Two of the president's longest-serving advisers allege in a new book that scores of officials inside the White House, Congress, the Justice Department and intelligence agencies are "embedded enemies of President Trump" working to stymie his agenda and delegitimize his presidency. [...]The authors describe a cohort of White House aides -- including former press secretary Sean Spicer and former deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin -- as "the November Ninth Club," arguing that they are establishment Republicans who did not fully support Trump until the day after he was elected, when they began angling for powerful government jobs.Lewandowski and Bossie also savage former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn as a "limousine liberal" and "the poster boy for the disloyal staff conspiring against President Trump." And they accuse former staff secretary Rob Porter of working to thwart Trump's agenda and style to make him more traditionally "presidential."The narrative reads in part like Trump's Twitter grievances in book form. Lewandowski and Bossie write at length about the same FBI and Justice Department officials whose names pepper so many presidential tweets -- Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and Sally Yates. And they go after the same intelligence officials that Trump often targets -- James R. Clapper Jr. and John Brennan -- and accuse them of wanting to "nullify the election and bring down the president" by detailing Russia's interference.The authors also go after many of Trump's Democratic foes. They refer to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) as "crazy"; call Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) "many people's favorite liberal wacko"; and label Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) an "enemy of President Trump." They also spell out former president Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein, echoing a common Republican tactic meant to falsely suggest that the 44th president is a Muslim.
Robert Swan Mueller III wears a $35 Casio watch with the face on the inside of his left wrist, in the style of an infantryman trying to avoid giving away his position with a glint of sunshine off the glass.Covert and careful, Mueller is still moving with stealth in Washington DC, 50 years after he was shot and wounded in Vietnam as a first lieutenant in the US Marines.For 18 months now, the former long-serving director of the FBI has been the calm centre of a gathering storm which may be about to break over Donald Trump's White House. [...]In attempting to discredit Mueller, Trump has implied that the lifelong Republican is a partisan stooge of Barack Obama. In fact, since the 1980s, Mueller has been appointed to public positions - as prosecutor and investigator - by five consecutive presidents, one of them called Reagan and two of them called Bush.He was inherited by Obama as director of the FBI, and was so widely admired that when his term limit of 10 years in the job approached, the Senate voted 100-0 to change the law so that he could stay on for two more years.Garrett Graff, author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller's FBI and the War on Global Terror, interviewed Mueller for about 12 hours for the 2011 book. He said: "He is probably America's straightest arrow, very by-the-book, very professional."The word integrity seems to be almost sewn into the fabric of his pin-striped suits. "It's why [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein brought him into this role of special counsel," Graff said, "because he is probably the one person in Washington that you could never accuse of having a partisan agenda - he's always seen things with a very strong moral compass, instilled in him by his father, and really sees the world with a pretty black and white, right or wrong vision."
An Israeli startup hopes to disrupt the vegan food market by developing 3D printing technology that will be able to produce meat substitutes using plant-based formulations, saying the final product very closely resembles the experience of consuming natural meat. Its founder says it has "replicated... the complex matrix that is meat."Jet Eat, which was established in early 2018 by Eshchar Ben Shitrit, aims for its products to hit the markets by 2020.Ben Shitrit, according to the Israeli tech blog NoCamels, was an avid meat consumer before he set his mind on a substitute using natural, healthy ingredients, without compromising on flavor or consistency.Get The Start-Up Israel's Daily Start-Up by email and never miss our top stories FREE SIGN UP"Meat is characterized by four components: the muscle, the fat within it, myoglobin and a connective tissue" Shitrit explained. "We replicated, with our 3D printer and precise formulations, the complex matrix that is meat."
"Actually two days ago we closed the border," Trump said at Mar-a-Lago during a meeting with journalists. "We actually just closed it. We said nobody's coming in because it was out of control." (See the video above at 16:10)Then he walked back what he had just insisted, saying he would shut the border in the future if it's necessary, "if we find that it gets to a level where we are going to lose control."But minutes later he returned to his insistence that he had already closed the border."I've already shut it down, I've already shut it down -- for short periods," he said in response to a question to clarify the shutdown."I've already shut down parts of the border because it was out of control with the rioting on the other side in Mexico. And I just said, 'Shut it down.' You see it. I mean, it took place two days ago." (19:00)When someone asked if he had to sign an order to shut it down, Trump responded: "Yeah, they call me up, and I sign an order."Asked if the media could get a copy, Trump responded: "You don't need it. Don't worry. It's not that big a deal. Maybe to some people it is."
