THANKS, UR!:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday called on Russia to get out of Turkey's way in Syria and allow Turkish forces to deal with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. 

In a speech to supporters, Erdogan said Turkey had "entered Syria at the demand of the Syrian people and not at the demand of Assad." 

THE TRUMP BRAND:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's senior aide Natan Eshel said that "hate is what unites" the right-wing camp led by the Likud party and that negative campaigning works well on "non-Ashkenazi voters" in a leaked recording revealed by Channel 12 on Saturday.

Eshel, a former Netanyahu chief of staff who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct, continues to work with the premier, leading the previous two coalition negotiations over the past year.

In the newly revealed recording, he can be heard discussing the party's campaign strategy with an unnamed person whom he is trying to recruit as a political adviser, according to the report. In the tape, Eshel says that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit's decision to indict Netanyahu in three corruption cases actually helped the premier in his campaign. "He went up by 20 percent" Eshel recalls, though it was unclear what numbers he was referring to.

"If you haven't stolen, what exactly have you come [into politics] for? We've checked this. And to my shock, they [the public] do not understand [this notion] of going into politics to do what's good for the nation. You go into politics in order to steal and you need to be a man," Eshel claims, not yet specifying which public he was referring to.

"Now, in this public, I'll call it... non-Ashkenazi...What gets them worked up? Why do they hate the press?...They hate everything and we've succeeded in whipping up that hatred. Hatred is what unites our camp," Eshel says plainly.

(self reference alert):

My political coordinates are 52.8% Right, 11.1% Communitarian https://t.co/xrDhb3CE5N via @idr_labs

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 29, 2020

THANKS, DONALD:

In April 2019, activists hired by his Likud sought to intimidate Arab voters by deploying with cameras at polling stations in Arab areas; the Arab turnout in April was a low 50%.

In September, however, the Israeli Arab community evidently decided not to be deterred and, apparently encouraged by the reunification of the Joint List of four largely Arab factions, its turnout rose dramatically, to 60%, and the Joint List won 13 seats -- up from 10 in April.

Ahead of Monday's elections, the Channel 12 survey gave the Joint List a record 14 seats, and Channel 13 predicted 15 seats, with pollsters assessing that Arab turnout could reach some 65% -- not far below the national average. (Overall turnout in April was 68.5%, and in September, 69.7%.)

BEFORE PETE WILSON TURNED THE GOP NATIVIST, GHWB CARRIED CA IN 1988:

CALIFORNIA
Biden 60% (+25)
Trump 35%
.
Sanders 59% (+23)
Trump 36%
.
Buttigieg 56% (+21)
Trump 35%
.
Klobuchar 55% (+20)
Trump 35%
.
Bloomberg 55% (+20)
Trump 35%
.
Warren 56% (+19)
Trump 37%@CNN 2/22-26https://t.co/1HpBUhhfLB

— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) February 28, 2020

THE MORE BEAUTIFUL THE MYTH THE TRUER:

As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that for Lewis and his Inkling companions, myths were not merely invented stories for interested literary hobbyists. Many today might claim "myth" to be simply that which is primitive or untrue, and therefore easily dismissed as irrelevant in discussions of truth and meaning. However, beneath modern culture's facile dismissal of the genre, there simmers a longing for myth Starr sees as expressed in the resurgent popularity of Star Wars, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books and their film adaptations, and even the comic-superheroes-turned-film-stars trend of recent years. Modern man is divided against himself, longing for transcendence in a world that has evacuated meaning from all manner of things which used to inspire awe: stars are simply balls of gas, not beacons that draw forth men's dreams; our bodies are mere fodder for manipulation, not the holy dwellings of our souls; our children are commodities chosen, rather than gifts received. Scientific materialism's tidal wave of cold rationality has washed over and washed out modern existence. This is no small problem for Christians, in particular those who depend upon the grace conveyed through sacramental matter, and who look forward to eternity as the dwelling of glorified, embodied souls. 

Starr points out, in his musings upon the fictional title Nymphs and their Ways, that Lewis was fully aware of these modern trends when he crafted his tales. Starr links Lewis' interest in mythology to his belief that the resolution to modernity's dilemma of meaningless matter turns on the centrality of the Incarnation--for Lewis, the "grand miracle" par excellence. If the divine Word has united itself with the physical world in Christ, not only man but all of nature is engaged in the movement towards redemption. Matter itself has been glorified in the Ascension and thus cannot be empty of meaning. Starr posits that this unification of the divine with the world is echoed in Lewis' tales of mythological creatures like nymphs, said to be the indwelling spirits of trees and springs. Such creatures, imaginary though they may be, are an oblique reminder to moderns that matter can be "permeated by spirit" and that our "universe is far more organism than machine."  

Myth is also, for Lewis, an important way of knowing. It has "epistemological value" for "providing knowledge (in ways that other methods of communication cannot)." In one of the more challenging portions of The Faun's Bookshelf, Starr addresses Lewis' fascination with Owen Barfield's book Poetic Diction, which he uses to make the point that a myth is not a rational articulation of an abstract point, but rather a primal experience. For modern readers, experiencing a myth the "right way" is closer to the visual, non-verbal experience of a film, or the appreciation of a symphony, in which meaning is conveyed without words and understood without articulation, at a deep human level, prior to, and separate from, the experience captured by linguistic analysis. Lewis described his own experiences of this dynamic while he was reading Norse myth or wandering through nature as being "stabbed by joy," a feeling he later identified as a foretaste of the glory of God. This enlivening of the imagination by myth, nature, or poetry was key for Lewis, pivotal not only in his own conversion, but, as he asserts in various texts, is a crucial complement to theological reason on the journey of any Christian. Hearts ill-trained in relishing that which, on the natural level, precedes or even exceeds articulation, may indeed struggle to engage on the supernatural level in a life of genuine prayer--in swimming freely with the Spirit between verbal address, meditative pondering, and contemplative indwelling.  

BUY STOCKS:

[M]ost public health officials now feel that widespread infection outside of the current hot zones like China and South Korea is no longer a matter of if but when. Containing the virus is likely impossible. So the next question is: Just how bad will the cases here be? In China, the death rate has been reported as zero in children under 10 and very low, 0.2 percent, in healthy adults. Unfortunately, the rate is far higher, as high as 14.8 percent, in the sick and elderly (though as is always the case in outbreaks like this, it is hard to know how many of these older and often chronically ill hospitalized patients died with COVID-19, not of COVID-19). The reported overall death rate of 2 percent is essentially a weighted average of these numbers.

So what does the case of a young and otherwise healthy patient contracting the disease despite no obvious exposure to a contagious source patient imply? That there are likely many asymptomatic cases in our communities already. Asymptomatic transmission has already been reported in China. In the first reported case, the source patient transmitted the infection to others but never became sick herself.

If this turns out to be common, it's a good thing. It implies that the case fatality rate--the number of deaths divided by the number of infections--of this novel coronavirus is likely to be far, far lower than the reported statistics.

ONE OF US:

In the Book of Genesis, the account given of the Fall of Man is, in psychological terms, perplexing. We are told that Eve is approached by a serpent who contradicts God's instructions, promising that she and Adam "shall be as gods" if they eat the forbidden fruit. We are told that the tree appeared, in Eve's mind, "pleasant to the eyes" and desirable in lending her wisdom. We are told that Eve succumbed to temptation, ate the fruit first, and then gave it to Adam, who did the same. We are told that they realized their nakedness, felt shame, and confessed their sins:

And [God] said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

There is an almost comical absurdity in that. The entire fate of human nature thrown off course -- with thousands of years of murder, rape, and war to follow -- and for no discernible reason. [...]

In her essay about women writers, A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf made passing reference to "Milton's bogey." One possible interpretation of this was that she meant that Milton's Eve was not really about a woman at all, but about a man's perception of a woman. Why did Eve take the fruit? Genesis doesn't say. But in Milton's version Eve was either excessively stupid or vain while Adam's only sin was loving his wife too much (i.e., more than he loved God). It's no wonder the feminists don't like it.

YOUR RIGHTS END AT YOUR NEIGHBOR'S NOSE:

SUPER ON BRAND:

Naomi Seibt, the 19-year-old German climate science denier being marketed as the right's answer to activist Greta Thunberg, praised a white nationalist while speaking on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.

During a question-and-answer session at the end of the panel entitled "Energy, Costs and Defeating the Climate Delusion," a Business Insider reporter asked Seibt if she is still a fan of white nationalist Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian vlogger.

"I am still a fan, absolutely," Seibt responded. 

THE TRUMPBOTS HATE AMERICA:

SO MUCH WINNING:

New data from Ballot Access News, which tracks registrations in the 31 states that require voters to register by party, shows that independents account for 29.09 percent of voters in them, compared with 28.87 percent for Republicans. As recently as 2004, Republicans outpaced independents by nearly 10 percentage points.

There are still way more registered Democrats; 39.66 percent of voters are registered with that party.

This marks the first time since party registration began in the early 1900s that the number of registered independents in the United States has surpassed members of either major political party, according to Ballot Access News.

AND THIS IS DONALD AT HIS PEAK:

Trump is angry that the television network that usually fawns over him published a poll showing him losing reelection in 2020.

Donald Trump on Friday criticized Fox News for publishing a poll that shows every top-tier Democratic presidential contender would beat Trump if the election were held today. [...]

The Fox News poll found:

Former Vice President Joe Biden would beat Trump, 49% to 41%;

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would beat Trump, 49% to 41%;

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg would beat Trump; 48% to 40%;

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would beat Trump, 46% to 43%; and

And former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg would beat Trump, 45% to 42%.

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

As of today, the President's average job approval is 43% and the generic congressional ballot advantage for Dems is 7%. This is exactly where things stood in October 2018 when Dems won a historic victory in the midterms.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) February 28, 2020

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

MarketWatch: How bad is the situation in China?

Leland Miller: Since 2012, when we started collecting data, we have never seen our headline index turn negative. This month it did. Our flash data shows nearly every major measurement is in contraction. I do always stress that this is early data.

(Only about half of the roughly 3,500 firms that report in the full-month version contribute to the flash report.) [...]

MarketWatch: Which is the single data point that's most telling to you?

Miller: The numbers in the property sector are remarkable. It confirms this sector is at the bottom of the food chain in China right now, the last priority for Beijing in a long list of priorities. Property is extremely important because it's the sector in which most Chinese have large portions of their wealth. Chinese people can't get money out of the country so they're stuck with only a few opportunities to diversify. The bond market is scary. The stock market is scary. Property has always been the least scary thing and the Chinese government has always known how important it is as a store of household wealth. It shows they're more afraid of the bankruptcies of small and medium-sized enterprises. At least there may finally be a culling of the herd in terms of (real estate) developers and overleveraged firms allowed to die.

