate, not even using hyphens). It's just convention that one does not write railwaystation or particleaccelerator or internalcombustionengine but imo those are perceived as units. Latin has very few of those and they are usually fixed terms of noun and adjective (e.g. res publica = state, res novae = coup d'etat, homo novus = upstart). A very rare exception is suovetaurilia (sacrificing a pig, a sheep and a bull together) but that is in essence a proper noun, a name.

In Latin one has to invent new words for concepts Cicero&Co. did not yet possess and would probably not understand. Greek (unlike classical Latin) allows composite words that can transport about any meaning with little to no loss.
No offense, but I wonder if being a native speaker of German might be coloring your view here. Composite words being one of the most noticable things (after gendered nouns) for English speakers when learning it.
I admit that I don't have a wide enough base to know how common composite words are in languages generally.

India, with its huge population, already uses it because its people speak 5 mutually unintelligible native languages
Off the top of my head, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu. There are many others.

Ancient Greek is far more versatile than Latin but also quite a bit more difficult. I never really got the hang of it (in 3.5 years at school compared to 9 years of Latin).
I think there is little to-day that could not be directly translated into ancient Greek while Latin would require massive reformulation to do the same and much would get lost doing it. In Latin one has to invent new words for concepts Cicero&Co. did not yet possess and would probably not understand. Greek (unlike classical Latin) allows composite words that can transport about any meaning with little to no loss. Latin is the hammer of a blacksmith, ancient Greek is a jeweller's toolset.

Why learn, if there is an instant translator?
I don't see that happening in complex, real-life contexts. It's hard enough to make sense of people in one's native language sometimes, lol.

Or kill it altogether. Why learn, if there is an instant translator? If everyone has a babelfish in his or her ear, the need disappears (at least for the lazy majority).
English is a good candidate for being easy to get at least sufficient proficiency (Ironically one theory is that this is the result of Old Norse mugging Old English killing declension in the process).
(Proper) Latin is far too cumbersome in some aspects.
Latin supplanted and replaced numerous languages but during the Middle Ages the unity disappeared and Latin turned (degraded?) into numerous new languages as far as common use was concerned.
I consider it likely that over time English will get rid (or ridden) of its 'gothi' problem and some other irregularities will get filed off too by international use and become at least the second language for a majority in the world (provided our world and/or civilisation does not perish before that).

I don't think subjugated peoples or immigrants are relevant examples. You are talking about e.g. the French not speaking French anymore - that's never going to happen because language is so closely tied to indentity and culture, but also practically speaking you would have to change all the laws etc.
More generally, you would have to imagine (non-immigrant) parents speaking to their babies in a language other than their mother tongue. Unless we are a talking about an actual genocide, I don't think that's going to happen either.
Finally, people routinely overestimate the quantity and quality of proficiency in English in other countries. This is understandable because usually those making such assumptions tend to interact only with a highly educated subset of the population of those countries, thus skewing the picture.

I have the suspicion that English will eventually end up as the world language.
More than 30 years ago now, I spent some time working with an engineering team at Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company. Ericsson's internal organization at the time had hardware being done in Sweden, operating system being done in the UK, and application software being done in Spain. By decree, the official technical language inside the company was English.
The official rules for international fencing are written in French. This leads to occasional interesting difficulties. Epee rules intentionally allow some amount of incidental body-to-body contact, but not too much. There was a great deal of debate at the FIE over how to translate the French phrase for what was not allowed to English. They finally settled on "excessive jostling".

I have the suspicion that English will eventually end up as the world language. There will no doubt be long and bitter fights to preserve the national language. But they will, in eventual history, be seen as futile fighting tetreats.
Sorry if I misunderstand you, but are you saying that the use of national languages in the native countries will disappear or be reduced? I don't think that would be realistic.

I'm just watching an hour long Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on the Ubu-Putin relationship. Very interesting compilation, with good sources, drawing a lot of stuff together, some of which we knew, but with more details. I don't know if you can get this stuff in the US (or Germany etc), but I reckon if you can you might find it worthwhile:
https://x.com/C4Dispatches/status/1945861731344880003
In case it helps, it's called ‘Trump: Moscow’s Man in the White House? Dispatches’

I've just watched a Daily Beast interview with Tina Brown, who commissioned and ran, when she was still with the Daily Beast, the first really detailed series (6 parts) by Conchita Sarnoff in 2010 on the Epstein case . She says, among other things, that her bet is also that Ubu himself was not into underage girls, despite his long, sleazy relationship with Epstein, but that she wonders whether one of the reasons he may want to keep any "list" secret is so that he has leverage, or kompromat, on some of the people mentioned in it. Also credible, IMO.