White House communications chief Bill Shine received an $8.4 million severance package upon leaving Fox News in May 2017 and will continue to be paid by the network for two more years, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Reminder to those who think a hard line on migration is a political necessity in 2018: immigration has literally never been seen more positively. pic.twitter.com/61SrXFQn7m
— Quinn Slobodian (@zeithistoriker) November 23, 2018
"Some people call it 'roids without the rage," explains Dr. Ryan Neinstein, a board certified plastic surgeon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He's describing a new technology that zaps his patients' abdominal and gluteal muscles to the tune of thousands of crunches and squats in one session. "We like to say it's 'athletic meets aesthetic.' "The FDA-approved EMSculpt machine sends high-intensity, focused electromagnetic waves into the body, provoking intense muscle contractions in select areas. It can be uncomfortable, but it's not painful--and there's little soreness afterward. Unlike the similar e-stim "As Seen on TV" staples of late-night infomercials, according to Neinstein, after four visits in two weeks, his clients see results. A clinical study of 22 users showed that patients experienced an average 20 percent reduction in body fat in that time, and a 15 percent increase in muscle in their stomachs and butts.
Back in the days when I worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, covering the politics and societies of a vast expanse of territory stretching from Belarus to Kyrgyzstan, hardly a day went by without my encountering the good works of George Soros. It was in Prague, my home base, where the Hungarian-born financier began as a backer of worthy causes by presciently supporting Charter 77, the pro-democracy movement led by the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel. My boyfriend at the time hailed from neighboring Slovakia, a country whose authoritarian leader, Vladimir Meciar, had been brought down in 1998, partly through the dedicated work of groups funded by Soros' Open Society Foundations (OSF). Another ex took his graduate degree from Central European University, the Budapest-based institution founded by Soros and which is currently under threat of being expelled from the country by right-wing nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.By the time I finished my European tour of duty, it had become axiomatic that, were I to encounter a democracy activist in Baku, a lesbian-rights campaigner in Bishkek, or a press freedom advocate in Belgrade, more likely than not they would have been beneficiaries of a Soros grant, scholarship, or in his employ. To take but one example of his generosity and foresight usually overlooked both by his detractors and fans, he is by far the largest private benefactor to the cause of the Roma--those long-persecuted, socially excluded, forgotten people of Europe.Soros was remarkably clairvoyant about the vast amounts of money, expertise, and political commitment that would be necessary to repair the damage Communism had wrought on Central and Eastern Europe. At a 1989 conference in Potsdam, just months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Soros proposed a Marshall Plan for the region. He was, he later recalled, "literally laughed at." So Soros did what he has since repeatedly done upon encountering a problem that no one seemed intent on fixing: He shelled out his own money.Over the course of the subsequent three decades, Soros spent billions of dollars funding organizations and initiatives devoted to promoting liberal democracy, independent media, good government, transparency, and pluralism across the former Soviet space. It was all work that the United States and its allies in Western Europe should have been funding, but, as a consequence of the post-Cold War hangover, shortsightedly scrimped. A Holocaust survivor, Soros personally experienced the fragile nature of democracy, and rightly worried that the region could revert back to its dark traditions unless the West consolidated democracy, human rights, the rule of law and market economies. Almost 30 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, his fears look evermore prescient."The system of robber capitalism that has taken hold in Russia is so iniquitous that people may well turn to a charismatic leader promising national revival at the cost of civil liberties," Soros wrote in 1997, three years before a former KGB colonel named Vladimir Putin would be plucked from relative obscurity to become president of that benighted land. "As things stand, it does not take very much imagination to realize that the global open society that prevails at present is likely to prove a temporary phenomenon."Obviously, America could greatly use the steadfast defender of political inquiry and free thought that George Soros was, and continues to be, in Eastern Europe. But here in America, Soros chose another route, to support a team rather than a mission. And on that team are some of the forces of illiberalism that threaten to rip apart the open society here in the same way that