On the positive side, we're seeing the job growth numbers in slight contraction. It's remarkable they're not much worse than that. This is an economy that could be in contraction for a long time, yet firms aren't firing people. You can't pay your people, you have no cash flow, no customers, so you're paying them to stay home right now. (The lack of layoffs) is one reason you're not seeing central bank stimulus yet.

IF IT WERE APARTHEID THEY'D OPPOSE UNIVERSAL RIGHTS:

Israelis are satisfied with the way democracy is functioning, but support in the Jewish state is significantly lower than in most countries for freedom of expression, including an uncensored press, internet freedom and freedom for human rights groups to operate freely, according to a Pew Research Center report published Thursday.

Unlike in most nations polled, support for freedom of speech in Israel declined between 2015 and 2019. Only 51 percent say it is very important that people can say what they want without government censorship, compared with 58% of Israelis who said so four years earlier.

Support in Israel also dropped for internet freedom -- from 51% who said it is very important in 2015 to 40%.

The level of support in Israel for freedom for human rights groups to operate freely, 37%, was the lowest among all the 34 countries surveyed.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

So, how should one approach the problem instead? Traditional economic models largely ignore how climate risk interacts with the state of the economy. But what if investments in emissions reductions followed the same logic used by professional asset managers? There is a good reason why investors put money into bonds despite their average returns falling well below those of stocks: bonds are less risky. Thus, even when the economy is faring poorly, some investments will still pay off.

In Climate Shocks, one of our main characters is Robert Litterman, a former top risk manager for Goldman Sachs who was shocked to find out how standard benefit-cost analyses of climate change were treating risk and uncertainty. Together with Kent Daniel of the Columbia Business School, Litterman and I set out to build a simple climate-economic model that takes seriously the basic insights from the financial industry.

Unlike the Stern Review, which simply selected a discount rate ex cathedra, we made the discount rate an outcome rather than an input in our approach. Treating atmospheric carbon as an "asset" (albeit one with negative payoffs), we calibrated a carbon price, following the methods used by the finance industry to price assets. In the end, no matter how hard we tried, we could not get the price of carbon below $100 per ton.

Meanwhile, other analyses have come up with carbon prices ranging from $200 to $400 or more per ton. But even if one stipulates that the price should be $100 per ton, that would translate into around $0.90 per gallon (3.8 liters) of gasoline - a charge at the pump that would feel more like a revolution than like a modest policy measure.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Bernie Sanders's performance in the last debate before Super Tuesday was a bellowing, boorish mess. The Vermont senator's signature response when challenged was to pump up the volume, as though persuasiveness were measured in decibels. It was particularly excruciating to watch Pete Buttigieg attempt to inject some facts and reason into the proceedings, only to be interrupted again and again by Sanders's shouting.

When I expressed dismay to a Democratic friend, he assured me it was just "Bernie being Bernie." At least Sanders, the argument goes, speaks his mind. He is not scripted. He is true to himself. He may not play by the normal political rules, but he is the kind of outsider who will shake up the establishment.

This is further evidence of the disorienting, deja vu quality of our politics. In 2016, I was told by Republican friends that, at least, Donald Trump speaks his mind. He isn't scripted. He is true to himself. He doesn't play by the normal political rules, but he is the kind of outsider who will shake up the establishment.

I'm not contending that the moral character of the two men is comparable. Sanders's is clearly superior, though this is clearing only an ankle-high bar. But both men have benefited from a certain definition of political authenticity that allows them -- no, encourages them -- to be unpleasant, ill-mannered loudmouths.

MASTER DESTROYER:

Roosevelt and Moses had been feuding as far back as 1924, when the two clashed over funding for the Taconic State Parkway. (Roosevelt was then chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission; Moses was president of the Long Island State Park Commission.) Now Moses wanted another soaring bridge--not an unsightly tunnel--to connect Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, and he was determined to prevail over his old nemesis, now president of the United States.

But the Power Broker met his match as community groups, civic leaders, historic preservationists, Wall Street executives, and the mayor and the governor, not to mention friends of the New York Aquarium at Castle Garden--which would have been demolished to make way for the bridge--closed ranks in opposition to his imperious plan. "A bridge with its terminus and approaches at the Battery will seriously disfigure perhaps the most thrillingly beautiful and world renowned feature of this great city," wrote one opposition group.

But it was ultimately the secretary of war Harry Woodring, who intervened, scuttling Moses's bridge because it was "seaward of a vital naval establishment," the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Reportedly out of spite, Moses took retaliatory aim at the aquarium, one of the city's most popular attractions, shuttering it on the dubious grounds that construction of the tunnel would undermine Castle Garden's fragile foundation.

The last remnants of Little Syria were demolished in the early 1940s to make way for the entrance ramps to the tunnel. "Expediting auto traffic to suburbia took priority over the community of politically powerless city dwellers," New York University professor Jack Tchen wrote in his 2002 essay, "Whose Downtown?!?" "The Syrians had to leave and restart their businesses and their lives somewhere else."

"Most [Little Syria] residents were Christian, their loyalties divided only between St. George's Syrian Catholic Church at 103 Washington Street and St. Joseph's Maronite Church at 57 Washington Street," wrote The New York Times' David Dunlap in 2012. St. George's is one of just three remaining buildings from the days of Little Syria and was declared an official landmark in 2009 by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission. "It remains Lower Manhattan's most vivid reminder of the vanished ethnic community once known as the Syrian Quarter," wrote the commission in its report, "and of the time when Washington Street was the Main Street of Syrian America."

COME BACK, ADMIRAL POINDEXTER, ALL IS FORGIVEN:

GROWING UP:

We are the former leaders of the Dartmouth College Republicans, and we regret the impact of our actions and decisions on that organization and on the Dartmouth community. Let us make one thing perfectly clear: It was never our intention to hurt the organization that we worked so hard to build and grow. We recognize that recent events have brought scrutiny to the College Republicans, and we take any and all responsibility for the organization's failures during our tenure.

In today's political climate, it's easy to get carried away. Under our leadership, the College Republicans' public presence became purely oppositional, combatting the "radical left" and devoted to "owning the libs." When your only stance is to oppose that of others, you feel you have no meaningful choices but to escalate the rhetoric of political -- and interpersonal -- conflict. This compulsion leads to a vicious cycle of increasingly hostile and alienating provocations and interactions.

We have decided to break that cycle and sincerely ask the forgiveness of our colleagues and our campus. [...]

We hope that the College Republicans will now gain respect among the student body, maintain its independence from other organizations, hold fair and open elections each term, and wear its convictions on its sleeve. In any case, it must find new confidence by redefining itself. 

We can only hope that a more respectful and engaged College Republicans will now emerge. We wish the current leadership the best of luck.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

[T]he thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor.

Because they're scolds?

Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion. It's the sense of knowing what's important. In my stage show I tell jokes that make the audience roar with laughter, jokes about the Australians or the French or the Canadians or the Germans or the Italians. I make all these jokes and everybody laughs -- and we don't hate those groups of people, do we? Take this joke: "A guy walks into a bar and says to the barman, 'You hear the latest Irish joke?' The barman says, 'I should warn you, I'm Irish.' So the guy says, 'All right then, I'll tell it slowly.'" That's funny! But if you tell that joke and replace "Irish" with "barman who isn't very intelligent" it isn't funny at all. Why should we sacrifice laughter to the cause of politically correctness if that laughter isn't rooted in nastiness? This actually reminds me of an idea I had: Every year at the U.N. they should vote one particular nation to be the butt of the joke.

"This year, all cultural jokes will henceforth be made at the expense of the Danes."

That's right. They would just have to accept that they're the butt of the joke for a year. People find it hard to believe this, but unless we're talking about puns and wordplay, all humor is essentially critical. So to eliminate jokes that are at the expense of other people is to eliminate most jokes. If you laugh at someone, it's because his behavior is inappropriate. That's why you can't really be funny about Jesus Christ or St. Francis of Assisi, because everything they do is pretty appropriate.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

In Chile, for example, the right-wing administration of Gen. Augusto Pinochet oversaw a substantial decline in the country's illiteracy rate--from 11.7 percent in 1970 to just 4.5 percent in 1992--a remarkable achievement that, despite Sanders's expressed philosophy on authoritarian accomplishments, the candidate has yet to applaud on the campaign trail.

Sanders has similarly refused to acknowledge educational achievements under the bold right-wing leadership of Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain, where female literacy climbed from 72 percent in 1940 to 88 percent in 1970. Nor has Sanders remarked upon the dramatic increase in literacy among Portuguese children--from just 33 percent in 1930 to a whopping 97 percent in 1960--under António Salazar's Estado Novo in Portugal.

Indonesian dictator Suharto oversaw a violent anti-communist purge in the 1960s but is also "credited with greatly improving the country's economy, literacy rates, and public health," according to what is presumably Sanders's most trusted source of news (NPR). Millions were lifted out of poverty during Suharto's 30-year reign, yet Sanders maintains a deafening silence with respect to these achievements and those of other right-wing dictators. Sanders has similarly neglected Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, under whom the literacy rate increased from 60 percent in 1960 to 90 percent in 1990.

By refusing to acknowledge the full spectrum of dictatorial achievements, Sanders is not only betraying his own philosophy. He is also actively erasing the lived experience of millions worldwide who owe their educations to the benevolence of right-wing autocrats.

OF COURSE, LUKE APPLING TOOK SPAHN DEEP:

THIS IS THE TRUTH THAT THE LEFT/RIGHT CAN'T ACCEPT:

OUR PARTISANSHIP IS A FUNCTION OF OUR AGREEMENT:

IN FAIRNESS TO BERNIE...:

Cold War controversies seem irrelevant today. But it's worth asking why, when most American Jews were demanding freedom for Soviet Jewry and denouncing the anti-Semitic nature of the Communist regime, Bernie Sanders was not there. While Jews who cared about the fate of their brethren were demonstrating in the streets about Soviet tyranny and advocating for Prisoners of Zion, Sanders was denouncing American foreign policy aimed at pressuring his Russian friends. When some heroic Jews went to Russian to aid oppressed Jews and other dissidents, Sanders was traveling the world proclaiming his sympathy with Soviet allies and then honeymooning in the Socialist Motherland itself.

He may now depict himself as a champion of the underdog. But by the time Sanders became a public figure in the 1980s, the ideological romance of Socialism was long over, and all that was left was a struggle against tyranny in which his sympathies lay with the tyrants whom he imagined deserved support in their fight against American imperialism. There is no available evidence that he ever lifted a finger to fight for Soviet Jews.

