The Arkansas-born, Texas-raised Dorough began working in music in the army, serving as a composer, arranger and player in the Special Services Army Band between 1943 and '45, before getting a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Texas. In the late '40s, Dorough made his way to New York, working there as a pianist and singer.He released his debut album, Devil May Care, in 1956 on Gus Wildi's Bethlehem label, also home to Nina Simone's first album. Devil May Care was a document of loungey bebop, with Dorough's windy, charming and idiosyncratically accented singing of buoyant lyrics that hinted at his success to come. "In a dream / the strangest and oddest things / appear / and what insane insane and silly things / we do," he sang on "I Had the Craziest Dream."Not long after the release of Devil May Care, the legendary Miles Davis recorded his own interpretation of its title track, which would go on to become a jazz standard.Dorough collaborated with Davis on the serrated holiday song "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)" and later sang on "Nothing Like You," the closing track of Davis' 1967 album Sorcerer. As critic Ben Ratliff wrote in notes accompanying a vinyl reissue of Sorcerer last fall: "The trumpeter Leron Thomas recently told me that he thinks of it as Miles's version of a Looney Tunes move: 'That's All, Folks.' "Then, in 1971, with the jazz money running thin, Dorough was asked by his boss at the advertising company where he had a day job to set the multiplication tables to music; his boss cited his children's ability to remember Hendrix and Rolling Stones lyrics, but not their school lessons."I got the idea that three is a magic number," Dorough told NPR's Rachel Martin in 2013. "Then I looked in the magic book and sure enough, three is one of the magic numbers." That concept became the song "Three Is a Magic Number" and the project would become the Grammy-nominated Multiplication Rock.
"For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country," [the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz] notes, "white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race." When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened, she explains, they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group ("all lives matter"), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.This could be why in one study, whites who were presented with evidence of racial progress experienced lower self-esteem afterward. In another study, reminding whites who were high in "ethnic identification" that nonwhite groups will soon outnumber them revved up their support for Trump, their desire for anti-immigrant policies, and their opposition to political correctness. [...]Mutz examined voters whose incomes declined, or didn't increase much, or who lost their jobs, or who were concerned about expenses, or who thought they had been personally hurt by trade. None of those things motivated people to switch from voting for Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016. Indeed, manufacturing employment in the United States has actually increased somewhat since 2010. And as my colleague Adam Serwer has pointed out, "Clinton defeated Trump handily among Americans making less than $50,000 a year."Meanwhile, a few things did correlate with support for Trump: a voter's desire for their group to be dominant, as well as how much they disagreed with Clinton's views on trade and China. Trump supporters were also more likely than Clinton voters to feel that "the American way of life is threatened," and that high-status groups, like men, Christians, and whites, are discriminated against.This sense of unfounded persecution is far from rare, and it seems to be heightened during moments of societal change. As my colleague Emma Green has written, white evangelicals see more discrimination against Christians than Muslims in the United States, and 79 percent of white working-class voters who had anxieties about the "American way of life" chose Trump over Clinton. As I pointed out in the fall of 2016, several surveys showed many men supported Trump because they felt their status in society was threatened, and that Trump would restore it. Even the education gap in support for Trump disappears, according to one analysis, if you account for the fact that non-college-educated whites are simply more likely to affirm racist views than those with college degrees. (At the most extreme end, white supremacists also use victimhood to further their cause.)
In Late August 2016, Donald Trump paid a visit to Tulare, Calif., a small city in the agricultural Central Valley and an unlikely stop for a Republican presidential campaign. California is a solidly blue state, and although Trump was in Tulare to speak at a fund-raiser, the $2,700 that most guests ponied up to attend hardly seemed substantial enough to justify the presence of a busy candidate. (At a fund-raiser Trump attended in Silicon Valley the day before, guests paid $25,000 a head.) At least one senior Trump campaign official argued against the trip, deeming it a colossal waste of time.But Trump had one very good reason for visiting Tulare: It is the hometown of Representative Devin Nunes. While many Republican elected officials had maintained a wary distance from their party's presidential nominee, Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was one of the few, not to mention one of the most prominent, to offer Trump his unequivocal support -- which included holding the fund-raiser. Better still, Trump liked Nunes. Although the 44-year-old congressman seems to wear a permanent grimace in public, as if trying to lend his boyish face some gravitas, in private he is a bit of a bon vivant. "He's a pretty easy guy to like," says Johnny Amaral, Nunes's longtime political consigliere and friend. "And he's fiercely loyal. I think Trump recognized that."The day before the Tulare event, Nunes drove up to the Bay Area to meet Trump and brief him on his district. Nunes expected to drive back to Tulare that evening, but Trump invited Nunes to fly with him to Los Angeles instead and then on to Tulare the next morning. It is unclear just what they discussed over those 24 hours, but by all accounts they seem to have strengthened their bond, and Nunes soon entered Trump's inner circle -- cementing a political alliance that would become one of the most consequential of the Trump era.In the beginning, it was Nunes who influenced Trump. During the campaign, he tutored the candidate on water policy -- a crucial issue to California agribusiness interests -- and Trump heeded his warnings about the perfidy of environmentalists and government bureaucrats who were creating a "man-made drought." At the Tulare fund-raiser, Trump promised the crowd that he would get their water back for them. Once Trump was elected, he appointed Nunes to the executive committee of his transition team, where Nunes helped shape the nascent Trump administration's foreign policy. "He just took a very proactive role," one Trump transition official recalls. "He was very aggressive and assertive about things and people we had to have." According to the Trump transition official, Nunes was among the strongest advocates for Mike Pompeo, a colleague of his on the Intelligence Committee, to become the C.I.A. director and for James Mattis to become the secretary of defense. He also recommended a number of staff members, including his Intelligence Committee aide Derek Harvey, for positions on the National Security Council. "If we didn't have Nunes," the transition official says, "we wouldn't have had anything stood up. He took the lead and was very important."The Trump team was so impressed with Nunes that, according to the transition official, it considered bringing him into the administration. A few weeks after the election, the congressman traveled to Trump Tower, where, according to transition officials, he and Trump discussed the possibility of his becoming the director of national intelligence and overseeing an ambitious reorganization of the intelligence community. But Trump ultimately decided to shelve those plans and appoint as director a less disruptive figure, Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator. Besides, with Pompeo leaving Capitol Hill for Langley, Trump's circle believed that Nunes would be even more valuable to the administration if he remained in Congress, running the Intelligence Committee.