those on the other end of the political spectrum are ripping it apart in Europe. [...]The American conservative critique of George Soros carries a different valence than the European right-wing nationalist one, and for two reasons. The first is rooted in simple geography. When the government of Hungary, a country from where over 600,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz with the connivance of a local gendarmerie whose efficiency impressed even the SS, launches an all-of-government crusade against a prominent Jewish figure, and does so in the midst of an already extensive campaign of Holocaust revisionism encompassing the creation of new historical institutes, museums, history textbooks, and a memorial in Budapest's most prominent public square dedicated to whitewashing the country's past crimes, it is unquestionably anti-Semitic.Why? Because it is clearly part of a large, concerted, overtly anti-Semitic campaign of historical revisionism, which aims to demonize Jews while at the same time whitewashing atrocities committed against them, on behalf of people who claim a direct historical descent from the perpetrators of those atrocities.When, on the other hand, American conservatives, who claim no such blood-and-soil fascist pedigree, and operate in a completely different socio-cultural-political environment, assert that George Soros generously funds a variety of partisan Democratic and left-wing organizations--a well-documented fact, despite the protestations of The Washington Post's "Fact Checker"--well, it certainly has the potential for being anti-Semitic, if those conservatives deploy traditionally anti-Semitic tropes. But the mere mention of George Soros' name in connection with the many political outfits he funds is not intrinsically anti-Semitic. Many American conservatives oppose Soros not because he's Jewish. They oppose him because he's liberal.
[T]he popular perception is that wildfires burn through these communities like a wall of flames. In fact, small, burning embers -- firebrands -- blown in advance of the fire are the primary cause of structural fires."When we look at the big flames but not the firebrands, we miss the principal igniter and pay attention to the show," Cohen said.Billions of these embers fly into neighborhoods, landing onto flammable roofs, into vegetation around the structure and rain gutters choked with leaves and needles.Big flame fronts, on the other hand, are less effective in igniting structures because they burn fast -- often consuming their fuels in about a minute or less in one location -- and move along often so quickly as to not consume the structures themselves.Yet in the face of increasingly severe and deadly wildfires throughout the country, Cohen maintains that it is possible to decrease the vulnerability of urban development in the face of these events."Uncontrolled extreme wildfires are inevitable," he said, "but does that mean these disasters are inevitable? No. We have great opportunities as homeowners to prevent our houses from igniting during wildfires."Pangburn's assessment -- that the Camp fire in Paradise was an urban conflagration, structure to structure -- opens the door for fire behaviorists to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the state's codes for protecting property in fire-prone, rural environments.The mandate in California, as stated in Public Resources Code Section 4291, is clear: A 100-foot perimeter of "defensible space" must be maintained in "land that is covered with flammable material."While the 100-foot requirement is appropriate, it is important to begin thinking closer to the structure itself and work out in concentric circles, Cohen said."We have to take care of everything from five feet out," he said, "so that when it burns, it doesn't produce enough radiation to ignite the structure or produce enough flames to contact the structure."The goal is to distinguish between structure fires and wildland fires and to understand that communities can be separated from wildland fire.We don't have to live in ammo bunkers, Cohen said, and we don't have to entirely eliminate fire from within the perimeter, just ensure that fires that occur within 100 feet don't burn long enough or intensely enough to ignite other objects.A defensible perimeter also provides residents with more safety options as fire approaches.Cohen refers to the story of the medical staff and patients from the hospital in Paradise who took refuge in a home. Climbing on the roof with hoses and clearing pine needles from the rain gutters, they were able to survive."A house that doesn't burn is the best place to be during a wildfire," he said.However, the 100-foot requirement in California stops at the property line, which creates a situation where homes can be built beside one another within that perimeter.If multiple homes share this perimeter, then each home is a potential ignition source, and homeowners cannot create a defensible space beyond their property line if that means trespassing on someone else's property."All it takes is one house to catch on fire, and the heat and embers put the other houses in jeopardy," Pangburn said.