We may not care today about the politics of the 1960s in which Sanders's identity was forged; however, the struggle for Soviet Jewry was the great Jewish moral test of the subsequent decades, and it is one he failed. If he asks us to trust him now to ensure that the 7 million Jews of Israel are not endangered by his policies, it's worth asking why he once thought defending Socialism was more important than the fate of millions of Soviet Jews. That is a question of morality, not ancient history.

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR (self-reference alert):

China is preparing to deploy 100,000 ducks to neighbouring Pakistan to help tackle swarms of crop-eating locusts.

Chinese agricultural experts say a single duck can eat more than 200 locusts a day and be more effective than pesticides.

WAS HE FAKING DECENCY TO RECRUIT PLAYERS...:

Has the former coach changed in the 11 years since he left Auburn? Or is Tuberville just recruiting again, a specialty that, for Tuberville anyway, involves saying whatever he needs to in exchange for a preferred result? (After agreeing to make Tuberville available for an interview, two campaign staffers stopped replying to The Washington Post's messages.)

"I've seen this guy in the heat of battle, and we've bled and cried together," said former Auburn quarterback Ben Leard, who's white and usually votes Republican. "It's a question on all of our minds. It's not just the African American minds; it's in all of our heads: 'Did he really mean that? Did Tubs type that?'"

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

What you may not have noticed is the sharp decline in another indicator, one that generates fewer fireworks than the stock market but to my mind is a more important economic variable: the interest rate. The yield, or interest rate paid, on the 10-year Treasury note fell to an all-time low of 1.33 percent Tuesday. Based on data since the early 1960s, the average yield on this type of security has been slightly north of 6 percent. [...]

[I]t is not incidental that even in the midst of all of our political craziness, from our volatile tweeter-in-chief to debate dynamics that would embarrass a third-grader, our public debt is still considered the safest in the world, meaning the risk of default (when the borrower fails to repay the lender) is as close to zero as you can get.

You might think that given their low returns -- yields were historically low even before the virus hit -- investors would think twice before boarding this flight to safety. But what matters in such times of stress is not just the absolute yield; it's the relative yield, meaning what's on offer from other countries lending low-risk debt. It so happens that in Europe and Japan, comparable rates to our low 10-year yield are negative, a weird situation of lenders paying borrowers to hold their money that predated the virus.

The main reason rates have been so low for so long is because economies here and abroad have hovered between pretty weak (Europe) and not that strong (United States). Interest rates tend to rise when economies threaten to overheat and push up inflation, but such pressures have been minimal for years.

This development is especially notable given that our unemployment rate is near a 50-year low and our fiscal deficits are unusually high. Econ 101 teaches that low unemployment and high deficits are a recipe for overheating, rising inflation and interest rates. But those textbooks hopefully are being rewritten, as reality says otherwise.

Globalization -- the much-increased integration of formerly dispersed economies -- means that everything, from exports and imports to viruses to capital, now flows much more freely around the globe. 

HATE IS A POOR SUBSTITUTE FOR WORTH:

In her recent book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, the author Julia Ebner describes how she infiltrated a number of extremist groups in order to understand from the inside what motivates and inspires their members. Whether Islamist or far-right, there are a striking number of similarities in their internal machinery. She describes how members are gradually radicalised in online forums and real-life meetings. Lines of argument or terminology that would be taboo in the wider world are regularly crossed and normalised. Meanwhile, the 'secrecy' of the group fosters a sense of belonging and special status: the feeling of being misunderstood and persecuted by the prevailing culture is constantly nourished.

An early chapter describes the chat on a white-power website, which is full of coded allusions and signifiers of Nazi sympathies: '88' referring to the initials 'HH' (Heil Hitler); WP (White Power); or W.O.T.A.N. (Will of the Aryan Nation). Many users have an intense interest in their genetics, she says, and are seeking out DNA-testing firms such as 23andMe and Ancestry in order to bolster their historical sense of white identity.

As might be predicted, however, white supremacists's genetic ancestry test results don't always match their own purity requirements, which can push them into profound identity crises. Sometimes, unexpected DNA results might lead them to question their existing racial philosophy -- but often instead they move into denial, reaching for "even more absurd conspiracy theories" to deny the validity of their test results, such as that Jews or 'global elites' are distorting the genetic tests as part of a plot to eradicate the white race. [...]

Anti-Semitism, of course, is one belief that white supremacists hold in common with Islamists. But both ideologies also dangle before followers the vision of a struggle, supercharged with importance and meaning, which will draw the devotee away from the contemptible, safe banalities of ordinary life.

NEVER MET AN ISLAMOPHOBE HE DOESN'T LOVE:

Now, Trump and Modi, those two illiberals, have found delight in each other's company. During his visit, Trump was full of praise for the Indian leader, whom he called "tough"--that being the ultimate compliment in Trumpworld. And on worldwide TV, Trump couldn't resist a little campaigning to the folks back home, as when he said, "Our borders will always be closed to terrorists and any form of extremism."

Yet mindful also of his friend, Trump added, "Every nation has the right to secure and control borders." This is surely a thesis statement for both Trumpism and Modism, and the American was happy to further conjoin the two, adding, "The United States and India are committed to working together to stop terrorists and to fight their ideology." [...]

In the shared Trump-Modi worldview, it's the majority that makes the rules. So Trump's Middle East "peace plan," for instance, is a frank concession--maybe proclamation is the better word--that Israel is going to decide what the Palestinians get.

In India, the Hindus are the majority--and they know it. So Hindutva must prevail. As one of Modi's colleagues in the BJP, Ravi Kishan, an action film star-turned-lawmaker, explained his thinking to The New York Times last year, "There are Muslim countries, there are Jew countries, everybody has their own identity. And we are a billion-plus, right? We must have one identity."

PURITAN NATION:

U-Haul, an Arizona-based moving company with about 30,000 workers, this month became one of the country's largest employers to stop hiring nicotine users -- a term that includes not just smokers but users of "nicotine products." This potentially covers people who test positive for nicotine because they are trying to give up smoking using vaping, gum or patches.

Like the Cleveland Clinic, U-Haul will allow those hired before the restriction to keep their jobs. And the hiring ban will only apply in the same 21 states.

However, should a U.S. company choose to fire any workers who use nicotine, the employees would have little recourse, depending on where they work. Smokers are not a "protected class" safeguarded by federal law, such as racial minorities or people with disabilities. That means in "at-will" employment states, a capricious boss can fire an employee for practically any reason, whether that is smoking off-duty or something as arbitrary as wearing the wrong color shirt to work. [...]

As for U-Haul, the company says its new anti-nicotine policy is part of its commitment to employee "wellness," but there are also clear financial motives at work. In the U.S., where health insurance is typically provided by employers, companies pay more for health coverage if their workforce includes a lot of smokers, says Buesing.

About one in every four companies with more than 500 employees offers nonsmokers a reduced rate on their health care premiums, says Steven Noeldner, partner at consultancy Mercer.

Yet off-duty smoking bans are only one type of potentially invasive "wellness" programs offered by companies. So-called "fitness contests" are growing increasingly common, where employees use step counters or other tracking devices to prove how active they are in exchange for a discount on their health insurance.

WINNING THE WAR ON WAGES:

On Tuesday, Amazon opened a full-size grocery store in Seattle. There are no cashiers. Instead, you use the Amazon Go app with your Amazon login credentials. You can't even visit the store without it, since you have to scan a QR code at a gate to enter.

As you walk through the aisles, you simply place things in your cart, and when you're done, you leave. Everything you've purchased is then charged to the payment method you have on file, and the receipt appears in your Amazon account. The store uses cameras and computer vision to keep track of everything you pick up and intend to purchase. 

THE TRUMP BRAND:

White supremacists and other far-right extremists killed at least 38 people in the US in 2019, the sixth deadliest year for violence by all domestic extremists since 1970, according to a report issued Wednesday by a group that fights anti-Semitism.

The Anti-Defamation League counted a total of 42 domestic extremism-related slayings last year. The gunman who shot and killed 22 people in August 2019 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, accounted for more than half of them. Patrick Crusius, the suspect in that shooting rampage, is accused of targeting Mexicans at the store and faces federal hate crime charges.

BRING THEM ALL:

A Sunday school in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. is teaching the Uighur language and culture to Uighur-American youngsters as a way to counter the repression in China against Uighurs in Xinjiang Province.  The school, Ana Care & Education, was founded in 2017 and was the first Sunday school in the U.S. to offer these courses, as VOA's Enming Liu reports.

THE PERFECT SOUNDTRACK:

But let's go back. Back before the fictional complicated man who was understood by no one but his woman (John Shaft), there was a real man named Melvin Van Peebles. Van Peebles was the writer, director, producer, composer, and star of the 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which tells the story of Sweetback, and his journey from his childhood in a brothel to revolutionary on the run. It was, he told Life magazine that year, "the first black movie that doesn't cop out." He's right about one thing; it doesn't cop out. Its graphic and unwavering eye (the film earned an X rating, which Van Peebles used in its marketing "Rated X by an all-white jury") may very well have been the catalyst for the Blaxploitation movement.[1] The soundtrack featured music from the then little-known group Earth, Wind, and Fire, interspersed with dialogue from the movie. There are some notable tracks, but unlike some of the ones that came later, the soundtrack for Sweetback feels disconnected as a standalone album. That would change a few months later when the Gordon Parks-directed Shaft starring Richard Roundtree as a tough, sexy private detective hit the screens, and the double album composed and performed by Isaac Hayes hit turntables. Not only did the album function as an amazing film score, it also works all by itself as a piece of 70s funk/soul.

IF IT WERE APARTHEID THERE'D BE JIM CROW:

Israel is building yet another bypass road for use by Jewish settlers only and, yet again, it is stealing Palestinian land to do so. The land in question is in Huwwara, to the south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank.

The 7-kilometre road will start from the village of Zaatara and pass through land owned by Palestinians in Huwwara, Beita and Odala. Until now, the access route in the area has been shared by Palestinians and Jewish settlers -- whose presence is illegal under international law -- who often use it to raid and terrorise the residents of the local villages.

Since the Israeli government decided to build the road last April, it has led to the seizure of more than 40 hectares of land from the surrounding Palestinian villages. According to Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in charge of the settlements file in the northern West Bank, Israeli bulldozers have been razing everything on the land near a military checkpoint outside Huwwara.

60-40 NATION:

In particular, three ideas to lower prescription drug prices -- revoking patent rights on the most expensive drugs, government-run manufacturing of generic drugs when there isn't much competition in the market, and a big boost in government funding for pharmaceutical R&D -- all hit the ball out of the park in terms of popularity. [...]