'Devin and I had a very good relationship until March 21,' Adam Schiff said. 'From that point on, I think that he considered it his primary mission to protect the White House no matter the cost.'Some 17 months later, that looks to have been a remarkably prescient decision -- as Trump appears to have been able to influence Nunes to a remarkable degree. So much so that during Trump's time in the White House, Nunes has transformed the Intelligence Committee into a beachhead from which to rally his fellow Republicans in support of the president against his perceived enemies -- not just the Democratic Party but also the F.B.I., the Department of Justice and the entire intelligence community. [...]While many Republicans on Capitol Hill may nurse private reservations about Trump but choose not to voice them or stand in his way out of political calculation and fear, Nunes is a true believer. Years before the Russia investigation, he was extremely skeptical of -- if not paranoid about -- the American military and intelligence establishments in a way that presaged Trump's denunciations of the "deep state." Now he and Trump are waging war against these foes, real and imagined, together.Devin Nunes began his political career, appropriately enough, because he believed he had uncovered a sinister plot.
First, some background. Conway's husband George is a highly distinguished and successful lawyer. He also operates a Twitter account on which he often posts cutting remarks about the Trump presidency. George Conway's comments do not deal with policy, but with more fundamental issues of character and integrity. For example, on the morning of Sunday April 22--just minutes before Kellyanne Conway's appearance on CNN--George Conway retweeted the following:The most obvious interpretation of that message is that Conway shared the tweeter's implicit view that President Trump is not actuated by love of country, but instead by love of self.Many people in government have spouses of course, and many of those spouses say things on social media. Why are George Conway's comments more interesting than most? The reason is captured in this New York Times report from May 15, 2017.The hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" said on Monday that the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway complained extensively about President Trump in private conversations with them before he was elected.Mika Brzezinski said during Monday's broadcast that she heard Ms. Conway denounce the candidate in private after promoting him on television.
"She would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say 'Blech, I need to take a shower,' because she disliked her candidate so much," Ms. Brzezinski said of Ms. Conway.Joe Scarborough, Ms. Brzezinski's co-host and fiancé, echoed the statements, saying that Ms. Conway said after being interviewed that she had only taken the job for money and that she would soon be done defending Mr. Trump. "'But first I have to take a shower, because it feels so dirty to be saying what I'm saying,'" Ms. Brzezinski added, mocking what the hosts said was Ms. Conway's attitude at the time. "I guess she's just used to it now."Conway has denied the story. But her husband's tweets suggest he currently holds views broadly similar to those attributed to Kellyanne by the Morning Joe hosts. And that, in turn, raises the possibility that she privately still feels the same way she allegedly did during the campaign: disgusted with the bad character of the man she helped elect to the presidency. If one of the most senior counselors of the United States does inwardly feel such acute disgust toward her boss, yet serves him anyway for her own personal advantage, that is important information both about the president and about the kind of people staffing his White House.
The right-wing provocateur and former Breitbart News editor unwittingly walked into the lion's den. His pub of choice was hosting a Democratic Socialists of America meeting. Suffice it to say, his presence did not go unnoticed.As seen in videos posted to Twitter, the bargoers chanted "Nazi scum get out!" eventually forcing Yiannopoulos and his friend out of the bar.
If Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers combined to make a movie about the White House, this might be the movie poster pic.twitter.com/8nArqdCd10
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) April 24, 2018
Spree Killer Believed To Be Heavily Armed And With History Of Serious Mental Illness And Law Enforcement Contacts Arrested Peacefully Without Incident Upon Demonstrating To Officer Satisfaction That He Is Totally White
— IPleadTheFifthHat (@Popehat) April 23, 2018
Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD Co. showed an early model."Everyone was laughing at BYD for making a toy," recalled Isbrand Ho, the Shenzhen-based company's managing director in Europe. "And look now. Everyone has one."Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport--and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand.The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country's entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters--the equivalent of London's entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The oft-pronounced goal of the State of Israel is to be a country comprised of the highest democratic and Jewish values. Unfortunately, in the national discourse on what is to be done concerning the approximately 40,000 non-Jewish Africans who have migrated to Israel in recent years, Jewish values have been mentioned primarily in generalities. It behooves us to take a serious look at what the founding document of Jewish ethics - our Bible, the Tanakh - has to say on what has become an extremely divisive issue. Indeed, although non-Jewish migrants per se are not a major issue of discussion in the Tanakh, the Torah and the Prophets have a great deal to say about the stranger who dwells among us - the ger, the resident alien. [...][I]t is important to pay attention to two phrases that are frequently repeated in the Torah: "for you were gerim (resident aliens) in the land of Egypt" (Exod. 22:20; 23:9; Lev. 19:34; Deut. 10:19), which shows empathy for the resident alien, and "there shall be one law for you and the ger" (or, "like the citizen, the ger" - Exod. 12:47-48; Lev. 24:16, 22; Num. 9:14; 15:15, 29-30, etc.), which exemplifies legal equality between the Israelite and the resident alien.The prophets echoed the Torah's outcry against mistreatment of the resident alien (Jeremiah 7:6; 22:3; Ezekiel 22:7, 29; Zechariah 7:10; Malachi 3:5; see also Psalms 94:6; 146:9). The permission of Boaz to grant Ruth the migrant the right to glean in his field may well be based upon the commandments enabling the resident alien to glean from the harvest in Lev. 19:9-10; 23:22; and Deut. 24:19.The Biblical treatment of the ger resulted in many if not most resident aliens eventually converting to Judaism. Therefore, by the Hellenistic period the term ger had acquired a new meaning - the proselyte to Judaism. Today, they, as much as any other Jews, are our ancestors.To summarize, it is clear from the Torah's laws, as well as the Prophets and the Writings, that the stranger/resident alien was a member of the disadvantaged elements of society. He is grouped together with the poor, the widow and the orphan.
Republicans' political fortunes have taken a turn in Missouri. GOP officials in the state are panicking over the fiasco surrounding Gov. Eric Greitens. And polls show their commanding lead over Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri's U.S. Senate race has reversed .Speaking to Politico, Missouri Republican consultant James Harris moaned that "all that's coming out in Missouri is about the scandals," while former Missouri GOP chairman John Hancock said that if Greitens stays in the news, "I think it will have a potentially debilitating effect on the Senate race."
President Donald Trump is increasingly relying on his personal cell phone to contact outside advisers, multiple sources inside and outside the White House told CNN, as Trump returns to the free-wheeling mode of operation that characterized the earliest days of his administration.
In his new book, Seven Types of Atheism, John Gray - who, I should mention, is no more a religious believer than I am - has little time for the so-called New Atheism of Dawkins and Co. The confusion of religion with science is only one of the points he objects to. Even if it can be shown that religion involves the creation of illusions, he argues, that does not mean that religion can or should be dispensed with; for "there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life". As for the idea of the American New Atheist Sam Harris that we can develop "a science of good and evil" which will contain all the correct liberal values: Gray sees this as a piece of astonishing and culpable naivety, ignoring nearly two centuries' worth of evidence that scientism in ethics and illiberalism go happily hand-in-hand.
If this short book were just another intervention in the Dawkinsian "God debate", it would be very short indeed. In fact it would get no further than page 23 where, at the end of his brief opening chapter, Gray concludes damningly that "the organised atheism of the present century is mostly a media phenomenon, and best appreciated as a type of entertainment".But the New Atheism is the least of the seven varieties that make up the subject-matter of this book. The others are all much more interesting, being connected with significant elements in our culture. And if the phrase "our culture" sounds parochial, well, that is an issue Gray deals with explicitly, pointing out that what we call "atheism" is something much more specific than just a rejection or absence of religion as such. It is a rejection of certain religious beliefs - and that narrows the field already, as many religions of the world are not primarily belief-systems at all. In particular, Gray argues, it is a rejection of belief in an omnipotent creator-god, which means that while atheism is Christianity's close relative, it bears no relation to Hinduism or Buddhism at all.So this is a book about post-Christian thinking - most of it, in Gray's view, pretty bad thinking, too. One of his targets is secular humanism, which he describes as "a hollowed-out version of the Christian belief in salvation through history". Another is what he calls "making a religion from science", a delusion which he traces all the way from Mesmerism in the late 18th century, via dialectical materialism in the 19th and 20th, to those futurist thinkers today who dream of uploading a human being's consciousness to computer circuits, thereby rendering it immortal. And another is political religion, "from Jacobinism through communism and Nazism to contemporary evangelical liberalism".