The immediate fallout from Khashoggi's murder has tainted the two principal architects and managers of current U.S.-Saudi ties, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. The incident and its immediate aftermath revealed the extent to which the bilateral relationship has been personalized in the hands of the impetuous and reckless young royal and the inexperienced and unqualified White House adviser. There is no way of knowing what side arrangements the two have struck as part of their broader bargain over regional policy, as their conversations have often taken place outside of formal channels with no official documentation or follow-up. But Kushner's urgent need for capital to save his family's real estate business combined with Saudi Arabia's culture of corruption makes such private channels a red flag for potential conflict of interest. In any case, Kushner has clearly been tainted by his close association with the now-toxic MBS.The same is true for the Washington think tank ecosystem, which is awash in Saudi and other Gulf money. This problem is neither new nor unreported, but the Khashoggi affair has once again shined the spotlight on it. In all fairness, there is no proof that the Gulf Arab states' patronage of Washington think tanks changes or determines their experts' opinions. In most cases, it serves more to amplify sympathetic voices than to outright buy them. Nor are the Gulf states the only U.S. partners that seek to shape policy debates in Washington, whether through think tanks or professional lobbyists. In normal times, the influence bought by Gulf money smacks of simple corruption, and U.S. support for the Gulf regimes can be justified by the realpolitik necessities of navigating the region. But the shocking nature of Khashoggi's murder highlights the Gulf states' political illiberalism and the disconnect between U.S. values and policy in ways that are more difficult to defend and sustain.The rot extends to America's private sector, as illustrated by the mad scramble among U.S. corporations to distance themselves from the upcoming Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, the so-called Davos in the Desert conference. The most visible aspects of the problem are in the energy, financial and weapons industries. President Donald Trump pointedly refused to cancel any of the pending Saudi arms purchases--whose actual value is far below the $110 billion he has trumpeted--as part of any punitive measures for Riyadh's involvement in Khashoggi's death. But MBS' most recent tour to the U.S. earlier this year included a high-profile stop in Silicon Valley, the destination for billions of dollars in Saudi investment across a range of tech start-ups. And it's particularly troubling that so many media companies were among the sponsors of the Riyadh conference, even if they have withdrawn from the event under the circumstances.
U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith attended and graduated from a segregation academy that w[as] set up so that white parents could avoid having to send their children to schools with black students, a yearbook reveals.A group photo in the 1975 edition of The Rebel--the Lawrence County Academy Yearbook--illustrates the point. High-school cheerleaders smile at the camera as they lie on the ground in front of their pom-poms, fists supporting their heads. In the center, the mascot, dressed in what appears to be an outfit designed to mimic that of a Confederate general, offers a salute as she holds up a large Confederate flag.Third from the right on the ground is a sophomore girl with short hair, identified in the caption as Cindy Hyde.The photo, and the recently appointed Republican senator's attendance at one of the many private schools that was set up to bypass integration, adds historic context to comments she made in recent weeks about a "public hanging" that drew condemnations from across the political spectrum.
The Khashoggi affair similarly confirms several fundamental truths about Trump. The first and most obvious is that his narrow, idiosyncratic and sometimes personal interests take precedence over the defense of traditional American values and even the expectation of honest treatment by an ally. Not just Mohammed's fellow Arab rulers but despots everywhere will study this case and conclude: If you heap flattery on Trump, court him with exotic entertainment, patronize his family businesses and promise to buy American, you can get away with outrages that would once have ensured censure and sanction from Washington.The United States has always tolerated human rights abuses by friendly dictators, but there were limits -- as Chile's Augusto Pinochet, the shah of Iran and, more recently, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak discovered. By refusing to impose sanctions on the Saudi crown prince even after the CIA concluded he was responsible for the Khashoggi murder, Trump has set a new standard. No atrocity is too much -- not even sawing up a critical journalist and then baldly lying about it to the president and secretary of state.The resulting open season on dissidents, journalists and human rights activists by regimes that used to worry about U.S. reaction will be compounded by a second Trump message: Abductions and murders in other countries are now okay. Western governments have been trying to resist a dangerous trend of international kidnappings and assassinations by Russia and China. Vladimir Putin incurred new sanctions when he tried to poison a KGB defector in Britain. Yet Trump showed no particular interest in the fact that Khashoggi was attacked not just on the territory of another nation but inside a diplomatic facility, a double offense to international norms nearly unprecedented in its audacity. That Turkey is a NATO member that the United States is bound to defend also didn't matter.