The most popular progressive ideas Data for Progress found were making the Clean Air Act stricter, capping credit card interest rates at 15 percent, giving 12 weeks of paid family leave, requiring companies to give worker salaries and benefits priority over creditors in bankruptcy, and passing commercial legalization of marijuana.

THE COMING WAR TO OBTAIN IMMIGRANTS:

Canada is experiencing resurgent growth, according to the latest population estimates from Statistics Canada. Between 2015 and 2019, the nation added 1.30 percent to its population annually. This is up about one-third from the annual rate between 2010 and 2015. The growth surge has been even greater in the larger labor markets (the 44 Census Metropolitan Areas [CMAs] and Census Agglomerations [CAs] over 100,000 population), where the annual rate has risen about approximately 30 percent, from 1.20 percent to 1.57 percent. Given the urbanizing tendency throughout the world, it is surprising that areas outside the largest labor markets, which include both urban and rural areas, experienced the greatest population rate increase, at 38 percent, from 0.39 percent to 0.53 percent.

Statistics Canada explained the increased population growth as follows:

This trend is linked to higher targets for permanent immigration, as defined by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and to various government programs that draw many temporary workers and foreign students to the country. [...]

Statistics Canada further noted that urban expansion and suburbanization continued to be strong:

Urban spread, as measured by the expansion of peripheral municipalities in metropolitan areas, continued over the past year in Canada's largest CMAs. Most often, the municipalities with the strongest growth were in suburban areas. For example, the municipalities of East Gwillimbury (+9.5%) and Milton (+5.0%) had the highest growth in the Toronto CMA (+2.0%). Similarly, Carignan (+4.6%) and Mirabel (+4.1%) recorded the largest population growth in the Montréal CMA (+1.5%).

While the largest labor markets continued to grow (Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver), they experienced substantial levels of domestic outmigration to areas external, but nearby.

Moreover, the three largest CMAs experienced urban spread beyond their borders. In 2018/2019, the CMAs of Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver continued to post steady population growth, mainly due to international migration. However, they also continued to lose people through their migratory exchanges with other regions within their respective provinces. The losses in Toronto (-47,838), Vancouver (-14,241) and Montréal (-14,117) contributed to the growth of areas just outside these CMAs.

HAVING LEARNED NOTHING FROM 2018:

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Wednesday would not promise that a potential coronavirus vaccine would be affordable for all Americans. 

"We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can't control that price, because we need the private sector to invest," Azar told members of Congress during a hearing concerning the coronavirus outbreak and the administration's budget request.

THANKS, DONALD!:

Gallup: As Donald Trump continues with trade wars (and threats of more trade wars) and some Democrats also express the need to reduce foreign trade, Americans view it in record levels as an opportunity for growth as opposed to a threat to the economy. pic.twitter.com/JQG3t5ye3h

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) February 26, 2020

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

In an age of hypersensitivity about everything to do with race, it's quite remarkable that a campaign dedicated to stopping predominantly non-white nations from procreating to save the planet has passed without comment. But it's quite easy to see how we got here. Climate fetishists tell us we have to make sacrifices in relation to our cars, our gas, our showers or our flights abroad. It's merely the next step in the trend for curtailing your habits to suggest that some people should be encouraged to stop having kids. It's just that those people are never the town-house-dwelling protesters, and almost always poverty-stricken non-white people in countries far, far away.

This quasi-eugenicist privileging of the environment over human beings is nothing new. David Attenborough, who paraded on stage at Glastonbury last year to cheers from thousands of young progressives, is a long-time supporter of population control in its most Malthusian form. Back in 2011 in an interview with the Wellcome Trust, Attenborough declared that he "couldn't think of a single problem that wouldn't be easier to solve if there were less people". And who are these people he's talking about? They're those inhabiting "slums in South America, India, Africa" -- places that Attenborough describes as "huge areas occupied by people living, whole families, in tiny little apartments with no sanitation and no future".  Rather than arguing that those people living in poverty in parts of the developing world should be given access to the same resources that we enjoy in the West -- clean water, housing and job opportunities --Attenborough and those like him simply think there should be fewer of them.

Aside from the question of resources, population control enthusiasts are often keen to talk about women's reproductive rights. In the same interview in 2011, Attenborough said that the "only comfort" he found was in the "knowledge that wherever you empower women, wherever they have the vote, education, the free will and are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, the birth rate falls -- which is a very good reason for getting rid of slums". In short, Attenborough's support for raising the level of education among women outside the Western world is dependent on the promise that they stop having children. Many of us will be familiar with the stereotype of the racist Little Englander, who bemoans the procreation of "them" -- usually Muslims or black people -- claiming that there's not enough housing or jobs or space for anyone who isn't one of "us". We condemn such views as racist, but why don't we criticise the "us and them" logic of environmentalists hellbent on bringing down population numbers in other parts of the world?

Is it a coincidence that many of the groups that support Thriving Together -- from Greenpeace to Marie Stopes International -- focus on the "marginalised communities" of developing countries, while their supporters on the front page of their website are people like Dr Jane Goodall? Of course, some of these institutions have form in the area of controversial support for population control. As Zoe Williams once pointed out in the Guardian, Marie Stopes herself was a zealous believer in sterilising the great unwashed: "Young married men of the professional classes are today often forced by conditions to remain sterile, though they passionately desire the healthy children they could have if they did not have hordes of defectives to support in one way or the other."

SUPER ON BRAND:

Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Ted Yoho of Florida all voted against the bill -- a piece of legislation that Congress has tried and failed to enact nearly 200 times over the last century, according to the Washington Post. [...]

Among the GOP lawmakers who changed their vote at the last minute was Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who has had his committee assignments stripped last year over comments supporting white supremacism.

Reps. Paul Gosar of Arizona, Chip Roy of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Ralph Norman of South Carolina also first voted against the bill before changing their vote to yea.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Five "racially motivated violent extremists" with ties to the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen, including its current leader, have been arrested by the FBI, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Of those, four were charged in the U.S. District Court in Seattle for allegedly sending racist and anti-Semitic threats to journalists and activists around the country and the fifth was charged in Virginia for his alleged participation in a swatting campaign.

Wednesday's news marks the biggest bust of the notorious group since it was founded five years ago, by a group of young, white men who met on the neo-Nazi site Iron March. 

DON'T SMOKE:

The medical journal JAMA released a paper this week analyzing data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention on 72,314 coronavirus cases in mainland China, the figure as of Feb. 11, the largest such sample in a study of this kind.

The sample's overall case-fatality rate was 2.3%, higher than World Health Organization official 0.7% rate. No deaths occurred in those aged 9 years and younger, but cases in those aged 70 to 79 years had an 8% fatality rate and those aged 80 years and older had a fatality rate of 14.8%.

No deaths were reported among mild and severe cases. The fatality rate was 49% among critical cases, and elevated among those with preexisting conditions: 10.5% for people with cardiovascular disease, 7.3% for diabetes, 6.3% for chronic respiratory disease, 6% for hypertension, and 5.6% for cancer.

The latest China-based study, which was not peer-reviewed by U.S. scientists, found that men had a fatality rate of 2.8% versus 1.7% for women. Some doctors have said that women may have a stronger immune system as a genetic advantage to help babies during pregnancy.

The Chinese study is likely not representative of what might happen if the global spread of the virus worsens. In China, nearly half of men smoke cigarettes compared to roughly 2% of women, which could be one reason for the higher death rate among males.

TRUTH IS A DEFENSE AGAINST LIBEL:

The lawsuit stems from a March 2019 op-ed that claimed Trump had a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to help him win in the 2016 election in exchange for relief to Russia once he was in office

'The complaint alleges The Times was aware of the falsity at the time it published them, but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign, while misleading its own readers in the process,' she continued.

The case stems from a March 2019 op-ed article by columnist Max Frankel, who also served as the Times' executive editor from 1986-1994.

He argues in the piece that there was an understood agreement between the Kremlin and Trump campaign to assist him in getting elected in exchange for relief toward Russia once he was in office.

'There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin's oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration's burdensome economic sanctions,' Frankel wrote at the time.

'The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo,' he continued.

SOMETHING THERE IS THAT DOESN'T LOVE A WALL:

Two ordinary families living a routine existence in Poessneck, a small East German town in 1979, yearn to escape by making their own hot-air balloon and soaring south over the border into West Germany. Some 75,000 East Germans were imprisoned for trying to make their way into the West, and about 800 were outright murdered by their own security forces in such attempts. The peril level is set at maximum, then, for these average citizens, and layered atop that is the massive danger of sailing thousands of feet up in a rickety jury-rigged contraption built by amateurs. Balloon revels in exploring the details of every possible kind of danger these people face, so it's a nerve-wincher, a cracking good escape thriller, but that's not all it is.

As breathtakingly plotted as the film is, it is nevertheless based on the true story of Peter Strelzyk (Friedrich Mücke) and Günter Wetzel (David Kross), who together with their wives Doris (Karoline Schuch) and Petra (Alicia von Rittberg) schemed to become the first people ever to escape East Germany in a hot-air balloon. The story was previously filmed at Disney, in Night Crossing (1982), but that retelling was much less faithful to the facts.

Balloon takes care not to exaggerate the suffering of Peter and Günter and their families. Even in a police state, it's possible to muddle through. If they just keep their heads down, say nothing controversial and salute the Party on cue, they'll survive, even enjoy something in the ballpark of a recognizable standard of living to Westerners. Still, there are glimpses of how a centralized economy makes everything an endless gray trudge, in which glum women line up patiently for groceries but worry that the coffee will be gone by the time they get in the store.

TOOTHLESS DRAGON:

CANTERBURY CRUSH:

"We want the public, not just academics, to see the manuscript as Chaucer would have likely thought of it--as a performance that mixed drama and humor," said University of Saskatchewan (USask) English professor Peter Robinson, leader of the project.

"We have become convinced, over many years, that the best way to read the Tales is to hear it performed--just as we imagine that Chaucer himself might have performed it at the court of Richard II."

The free app is the first edition in a planned series. The app features a 45-minute audio performance of the General Prologue of the Tales--the masterpiece work by the most important English writer before Shakespeare--along with the digitized original manuscript. While listening to the reading, users have access to supporting content such as a translation in modern English, commentary, notes and vocabulary explaining Middle English words used by Chaucer.

YOU CAN'T BE BOTH:

While those on the political left have long been vocal in their opposition to the travel restrictions, the expansion of the policy drew responses from some Christian leaders who have been supportive of the Trump administration's push to promote international religious freedom. 

This includes David Curry, president of Open Doors USA, a global persecution watchdog organization active in over 60 countries. Six of the 13 countries included on the travel ban list are listed on Open Doors USA's 2020 World Watch List of the 50 worst countries in the world when it comes to Christian persecution. Eritrea is ranked No. 6, while Nigeria is ranked No. 12 and Myanmar is ranked No. 19. 