Just because there are people who turn this into a wild conspiracy story that can be used for partisan purposes doesn't mean that there is no there there.
Agreed. The wild conspiracy story was that there was a vast deep-state cover-up to protect a large satanic pedophile network of elite Democrats that Epstein was at the center of. What's not at all unlikely is that Epstein trafficked underage girls for himself with help from Maxwell, as was proved in court well enough for both of them to be convicted.
Beyond that, the more clients you propose they had, the less likely it is to be true. And whether there was a written list of clients I would consider a toss-up. Maybe or maybe not. There's also the question of that list, if there was one, being obtained in the investigation.
A list isn't the only evidence that could implicate other participants in the sexual exploitation of underage girls, so what else might there be?
This story gets to that:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/jeffrey-epstein-key-victims-attorney/story?id=123805543
Excerpts:

"Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john. He was his own No. 1 client," Edwards told ABC News. "Nearly all of the exploitation and abuse of all of the women was intended to benefit only Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein's sexual desires."
Edwards describes the enigmatic Epstein as living, essentially, two separate lives: one in which he was sexually abusing women and girls "on a daily basis," and another in which he associated with politicians, royalty, and titans of business, academia, and science.
"For the most part, those two worlds did not overlap. And where they overlapped, in the instances they overlapped, it seems to be a very small percentage," Edwards said. "There were occasions where a select few of these men engaged in sexual acts with a select few of the girls that Jeffrey Epstein was exploiting or abusing -- primarily girls who were over the age of 18."

Concluding with:

But for Edwards, the primary concern should be for the survivors of Epstein's abuse -- and he worries that the victims are an afterthought in the ongoing Washington power struggle.
"I think some [victims] believe that the government protected him, and there's this outrage because they believe that [Epstein] was always more important than they were, and that's why this was allowed to go on for so long. So if there was evidence that his political or other connections assisted, I think that they would want to know it," Edwards said. "But more so, they just want this to die off. And they see it's not dying off because of the way that it's being handled right now. In fact, somehow there's more attention to it today than there was when he was abusing them."
For the well-being of the survivors, Edwards is hopeful there will soon be a resolution that will allow the victims to move on.
"I just wish everybody would step back and remember real people were hurt here, and let's try to do what's in their best interest, as opposed to politicizing this whole thing and making it the right versus the left," he said. "All of that is hurting the people who are already hurt."

The Epstein narrative is an article of faith among the Believers and a very profitable story arc that never gets old for a host of podcaster/influencers. The howls from them are because Trump just ... took that story away from them and replaced it with nothing. Now he's rummaging through his Bag of Tricks and throwing anything that comes to hand out there. It's a hoax! Written by Democrats! Who suppressed it but now want to release it to attack me! This is no fissure or turning point. They will continue to make up stories, the cries for the Tsar to do something will fade, leaving the circus running it's course. Why Trump has shot himself in the foot for no coherent reason will provide endless speculation with him at the center, where he likes it.

The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it.
And she doesn't even have to stash the evidence. A copy of the evidence would be just as good, maybe even better, for convincing the conspiracy theory enthusiasts that it's real. "The Elites destroyed the original. But we've gotten a copy out and we'll destroy them with it!"
Of course, the minute there's one copy out, there will be a dozen (hey, I said the first minute) variations splashing across the Internet. No doubt Trump will feature in at least some of them.

Here's hoping. And here's also hoping that they don't find a way to just destroy any evidence that does exist....
At this point you have to assume that there are many people who have seen the evidence - some in the Biden administration, and some, possibly Patel and Bongino, in the Trump administration.
The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it. Given all that we have seen from Trump in the past, the only way to protect yourself is to have leverage. If she were to get rid of it, she would have no leverage.

I think Trump simply believed that if he said that the evidence was not conclusive, his followers would rally around that. I think he's genuinely surprised that there are MAGA fanatics that are not following their cues.
The problem that he has, I think, is that there are two major MAGA factions (with some overlap - it's a continuum). There's the P2025 crowd that are in it for the Christian Nationalism and there's the QAnon crowd that are deeply invested in the "elite pedophile ring" narrative. The QAnon faction, and the people in the middle of the mix that are committed to both are all going to balk at Trump's avowals and assume that someone in the mix is a Deep State plant. My bet is that they land on Bondi for that, which would be fine for Trump so long as she doesn't keep an insurance copy to leak if he comes after her.
My other bet is that they are eventually going to land on the narrative that the Biden administration tampered with the evidence in some way that made it unreliable, and they will use that narrative everywhere that does not involve oaths and the risk of perjury charges.
But it's not going to simply go away, and it will take time and constant massaging to make the new narrative take hold.
I know that the mainstream Dem attitude is that all this conspiracy crap is bad and should not be encouraged, but this is a real fault line that could be a wedge issue. I'd et the infighting rage, and work to poke holes in the Trump cover story that there is nothing to be seen. All that is required is to remain skeptcally agnostic and ask questions. They'll do the rest themselves.

I agree it may not move the needle enough on the MAGA people, but still, every development shows Ubu has not understood how unhelpful so much of this is to him:
From 2 hours ago in the Guardian:
Trump doubles down on 'Epstein hoax' and says Republicans pursuing it are 'stupid people'.
The president then was asked what evidence he might have seen to change his stance on the Epstein case, which this morning he called a “hoax”.
Trump doubled down on his claim that it’s a “big hoax,” but did not provide evidence to support this claim. He also claimed the Epstein case was “started by the Democrats,” but again cited no evidence (though he did mention the Steele Dossier, a report on Trump’s 2016 campaign that alleged cooperation with Russia?).
“Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net and try to do the Democrats’s work,” Trump said.
“They’re stupid people,” he continued to say about Republicans who believe there is more to be revealed about the Epstein case.