[Saida Qarash, a spokesperson of the Tunisian government,] said Tunisia condemns Khashoggi's murder, and stressed that her country's position calls for revealing the truth.According to Tunisian activist and former leader of the al-Irada party Tarek Kahlawi, hundreds of people are expected to gather in front of the presidential palace in Carthage, in conjunction with the crown prince's arrival."It is a shame that Tunisia, which has witnessed a democratic transition and a revolution against tyranny and dictatorship, will receive a criminal whose hands were stained with the blood of Saudis and Yemenis," he told Al Jazeera.Kahlawi explained that the protest tent is a "citizenship initiative" that was called upon by all political parties to protest against the visit of the crown prince.Hamma Hammami, the spokesperson of the main opposition Popular Front party, also condemned the upcoming visit of MBS and considered it a "provocation to the Tunisian people and its revolution and principles"."We will not welcome the devastator of Yemen and its people, the one who is suspected of being behind the gruesome killing of Khashoggi, and the leader of normalising with the Zionist entity at the expense of the Palestinian people," Hammami told a local Tunisian radio station.For his part, Emad Al-Daimi, the leader of the People's Movement party, warned Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi in a Facebook post of the consequences of "committing a mistake by allowing bin Salman to desecrate the soil of Tunisia."A team of Tunisian lawyers said they would file a lawsuit, commissioned by bloggers and journalists who are demanding a ban on the visit.In an open letter addressed to Essebsi, the Tunisian press syndicate said the aim of MBS' visit to Tunisia was to "whitewash his bloody record because of his involvement in human rights violations".
Bahrain's Sunni-Muslim ruling Al Khalifa family has kept a lid on dissent since the Shia opposition staged a failed uprising in 2011. Saudi Arabia sent in troops to help crush the unrest in a mark of concern that any power-sharing concession by Bahrain could inspire Saudi Arabia's own Shia minority.Riyadh regards the neighbouring island nation, which does not possess vast oil wealth like other Gulf states, as a critical ally in its proxy wars with Iran in the Middle East.Bahrain, which is home to the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, has closed the main opposition groups, barred their members from running in elections and prosecuted scores of people, many described by human rights groups as activists, in mass trials."Clearly, legislatures from the world's leading democratic states believe that the upcoming election in Bahrain lacks legitimacy. You simply cannot crush, torture and imprison your entire opposition, call for a pseudo-election, and then demand the respect of the international community," said Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, director of the UK-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD).
Ideologues already know the only verdict they'll accept.Opposition to the Kavanaugh nomination was based on the principle that self-professed "survivors" must be believed and that accused males must be condemned, regardless of the paucity of evidence against them. That principle, already ubiquitous on college campuses, got an assist from the federal government in 2011, when the Obama administration released a so-called guidance (an informal federal directive of murky legal status) on college rape proceedings. The guidance strongly discouraged cross-examination of the accuser and required schools to use the lowest possible standard of proof for finding a defendant guilty of sexual assault. It promulgated a broad definition of actionable sexual harassment--"unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature"--that ignored relevant Supreme Court precedent and that would extend to an unwanted request for a date. Since 2011, due-process deficiencies in campus-rape proceedings have become ever more widespread. Colleges routinely deny defendants the opportunity to review all the evidence, fail to provide an impartial decision-maker, and ignore the presumption of innocence. The accused is regularly forbidden the assistance of counsel. In 2014, a Title IX officer at Washington and Lee University issued a lugubrious warning to a male student--"a lawyer can't help you here"--before expelling him for sexual assault.The proposed Education Department regulation tries to end these abuses. Ironically, in an administration regularly charged with ignoring the law, the DOE has carefully followed the legal framework for promulgating new federal rules. The 2011 Obama guidance was issued as a fait accompli; Donald Trump's DOE, by contrast, is giving the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed rule before it becomes final.And the feminist establishment is responding as it does to any challenge to its ideological hegemony: with an attack of the vapors. The manager of Know Your IX, an advocacy group, first heard about the new regulation in a grocery store and sank to the ground in shock, she said. How her fellow shoppers viewed this Victorian swoon is unknown, but it recalls the flight of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins when Harvard's then-president Larry Summers was discussing the unequal sex distribution of high-end math skills. Hopkins would have thrown up had she stayed in the room, she later explained. NARAL, the abortion-rights group, tweeted that the new campus-rape tribunal rule was "absolutely sickening."It is the extension of due-process rights to males accused of sexual assault that sickens the activists. In their view of justice, due process is zero-sum: if a male receives procedural rights, the female accuser must by definition lose hers. "These changes are designed to flip Title IX on its head and give rights to accused students when Title IX was supposed to be protecting those experiencing sexual discrimination," a senior staff attorney with SurvJustice told the Chronicle of Higher Education.