"Though I recognize there is an important discussion on how to best deal with terrorists who are present dangers to free societies, we must never restrict based on religious identification," Curry said in a statement shared with The Christian Post. "It's up to us to exemplify religious tolerance and freedom on a daily basis. To the degree we have failed in the past, let's never fail to fix the wrong and to keep raising the level of freedom."

Travis Wussow, vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told The Alabama Baptist that SBC churches are among the "most committed people in the country" when it comes to "ministering to those fleeing persecution." 

Wussow asserted that while international religious freedom has been a priority to the Trump administration, any policy that "closes the door to refugees" undercuts such a priority. He stressed that the U.S. should find a way to balance "security and compassion." 

"[Our churches] recognize that all of those escaping tyranny are made in the image of God, and many of them are our brothers and sisters in Christ," Wussow said in a statement. "That's why, from the beginning, the ERLC has asked our government to do everything possible to provide security without turning away from those in danger and need."

World Relief, an evangelical refugee resettlement agency and humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals that has helped resettle thousands of refugees since the 1980s, has long opposed the travel ban.

World Relief President Scott Arbeiter argued in a statement that the new restrictions "will mean families seeking reunification will be stymied."

"This overly broad policy unfairly targets individuals of particular nationalities in Africa and Asia, and sadly it's consistent with various other policies that have the effect of significantly restricting legal immigration to the United States," Arbeiter stated. 

Although the extended travel ban does not apply to the U.S. refugee resettlement program, World Relief fears how the ban will impact Myanmar. Myanmar, also known as Burma, has been the top country of origin for refugees resettled to the U.S. in the past decade with over 150,000 resettled in the last 12 years. 

Many of those 150,000, World Relief notes, are persecuted Christians.

Prior to the official signing of the travel ban extension, Michael K. Le Roy, president of the reformed Christian institution Calvin University in Michigan, voiced concern with reports of Nigeria's inclusion in the travel ban with U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback. 

Le Roy raised the issue during a question and answer session at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities Presidents Conference in Washington. He said that Calvin University's mission is to equip students "to think deeply, to act justly and to live wholeheartedly as Christ's agents of renewal in the world."

"I am really concerned about these reports that I have heard that Nigeria may be [put] on the banned country list," he said, adding that the university has students that come from Nigeria. "We have a long history of working with [Nigerian Christian students] to the extent that a ban would limit those students' opportunities to be a part of our community."

He argued that a ban on Nigeria and other countries would "rob" Christian students from those places of the opportunities.  

WE ARE ALL NEOCONOMIST NOW:

The logic behind a sin tax boils down to simple economics. If the price of a product increases, sales can be expected to decrease. But the end goal of a soda tax isn't simply to cut soda consumption--it's to reduce the health problems associated with sugar. So as the first round of soda taxes gains traction, it's time to ask: Are they working?

The answer is hard to find, because research is limited. And what evidence exists is mostly focused on consumption, not health.

A new study published in the May edition of the journal Economics & Human Biology, for example, explored how a tax on soda played out in Seattle. After adopting a 1.7-cent tax for every ounce of soda at the beginning of 2018, soda prices rose by about 59%--and correspondingly, sales fell by 30.5%. Similarly, a study published this week found that a penny-per-ounce soda tax passed (and repealed four months later) in Cook County, Illinois decreased purchases of sugary drinks by 21%. In Philadelphia, soda sales reportedly fell 46%.

Alone, those numbers don't tell you the soda tax caused the drop in drinking: Market data suggest people are voluntarily choosing other drinks over soda, particularly water. But having a tax in place does appear to encourage the switch. Compare Seattle to Portland, which does not have a tax: In the same time period after January 2018, the researchers found sugary drink sales in Portland only dropped by 10% compared to Seattle's 30.5%.

THANKS, UR!:

Even though the United States now lives in a state of perpetual war, for most Americans it's a peculiar form of non-war. Most of the time, those overseas conflicts are literally out of sight (and largely out of mind). Meanwhile, whatever administration is in power assures us that our attention isn't required, nor is our approval asked for, so we carry on with our lives as if no one is being murdered in our name.

War without dire consequences poses a conundrum.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Bernie Sanders hopes that in 2020 his progressive message has sunk in so deeply that the Democratic Party is ready to make him its new leader. BY ADAM WOLLNER | PATRICK GLEASON

While presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has created a storm of criticism in the U.s. after his recent comments on Fidel Castro, there is a place where the Vermont senator has become front-page news, and in a positive light.

That place is Havana, where the newspaper of the Communist Party prominently displayed a report about Sanders and his praise of "some of the social programs implemented by the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro."

"US Senator Bernie Sanders, today one of the strongest candidates for the nomination of the Democratic Party to the November presidential elections, recognized Cuba's role in sending doctors worldwide," Granma said.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Sanders broke with prominent Democrats to oppose a key comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007 that would have provided a path to citizenship for millions of unauthorized immigrants living in the US. He opposed measures to increase the number of guest workers and offer green cards to citizens of countries with low levels of immigration. And he once voted for an amendment supporting a group of vigilantes that sought to take immigration enforcement into their own hands along the border (though he has since disavowed the group.)

Whether immigrants actually drive down wages for American workers, or put them out of jobs entirely, is a question that continues to divide economists. But Sanders's public statements and voting records over his nearly three-decade career in Congress suggest he thinks they do -- a belief historically shared by American labor groups but an uneasy fit with a modern Democratic Party positioning itself against President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric.

IF YOU GET PAST "LATINA" YOU'VE OVERANALYZED:

ACORN?:

 "She's trying to shame people with perhaps a different view into voting her way..."

EXCEPT THAT THE RESOURCES ARE UNLIMITED TOO:

By the time the modern intelligence community was established in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the scale of that challenge had grown so vast that Sherman Kent, one of the community's founding fathers, observed that "...to be able to deliver [intelligence] in the fashion apparently expected... would demand a research staff large enough to codify and keep up-to-date virtually the sum-total of universal knowledge." [...]

The classified collection model's architects built a sprawling intelligence-gathering armature whose ambitions, in time, would brush the limits of what was possible. But the model's fundamental logic stayed intact throughout the Cold War because the most useful information--war plans, missile designs, and the like--remained in the hands of a relatively small number of elites.

Today, the situation is reversed. In sharp contrast to Kent's era, useful information is now quite literally everywhere. Rather than belonging to few, it can come from practically anyone, anywhere on earth. And due to the growing complexity of international affairs, more information does not equate to more accurate forecasts.  [...]

Today, the intelligence community owns the collection platforms, as well as the exploitation and processing centers, the communications channels, and even the administrative infrastructure that controls access to classified information. 

The intelligence community is not a business, nor is it motivated by profit. But it should apply the lessons learned by other institutions adapting to change, and its efforts should profit the nation. The time to begin thinking about a pivot is long overdue. The intelligence community must chart a bold new model suited to the information-rich reality of our digital era, and finally, break free from the collector's trap. 

The nation's intelligence services should conform to the nation's needs. In the past, when useful information was scarcer, the need was to find pieces of it wherever they hid and use them to build a coherent picture. What today's America needs most, in contrast, is help making sense of a shapeless, increasingly discordant world where information is abundant but truth is in short supply.

Today, intelligence can no longer be synonymous with information, or even with secrecy--the very notion of which is dying. Soon, there will be no more hiding in an increasingly transparent world that is always monitoring, always tracking, and always listening. When information is cheap and easily accessible, what is valuable is discernment and curation. 

Let's get back to Clausewitz. He said critical analysis is "tracing effects to their causes," that is, illuminating the connections between things to determine "...which among the countless concatenations of events are the essential ones." This is a solid value proposition for intelligence in the information age. He further warned against treating separately what is more accurately viewed as a gestalt, and reminded us that individual actions, "however small their cause, must influence all subsequent military operations and modify their outcome to some degree, however slight." In other words: It's all connected, man.

My argument is not that we should stop collecting secrets, only that we should place less emphasis on doing so and realign limited resources accordingly.

NO ONE LIVES THERE ANYMORE, THE HOUSING DEMAND IS TOO HIGH:

Southern California home prices shot up in January from a year earlier, as buyers fought over a meager supply of homes for sale across the six-county region.

The area's median price -- the point at which half the homes sold for more and half for less -- clocked in at $533,000, DQNews said Monday. That was 6.6% higher than a year earlier. It's the latest indication that the housing market is heating up after muddling through much of 2019.

WITNESS:

Say Amen, Somebody, a documentary about the men and women who pioneered African American gospel music, was widely praised upon its release in 1982; the late Roger Ebert called it "One of the most joyful movies I've ever seen." But it hasn't been seen in theaters in nearly 30 years. Now George T. Nierenberg's film has been restored and re-released to theaters and DVD.

At the time, Nierenberg was looking for a follow-up to his award-winning 1979 tap dance documentary, No Maps on My Taps, when he had dinner with musician Ry Cooder.

"I asked him for any suggestions that he had for another topic for an interesting film, and he said -- these were his exact words -- he said, 'You oughta look into gospel music; those cats are really neat,' " Nierenberg remembers.

SO MUCH WINNING!:

The best deals. https://t.co/u40Gb3bdUi

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) February 25, 2020

WHEN FACED WITH A CHOICE OF SOCIALISTS, REJECT THE NATIONALIST SOCIALIST:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Trump says he might invite boxer Tyson Fury -- who has a long history of homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic comments -- to the White House following his recent win https://t.co/zh5cpqt61f @businessinsider The Trump brand

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 25, 2020

SUBLIME:

How about Joseph Mitchell?

The thing about Joe Mitchell is that he knew everything. No subject escaped him, from James Joyce to horse breeding, backcountry life, culture. A. J. Liebling, his close friend and colleague, resented this. So one day Liebling is wandering around Sixth Avenue--it still had the elevated track--and there was a little taxidermy shop under the subway, and he goes in and finds a little set of bones. The owner says, "These are very interesting. They're the bones of a young male opossum, which has a bone in its penis." Liebling buys this collection of bones for six dollars and brings it over to the office wrapped up in a paper bag. Mitchell is typing. Liebling knocks on the door, comes in, unwraps the package, and puts it on the table. Mitchell looks at it and says, "Pecker bone of a young male opossum--anything you want to know about that?"

GOOD TRICK, DICK!:

BUT IF TIMES AREN'T HARD WE'RE JUST BEING CRETINOUS:

This doesn't look like 40 years of stagnant earnings to me. Maybe politicians should stop making that erroneous claim. pic.twitter.com/tLnVEeD93b

— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) February 24, 2020

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Harvey Weinstein was convicted Monday at his sexual assault trial, sealing his dizzying fall from powerful Hollywood studio boss to arch-villain of the #MeToo movement.

He was found guilty of a criminal sex act for assaulting production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in 2006 and third-degree rape of a woman in 2013. The jury found him not guilty on the most serious charge, predatory sexual assault, that could have resulted in a life sentence.

The verdict followed weeks of often harrowing and excruciatingly graphic testimony from a string of accusers who told of rapes, forced oral sex, groping, masturbation, lewd propositions, and "that's-Hollywood" excuses from Weinstein about how the casting couch works.

GETTING RIGHT:

I only realized when I spoke to you a couple of years ago that you had to give up the saxophone. So much of your life had been about using music to fulfill your potential as a person. Now that you don't play, is fulfillment still possible? 

When I had to stop playing it was quite traumatic. But I realized that instead of lamenting and crying, I should be grateful for the fact that I was able to do music all of my life. So I had that realization, plus my spiritual beliefs, which I've been cultivating for many years. All that work went into my accepting the fact that I couldn't play my horn.

Tell me more about that work. 

I'm working toward why I'm here -- what it's all about. At this point in my life I'm -- well, I don't want to say satisfied, but I feel that I'm closer to an understanding. It's always been my idea that the golden rule is a good thing, but I wasn't quite able to understand if the golden rule was possible. If somebody is playing music and I'm playing music and we're in a saxophone battle, I still have to play my best, regardless of the other guy. It has nothing to do with my trying to make him feel bad because playing music is for a higher cause. So I believe living by the golden rule is possible. Not only possible but the reason we're here.

Were you playing for a higher cause on something like "The Serpent's Tooth" with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis? In your solo you quoted the melody of "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)." That wasn't intended as a provocation? 

If I was so stupid to have to implied that, then I was ignorant. I was in Miles's band at the time and "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)" was just one of the riffs that we played. It had nothing to do with my attitude about Charlie Parker. I would never say that to him. But I take your criticism. I might have been a foolish young boy playing that to his guru. If there was a little of that, it was sophomoric. I was ignorant. I am still ignorant about many things.

I'm also thinking about when you played with John Coltrane on "Tenor Madness." There's a part of that performance where you guys were trading fours and he played a lick and in response you played the same lick but with the notes reversed. That wasn't meant as one-upmanship? 

David, I don't believe I've mentioned this to many people. When I played with Coltrane, I had the impression -- and back then it was true -- that I was much more popular than him. I remember what Kamasi Washington said about "Tenor Madness": "Sonny, you weren't even really playing." I wasn't really playing. Coltrane was playing. I was only playing halfway, because I thought that I was the guy and that Coltrane was this young whippersnapper. That was my mind-set. It was immature.

So you were holding back to show your status? 

Exactly. I don't want people to think that I'm saying, "Oh, wow, I could have played much better," but that's the story of "Tenor Madness." My attitude on it wasn't right.

IF gOD COULDN'T KILL IT, WE'RE NOT GOING TO:

In general, irony refers to a clash between expectations and outcomes. Typically, the outcome is the opposite of what someone wanted or hoped for. It's ironic, for example, when your boss calls you into her office, and you're expecting a promotion, but you instead find out you've been fired.

This clash carries over to verbal irony, in which people say the opposite of what they literally mean. But such expectations are subjective, and verbal ironists don't always mean the exact opposite of what they say. Insulting someone by saying they're the most intelligent person on Earth, for example, doesn't mean they are the least intelligent; it just means they're not all that bright.

Some cases, however, are relatively straightforward. Consider situational irony, in which two things become odd or humorous when juxtaposed. A photo of a sign in front of a school with a misspelled word - "We are committed to excellense" - went viral. And the January 2020 rescheduling of an annual snowball fight at the University of British Columbia was correctly described as ironic because of the reason for the cancelation: too much snow.

In other cases, however, a situation may lack an essential element that irony seems to require. It's not ironic when someone's home is burglarized, but it is if the owner had just installed an elaborate security system and had failed to activate it. It's not ironic when a magician cancels a show due to "unforeseen circumstances," but it is when a psychic's performance is canceled for the same reason.

In 1996, Alanis Morissette was roundly criticized by pedants who argued that the examples of situational irony in her song "Ironic" - "It's like rain on your wedding day" - were not, in fact, ironic.

Warnings abound in dictionaries and style guides. "The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage," for example, warns that "not every coincidence, curiosity, oddity and paradox is an irony even loosely."

One reason that irony is so confusing is that the word also refers to a certain perspective or style: one that is detached, aloof and seemingly world-weary. This affectation is often referred to as the "ironic attitude" and has come to be associated with adolescents or young adults.

Following 9/11, many pundits announced the "death of irony," arguing that a frivolous and flippant attitude, often described as ironic, was out of step with the times.

If this were true, irony didn't stay dead for long. In fact, the ironic attitude has been declared dead with almost every change in recent American politics. In 2008, Joan Didion worried that Barack Obama's election was fueled by a naïve belief in "hope" that would transform the country into an "irony-free zone." Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump's hypocrisy has - once again - killed irony.

DONALD'S 25% BASE:

THE TRUMP BRAND:

ALL THEIR MOST RADICAL IDEAS ARE POPULAR:

Free College

Calls to make public colleges tuition-free are on the rise. Bernie Sanders zeroed in on the issue in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, and now several contenders for the 2020 nomination are offering proposals of their own. At the same time, a number of states, such as Tennessee, have launched programs to make tuition free at public two-year community colleges, and others, such as New York, have waived in-state tuition at public four-year colleges and universities.

We asked survey respondents whether they favor or oppose making public colleges in the United States free to attend. Some participants were asked about two-year colleges while others were asked about four-year colleges. For both types of college, free tuition is a popular concept (see Figure 10). Sixty percent of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and even more (69%) want free public two-year colleges.

NOW THAT THE BLACK GUY ISN'T RUNNING IT:

Common Core. After several years of vigorous debate, support for the Common Core State Standards is rebounding (see Figure 9). Overall, 50% of Americans endorse use of the standards in their state, continuing a climb in approval from its low point of 41% in 2017. The resurgence in support is strongest among Republicans, rising to 46% from 32% over the past two years. Even so, Republicans remain divided over the standards, with 47% opposing their adoption. Democrats, who since at least 2014 have consistently expressed higher levels of approval for the standards than Republicans have, hold steady at 52% in favor and 36% opposed. Today, the party gap is the smallest it has been since 2013, when there was almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats over the Common Core. After opening to a 20-percentage-point chasm by 2015, the difference between Democrats and Republicans stands at just 6 percentage points today.

LA TRUMPISME:

Our new research shows that the nationalist far right arises from a deeper history. New Right ideas are clearly not a revival of 1930s fascism. Despite some similarities, today's nationalists are more directly inspired by a late 19th-century French line of thinking.

We spent the last two years analysing hundreds of documents written by New Right thinkers and their forebears to explain how and why these ideas take root. This ideological history is important if today's nationalists are to be understood, and if there is to be any hope of overcoming the racism and sexism inherent to their ideas.

What our research shows is that we are living through the latest battle in a 300-year long ideological war over the meaning of humanity itself. On one side is the belief in a universal idea of humanity, which produced notions of equal rights, humanism and liberalism. Opposing it is the belief that marks all forms of nationalism: that humanity is not a single entity but rather, one divided by nature into national identities.

Nationalism is the dark cousin of liberalism. Both seek to establish freedoms and rights. If the French Revolution gave rise to the "rights of man", Napoleon's subsequent coup and his idea of the "nation" argued that only the French, not all men, should enjoy those rights. Half a century later, nationalism was being regularly used by politicians like Otto von Bismarck to confront expanding claims to political rights with the argument that the national necessity of a vaguely defined identity trumped granting certain rights to citizens.

These ideas drew heavily on ethno-nationalist geopolitics, which treated each nation as a distinct species struggling for survival. International relations was viewed as a zero-sum game where the survival of a nation sometimes necessitates the destruction of others.

Then Maurice Barrès came along 1897. He was the thinker behind a very specific set of nationalist ideas that developed more restrictive definitions of national identity than those of the previous nationalist pioneers. His idea of nationalism was focused on birth and culture, rather than civil belonging (as for Napoleon) or loyalty (as for Bismarck). Our research has found that key ideas in today's New Right find their roots in Barrès and especially retain his ideas about culture and racial birth.

Barrès theorised that the culture and integrity of a nation was "eternal", and that any change to it, whether brought about by foreign influence or progressive politics, would bring about its demise. Any cultural change, be it to the arts, to the role of women, or to racial assumptions, was seen to erode the spirit of the nation and its way of life. Ideas about the state, belonging and politics, which emerged from Barrès and like-minded thinkers like Charles Maurrastended to advocate racial and cultural exclusion as necessary to national survival.

The key idea introduced by Barrès was the link between race and culture. It meant that culture needed to remain unchanged if it was to survive, as did the race that produced it. Even more importantly, it introduced the notion that any progressive, modern or culture-changing idea endangered the nation's survival. This idea has found its way to the heart of New Right nationalism today, which is why they attack liberals, socialists, feminists, progressives, and their institutions as much as foreigners.

RACIAL HYGIENE HAS COSTS, BRO:

 Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told a crowd at a private gathering in England on Wednesday night that the Trump administration "needs more immigrants" for the U.S. economy to continue growing, according to an audio recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post.

"We are desperate -- desperate -- for more people," Mulvaney said. "We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we've had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants."

...AND CHEAPER...:

The rod-shaped microbe, Geobacter sulfurreducens is, as its name implies, a member of the Geobacter genus, a group referred to as "electrigens" for their known ability to generate an electrical charge. It was UMass Amherst microbiologist Derek Lovley who found and wrote about the microbe in the late 80s.

It was also Lovlley's lab that discovered the microbe has a talent for producing electrically conductive protein nanowires, and his lab recently developed a new Geobacter strain that could produce them more rapidly and inexpensively. "We turned E. coli into a protein nanowire factory," Lovley says. What this means, he says, is that "With this new scalable process, protein nanowire supply will no longer be a bottleneck to developing these applications."

Enter electrical engineer Jun Yao, also of UMass Amherst. His specialty had been engineering electronic devices using silicon nanowires. The two decided to work together to see if they could turn Geobacter's protein nanowires into something useful.

The fruit of their collaboration is a device they call "Air-gen." It employs a thin film of Geobacter nanowires less than 10 microns thick resting on an electrode. Another, smaller electrode sits on top of the film. The film collects, or adsorbs, water vapor, and its surface chemistry and conductivity produce a charge that passes between the two electrodes through the fine gaps between individual nanowires.