At lunchtime, the Sushiro restaurant near Tokyo's Ogikubo train station is packed with families, couples and business people, but one thing is missing: staff.Instead of receptionists, diners use a touch panel to find a table. At their seats, they navigate a tablet to order from a menu spanning some 130 items including sushi, ramen noodles, fried chicken and hot coffee. The dishes are delivered directly to the table via a conveyor belt. A self-serving register awaits them on their way out.Staff can be found inside the kitchen, where they tirelessly churn out as many as 1,500 dishes per hour. But instead of skilled sushi chefs, many are young foreign part-time workers who have never eaten sushi in their home countries. Their lack of experience is complemented by a dazzling array of machines that mold rice, boil noodles and tell humans what to make next. Using big data, Sushiro's system predicts how many customers will come in the next 15 minutes and what they will order.For decades, conveyor belt sushi chains have embraced robots to deal with high fish prices. Now, as rising part-time wages and sluggish consumer demand cut deep into margins of restaurants operators, they are emerging as a role model for Japan's $213 billion restaurant industry. Chains serving tempura, beef bowls and other Japanese cuisines are racing to replace humans with machines.
In 2017, NFL games averaged 1.89 fourth-down attempts per game, and offenses picked up the first down on 46.4 percent of fourth-down attempts. So far this year, NFL games are averaging 2.0 fourth-down attempts per game, and offenses are successful on 62.5 percent of fourth-down attempts.In other words, NFL teams are getting a little more aggressive about going for it -- and a lot better at picking up the first down when they do go for it. That indicates that offenses are spending more time installing fourth-down plays, and getting smarter about calling them at the right time.
This article based on the 22nd Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion & World Affairs, given by Dr. Chris Seiple on 30 October 2018 at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia.The Foreign Policy Research Institute was kind enough to put me up at the Union League. It was founded in 1862 as a "patriotic society" to support the Union and the policies of President Abraham Lincoln, and then work with freed slaves in the South after the war.Why did Lincoln need such support? Because he was fighting a religious nationalism not unlike the examples above. As Yale historian Harry S. Stoudt writes in his 2006 book, Upon the Altar of the Nation:Clerical voices--which mattered greatly as moral arbiters and upholders of a virtuous social order--so meshed evangelical Christianity with Southern republicanism that one seemingly could not exist without the other. . . . Christianity offered the only terms out of which a national [Southern] identity could be constructed and a violent war pursued . . . God, who had ordained or at least permitted slavery, would never bless the Christ-denying, humanistic North (pp. 10, 43, 97).In reacting to the Equal Justice Initiative 2015 report on the thousands of lynchings between 1877 and 1950, a writer for The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, himself from Louisiana, concluded the following in his blog, "When ISIS Ran the American South:"No, the American South (and other parts of America where racial terrorists ran rampant) was never run by fanatical theocrats who used grotesque public murders as a tool of terror [like ISIS]. But if you were a black in the years 1877-1950, this was a distinction without much meaningful difference.As the October 2018 tragedy at Tree of Life Synagogue reminds us, this white nationalist cancer is not only still here, it is metastasizing. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports that over the last decade, 71% of domestic extremist-related killings in the United States were linked to right-wing extremists. The ADL also reported a 57% increase in anti-Semitism in 2017. [...]President Lincoln, of course, set the example we need, when considering such things. As you might know, when asked amidst the Civil War whose side was God on, he famously responded:Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My great concern is to be on God's side. For God is always right!There was a deep humility in Lincoln's theology. He absolutely believed in an Absolute, but recognized that he could not know, let alone speak for the Absolute, absolutely.How do we reclaim such a posture, in both our policies and our practices?In April 2012, the late Jack Templeton, patron of this lecture series, challenged me to codify my experiences at the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) into a theory of change. He wanted to know how and why IGE's approach effected positive and sustainable change. He wanted to know why IGE was worth funding.Before I could produce a theory of change (which would eventually take form through this article), I had to wrestle with the words that I had begun to use to describe the complicated places that IGE had been engaging around the world. My experience