Yao's doctoral student Xiaomeng Liu recalls, "I saw that when the nanowires were contacted with electrodes in a specific way the devices generated a current. I found that that exposure to atmospheric humidity was essential and that protein nanowires adsorbed water, producing a voltage gradient across the device."

Says Yao, "We are literally making electricity out of thin air." The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7. "It's the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet." The two see their new technology as being non-polluting, renewable, and low cost- with distinct advantages over other developing energy sources such as solar and wind for at least one big reason, "it even works indoors" notes Lovley.

PEOPLE WANT JOBS, NOT WORK:

Last year, Farmgirl Flowers had a hiring problem.

The e-commerce flower delivery startup struggled to find people to fill open positions at its flagship distribution center in San Francisco.

"We had at least 30% of our positions open all of last year," Christina Stembel, founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers, told Yahoo Finance in a Breakouts series interview. "We had no less than 40 positions open the entire year trying to find people, especially in San Francisco."

Farmgirl Flowers, a bootstrapped startup with more than 160 employees, delivers between 6,000 to 8,000 bouquets across 48 states in a typical week and brought in more than $30 million in revenue last year.

For a company that depends on shipping a highly perishable product to customers across the country, the lack of staffing was palpable.

"It's a universal problem in the United States right now," Stembel said. "Manufacturing jobs are not the ones that are in demand any longer, and so trying to find people that want to work at these types of jobs is very challenging."

COULD BE WORSE (self-reference alert):

If you were driving through Arlington in September, you might have noticed a change that was almost five years in the making: Jefferson Davis Highway was no more. Instead, the stretch of U.S. Route 1 that runs through Crystal City -- where Jeff Bezos's Amazon empire is setting up a new headquarters -- had been renamed Richmond Highway. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

In renaming the road, Arlington was following Alexandria, where another portion of Route 1 lies; in 2018, the city council there unanimously voted to change the name of its stretch of Jefferson Davis Highway to Richmond Highway. Arlington's leaders would have acted sooner, but, because Arlington is a county, not a city, it wasn't clear whether they could do so without approval from Virginia's General Assembly. And so they were stymied until March 2019, when the state attorney general issued a legal opinion that said Arlington could bypass the legislature. "It felt great," Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey told reporters in September. "We are at a point now where we don't have to have these monumental signs hanging over the streets of Arlington."

But soon after the change, some drivers in Arlington noticed that when they typed a Richmond Highway address into Apple Maps, the app kept redirecting them to Richmond Highway in Alexandria. By contrast, Google Maps -- the most widely used navigation app, with about 150 million monthly users -- began employing the new name in January 2019, almost nine months before it went into effect.

This problem persisted for several months on Apple Maps, the third most widely used navigation app, with about 20 million monthly users. (As of press time, it will take you to Richmond Highway in Arlington, but only if you also type "Arlington.") The news didn't exactly stop traffic. A comment on a Sept. 10 story about the glitch on the hyperlocal site ARLnow.com summed up the public reaction: "Way to bury the lead! People actually using Apple Maps is a bigger story here."

Still, the incident points to ways in which maps, even in our digital age, can struggle to keep up with changing political realities on the ground. Satellites, after all, are indifferent to whether naming a highway after a Confederate leader in the early 1900s was a form of intimidation at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was spreading nationwide.

THE NUB OF AN INSIGHT:

Enacted in the wake of Watergate and domestic spying scandals that led to Congress's Pike and Church Committee inquiries, FISA empowered federal judges to oversee the executive's foreign intelligence collection. Originally, this power was limited to the FBI's surveillance of clandestine foreign agents in the United States; later, it was dramatically expanded to cover intelligence collection targeting foreigners outside the U.S. Plainly, lawmakers calculated that the creation of a separate court to handle all applications for foreign-intelligence surveillance would grow judicial expertise, addressing the institutional incompetence problem to which Jackson had alluded. FISA is heedless, though, of the more serious constitutional problem: the transfer of responsibility for innately political national security decisions to nonpolitical unelected officials -- i.e., away from democratic accountability.

It is the culture of law enforcement to expect independence from politics. Such independence is imperative for the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, on which depend the rule of law and thus domestic peace and prosperity. The framers understood that nothing lends itself to tyranny more than police powers unmoored from political accountability. The FBI and the Justice Department (of which the bureau is a component) are part of the executive branch, answerable to the president, who is accountable to the public. Prudently, however, the executive branch's political leadership does not involve itself in day-to-day policing, content to set programmatic enforcement priorities (e.g., deciding whether to allocate more resources to violent crime or healthcare fraud). There is no political interference in decisions about what cases to bring and which defendants to charge. Those are left to police professionals, who apply Congress's penal statutes in proceedings overseen by courts.

National security, on the other hand, is an innately political responsibility. Indeed, the foreign counterintelligence mission is conducted solely to support the president's national defense duties, not to develop prosecutable court cases. If the FBI and the courts are doing national security, they are necessarily practicing politics. Arms of government that make political determinations cannot properly be independent of political oversight and accountability.

I've always believed the FBI could handle these related but different responsibilities. History proved me wrong. The bureau arrogantly insists on independence from political oversight not just in criminal cases but even when it is carrying out national security functions. It wants a free hand to act and even make policy judgments in the political realm, but it demands insulation from political accountability. The courts, analogously, have shed their healthy reluctance to become embroiled in national security policy disputes, as well as their formerly laudable line-drawing between political questions and controversies fit for judicial resolution.

FISA was a well-meaning effort to give a modicum of due process to Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents. In point of fact, it does not provide meaningful due process because it cannot replicate the adversarial search for truth that is the hallmark of judicial proceedings. The FBI and Justice Department appear ex parte before the court; the surveillance subject cannot be effectively represented, and the proceedings are classified, so the expectation is that no one will ever check the executive's representations. This is unlike criminal cases, which lead to prosecution, discovery, and significant legal consequences if government agents duped the judge into granting warrants.

More important, the FISA framework intended to provide more oversight of executive surveillance has had the opposite effect. Because the judges are not constitutionally responsible for national security, they are loath to second-guess the officials who are. The system perversely incentivizes those officials to seek warrants on questionable premises. They know that the judge will probably approve the warrants. Once that's done, the agents can brandish these judicial imprimaturs as proof that their actions are unimpeachable -- and thus to claim there is no legitimate reason for Congress, much less the public, to pierce the veil of secrecy.

THE FUNNY PART IS LOOKING TO POLITICS FOR A SAVIOR...:

IN JOKES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNCONSCIOUS (1905), his three-hundred page book on humor, Sigmund Freud shares his favorite yuks, none of which are funny to begin with, and then proceeds to slowly murder them by explaining their punchlines. The book is so turgid that modern interpreters sometimes argue that the whole enterprise is itself a kind of meta-joke, which may be true, but still doesn't make it funny. Reading the book in the election year of 2020, however, one bit stands out. Freud describes it as "an American anecdote":

Two not particularly scrupulous businessmen had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring judgment on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: "But where's the Savior?"

Getting this joke, such as it is, presumes familiarity with an implied reference: depictions of the crucifixion, wherein the savior (i.e., Christ), famously hangs on the cross between two thieves. Even then, it's not really laugh-out-loud funny. It is, however uncannily relevant. As we find ourselves in the quickening of our election season, we Americans are increasingly being asked to contemplate the prospect of voting for one of two unsavory businessmen. Redemption is nowhere to be found in this forced choice between two scoundrels; the savior isn't even absent. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at Harvard University, Hunter College and the University of Ottawa similarly estimated that switching to a single-payer system like Medicare for All could save up to $600 billion per year on administrative costs alone.

The study found that the average American pays $2,597 per year on administrative costs -- overhead for insurers and hospitals, salaries, huge executive compensation packages and growing profits -- while Canadians pay $551 per year.

Though Canada had costs similar to the United States and worse health outcomes before it adopted its single-payer system in 1962, Canada now has better health outcomes than the United States and only spends 17% of its health care spending on administrative costs, compared to 34% in the U.S.

"Americans spend twice as much per person as Canadians on health care. But instead of buying better care, that extra spending buys us sky-high profits and useless paperwork," lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, who teaches at Harvard and Hunter College, said in a statement. "Before their single-payer reform, Canadians died younger than Americans, and their infant mortality rate was higher than ours. Now Canadians live three years longer and their infant mortality rate is 22% lower than ours. Under Medicare for All, Americans could cut out the red tape and afford a Rolls Royce version of Canada's system."

Himmelstein told Time that the savings in administrative costs alone would be enough to eliminate "all copayments and deductibles" and still "have money left over."

But while Medicare for All would reduce these costs by eliminating private profit-seeking insurers, the public option alternative would add costs while leaving the bloated administrative costs in place.

"Medicare for All could save more than $600 billion each year on bureaucracy, and repurpose that money to cover America's 30 million uninsured and eliminate copayments and deductibles for everyone," said researcher Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, who also teaches at Harvard and Hunter. "Reforms like a public option that leave private insurers in place can't deliver big administrative savings. As a result, public option reform would cost much more and cover much less than Medicare for All."

Other studies have led to similar conclusions. A review of 22 single-payer studies published in PLOS Medicine found that 19 of them "predicted net savings ... in the first year of program operation and 20 ... predicted savings over several years; anticipated growth rates would result in long-term net savings for all plans."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Time to get serious comrades! pic.twitter.com/rlTGCt7259

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) February 21, 2020

THE TRUMP BRAND:

It's not unheard-of for members of Congress to resign their seats because of serious legal trouble. Now Republican House candidate Danielle Stella is trying to achieve the inverse: getting elected to Congress while being wanted by the law. 

Stella, one of the five Republicans competing for the right to take on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in November, has been wanted for months on an arrest warrant for felony shoplifting. Even while facing arrest, though, she's managed to achieve a respectable fundraising haul--nearly $84,000 as of the end of 2019--and built up a following on social media, where, well, she's made some waves. 

Stella first stirred the pot in July over tweets suggesting she supports the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that Trump is engaged in a ceaseless secret war against high-ranking pedophile-cannibals in the halls of power. At the same time, The Guardian reported that she had been arrested twice in the Minneapolis area's Hennepin County on shoplifting charges, including an allegation that she stole $2,300 from Target. 

THANKS, UR!:

The Kremlin was scrambling Friday to reach a stopgap agreement with Ankara to halt fighting in northwest Syria amid growing fears that Russia and Turkey are on the brink of open warfare.  

Clashes between the Turks and their Syrian rebel allies with troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in Idlib province have already killed two Turkish soldiers this week and dozens of Syrian government troops.