overseas had one common factor: the relationship between the ethno-religious majority and the ethno-religious minorities. Almost all situations had some element of the tension between the two, of the former's desire to exercise power without including the latter.Five sets of terms emerged from my early years at IGE. In using these terms to illustrate a positive vs. negative vision, I do not mean to suggest that some words are bad. I simply use them to elicit better thinking about the approach (and values) that is the best of America.Respect vs. Tolerance. Respect values the essence of the other's identity, without sacrificing the substance of one's own. In other words, "respecting" those beliefs does not necessarily lend moral equivalence. Respect simply means that everyone should respect the inherent dignity of every human, to include the innate liberty of conscience common to all. Respect therefore encourages the right to exercise that liberty of conscience, even if the conclusions drawn are different from one's own.Tolerance is not enough. It allows merely for the presence of the other. No one wants to be tolerated.Faith vs. religion. Faith is the mystery, majesty, and mercy of something greater than oneself, resulting in a constant humility of theology. It involves absolutely believing in an Absolute, but knowing it impossible to speak for the Absolute, absolutely. There are core values, to be sure, but there is also respect for the market place of ideas and beliefs, and that much can be learned from them.Religion, on the other hand, absolutely speaks for the Absolute. There is nothing new under the sun, for the lines are clear, as the mind of God is known. There is no market place because religion holds a monopoly on truth. There is no need to listen or learn.Multi-faith vs. interfaith. Multi-faith acknowledges and names--at the appropriate time--the irreconcilable theological differences between and among the faith traditions. These differences are not named to divide, but to understand and demonstrate respect for the essence of someone else's identity. In other words, it is impossible to know someone without knowing their core beliefs.Interfaith, however, tends to suggest a blending of theologies. Too often, interfaith dialogues water-down the differences, reducing rich traditions to such banal commonalities that there seemingly were no differences to begin with. Discovering common values only possesses meaning when the richness of the different points of moral departure are also understood. Put differently, if there is no understanding of difference, then there can be no respect. Incidentally, when real mutual respect takes root, practical collaboration tends to happen faster.Patriotism vs. nationalism. Patriotism is pride in one's country--a legally defined state with international boundaries, that includes many nations and faiths. Patriotism is defined by what it is for, including everyone as equal citizens under the transparent rule of law, with the opportunity for each to practice and bring their beliefs to bear in the public square.Nationalism tends to be a xenophobic pride of the ethno-religious majority, defining against ethnic/religious minorities. It seeks a nation-state: a state with one homogenous people group. [...]Put differently, the above five comparisons are wrestling with the fundamental question of civilization: how do we live with our deepest differences (without killing each other)? Another way to frame these five concepts is to ask this question: how do we move beyond tolerance and diversity, beyond tolerating someone's presence beside you, as we live side-by-side?Seemingly, there is only one answer: mutual engagement based on mutual respect for the other's liberty of conscience. To borrow from Star Trek, liberty of conscience seems to be the Prime Directive of civilization. As Sir John Templeton wrote in Wisdom from World Religions: "Conscience is as essential as the air we breathe . . . present wherever we look and whenever we look" (p. 174).William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, would agree. In The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1671), he wrote: "Imposition, restraint, and persecution for matters relating to conscience directly invade the divine prerogative, and divest the Almighty of a due, proper to none besides himself." Or, less eloquently, but perhaps more memorably, Roger Williams said: "Forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God."The above discussion speaks to a more comprehensive concept. Call it: Covenantal Pluralism. Covenantal Pluralism entails the obligation, the responsibility, and intentional pledge to engage, respect, and protect the other's liberty of conscience, without necessarily lending moral equivalency to the other's resulting beliefs and behavior.Covenantal Pluralism requires a faithful patriotism that seeks an entrepreneurial competition--i.e., a cooperative competition that is loving, spirited, and constructive--that stands against the monopoly of religious nationalism. This Covenantal Pluralism, therefore, is not only the right thing to do, it is in everyone's self-interest.