SOUL MEETS BODY:

Greyhound, the nation's largest bus company, said Friday it will stop allowing Border Patrol agents without a warrant to board its buses to conduct routine immigration checks.

The company's announcement came one week after The Associated Press reported on a leaked Border Patrol memo confirming that agents can't board private buses without the consent of the bus company. Greyhound had previously insisted that even though it didn't like the immigration checks, it had no choice under federal law but to allow them.

NOT A pROGRESSIVE COUNTRY:

[D]espite being far longer, the Blair years pale in Labour mythology compared to the one-term post-war administration of Clement Attlee. This, they will tell you, was a radical, reforming leftwing government that changed the face of the country. It's an assessment that is not so much untrue as overly partial.

To listen to some Labourites, the NHS and the welfare state were the epitome of a properly socialist approach to government.  But, as Blair notes, the National Health Service was not the fruit of pure socialism but "grew out of a whole lot of things already happening, being discussed and debated".

It was the Tories who proposed a 'free' and 'comprehensive' health service in their White Paper of 1944 - a point they only recently seem to have got round to emphasising - the difference was not whether a nationwide health service was desirable, but how it should be adminstered and by whom.  And, famously, the report laying the foundation of the modern welfare state was written by a Liberal, William Beveridge. Likewise,  Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison were not socialist firebrands but, to quote Blair again, "very much on the moderate side of politics".

Far from being successful when it was most leftwing, Labour's most feted government reformed in line not just with the desires of its public, but the ideas of other parties (none of which prevented them losing the 1951 election anyway).

NOT THAT HARD, IS IT:

SICK OF TRUMPISM:

Ducey -- a supporter of President Donald Trump, who has made immigration a signature issue -- denied that his push for lawmakers to put the constitutional amendment on the ballot was a sea change. And he bristled when questioned about whether his effort would again lead to boycotts of Arizona and other problems like SB 1070 did.

"The state is booming. I think what would hurt the state's reputation is sanctuary cities, which people have tried to put on the ballot," Ducey said Thursday before ending his plan. "The state's reputation is just fine -- we've got people moving here every day."

But opponents of the governor's plan say it was a major about-face from his first term, when he faced pressure from the business community to halt the Republican-controlled Legislature's anti-immigration efforts.

They lambasted the proposal Ducey asked for in last month's State of the State address as a return to "one of the darkest years in Arizona history." After then-GOP Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 in 2010, tens of thousands of people marched on the Capitol and some businesses boycotted the state.

The damage was deep, coming as Arizona reeled from the lingering effects of the Great Recession and a foreclosure crisis that was the worst in the nation.

Legal challenges to SB 1070 kept many of its provisions from being implemented, but courts upheld the law's ban on sanctuary policies and its key feature: a requirement that police officers, while enforcing other laws, question the immigration status of people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Other than relatively minor proposals targeting immigrant criminals or border security, Ducey largely avoided the contentious issue after taking office in 2015.

Instead, he worked to repair Arizona's reputation, boosting its frayed relationship with Mexico and touting the state to businesses nationwide. His staff worked behind the scenes to make it clear that he was different than Brewer and didn't want divisive legislation to reach his desk.

Ducey says his motivation for a constitutional ban was a ballot measure to create a sanctuary city in Tucson that voters widely rejected last November. City leaders in the Democratic stronghold opposed the measure, citing SB 1070′s ban and the potential loss of state and federal dollars.

Democratic Sen. Martin Quezada said Thursday that Ducey had made a major political miscalculation and called it unnecessary because sanctuary policies are illegal already.

"I think he saw what happened in Tucson and he thought, 'Hey, this is low-hanging fruit and I can slam-dunk an issue that's really big with the Trump crowd and with the extreme element of his political base, and it's going to pass easily if it gets to the ballot,'" Quezada said.

The lawmaker said Ducey didn't think through the move and predicted the governor would backtrack "because the reality is the people in general are kind of sick of this stuff."

Quezada's was right: The governor and majority GOP legislative leaders announced the effort was dead Thursday night.

THE EMPTINESS OF THE TRUMPBOT:

"I didn't mean to come across as harsh," he told officials. "It's just that this is all I care about. I don't have a family. I don't have anything else. This is my life."

THEY TOLD US AMERICA WOULD NEVER ELECT A SOCIALIST:

President Trump promised in an all-caps tweet Friday to provide additional bailout funding to American farmers if necessary, as questions arise over whether China's purchases of agricultural products will fall short of what it pledged in the recently signed trade deal.

Crime in New York City https://t.co/hemRgs4fhf via @MotherJones Who will tell the bubble that NYC is not a crime-infested hellhole?

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 21, 2020

60-40 NATION:

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that 55 percent of the public views the health law favorably, the highest level since KFF began polling the question about 10 years ago. Just 37 percent said they view it unfavorably.

IF YOU BURST THE BUBBLE THE SNOWFLAKES MELT:

Among this piece's revelations, there isn't one more concerning than this: There are senior intelligence officials who thought the best strategy was to tone down the briefing or remove the Russia information entirely to avoid angering Republican lawmakers. pic.twitter.com/vBiguKvJL9

— Ned Price (@nedprice) February 20, 2020

NOTHING MORE NEW HAMPSHIRE...:

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Before announcing her sentence, Jackson rebuked Stone's conduct, saying he was "proud to act with impunity outside the law." She defended the integrity of the investigation.

"There was nothing unfair about the investigation and the prosecution," Jackson said, adding that Stone was not prosecuted because of his politics. "He was prosecuted for covering up for the president."

In a thinly veiled reference to Trump, Jackson said Stone's sentence should not be decided or influenced by someone who's a friend of the defendant and whose "political career was aided by the defendant."

TRUMPONOMICS:

Chief White House economist Tomas Philipson acknowledged Thursday that the trade war has hurt business investment, which the president wrongly predicted would spike after his 2017 tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the rich.

"Uncertainty generated by trade negotiations dampened investment," Philipson told reporters during a briefing on the Economic Report of the President, according to Bloomberg News.

Despite the admission, the 435-page report "barely" mentions the harmful effects of the tariffs as it argues that Trump's policies have led to a "great expansion," the outlet reported.

Philipson, who heads the Council of Economic Advisers, did not say how much the trade war has impacted investment. He cited a Federal Reserve study, which found it could reduce economic growth by about 1%.

...AND CHEAPER...:

"It's truly extreme," said Christian Holtz, an electricity analyst at Sweco. 

More wind power and windy weather, along with a lot of water in reservoirs, are two of the factors behind the forecasts.

On the Nordpool power exchange, a kilowatt-hour currently costs around 15 öre, which is extremely low for mid-winter.

The so-called futures, or prices for the second and third quarter, are currently set at around ten öre, and likely to rise to around 24 öre in the fourth quarter of 2020.

"You have to go back to the start of the millennium to find corresponding levels, and then the monetary value was different," said Holtz. In other words, ten öre today is cheaper than the same price in the early 2000s.

WHEN MEN WERE MEN...:

I did a story for SI this week on Bob Costas and Al Michaels. And to research the story, I asked if they could send me a DVD of the 1980 Olympic hockey game between the U.S. and Soviet Union -- the "Do you believe in miracles?" game. And they did. Of course, I have seen bits and pieces of that game many times since 1980 -- we all have -- but I have not seen the actual game, beginning to end (with extra commentary from Jim McKay), since I was 13 years old.

Watching that game (more than once) was incredible. And it inspired me to write up 10 things you may or may not know about the Miracle on Ice. You probably know most of this stuff. But it's fun just to remember.

10. The game was not broadcast live. Well, that's not exactly right... it was broadcast live on Canadian TV, so a few people up near the border saw it live. But most of the country -- almost all of the country, really -- saw it on tape delay, in prime time. The game had ended less than an hour before it was broadcast.

Funny, a lot of people still think they saw the game live. But I know that one of my strongest memories -- confirmed by the tape -- was of McKay saying that it was tape delay and that if even one person did not know the outcome, well, he wasn't going to be the one to break the news. I have seen polls through the years that suggested most of the people who watched the game on television did not know the outcome. I know that my father and I did not. That shows you how long ago 1980 was in terms of technology. There's no way you could keep that a secret now.

STUMBLING INTO AN INSIGHT:

Despite historically low interest rates, U.S. companies are being unusually frugal, holding back on issuing new debt and pumping up their balance sheets with cash.

Why it matters: Historically, when interest rates are low and the economy is strong, companies have levered up to increase capital expenditures and buy assets in order to expand. The opposite is happening now.

ALL HE HAS TO OFFER IS RACISM...:

"How bad were the Academy Awards this year?" asked Trump at the rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Imitating an Academy Awards presenter, he said: "And the winner is: a movie from South Korea." [...]

"Can we get Gone With the Wind back, please?" he said to thousands of supporters, referring to the film about the Civil War-era US that won the best picture Oscar 80 years ago.

WHO'S APOLOGIZING TO THE IMMIGRANTS WE HAVE IN CAMPS NOW?:

"During the years leading up to World War II, California led the nation in fanning the flames of racism," said Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, who was born in Japan.

The resolution said anti-Japanese sentiment began in California as early as 1913, when the state passed the Alien Land Law, targeting Japanese farmers who were perceived as a threat by some in the massive agricultural industry. Seven years later, the state barred anyone with Japanese ancestry from buying farmland.

"We are specifically apologizing for wrongs that were committed on this floor," Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said in the chamber.

"We are apologizing for what we have done."

Senators will take up a version of the resolution later in the year and send it to the governor to sign. California is providing no financial compensation.

A congressional commission in 1983 concluded that the detentions were a result of "racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership." Five years later, the U.S. government formally apologized and paid $20,000 in reparations to each victim.

Several California lawmakers noted the state's direct role in discriminating against Japanese Americans and carrying out the federal government's order to send residents to internment camps.

Two camps in the mid-1940s were in California: Manzanar on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada and Tule Lake near the Oregon state line, the largest of all the camps.

OUR TWO PRO-LIFE PARTIES:

Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. Efforts are ongoing to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would exacerbate health-care inequities. By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.

IT WASN'T AN AGREEMENT; IT WAS DONALD'S SURRENDER:

[I]t falls far short of the Trump administration's outlook that China will purchase $40 billion of US farm goods in the first year of the agreement -- an amount it hasn't come close to in the past decade.

THANKS, UR!:

Household net worth as a percentage of disposable income is near its post-WWII peak. pic.twitter.com/kFEowA14ZA

— Michael R. Strain (@MichaelRStrain) February 18, 2020

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

President Trump erupted at his acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, in the Oval Office last week over what he perceived as disloyalty by Maguire's staff, which ruined McGuire's chances of becoming the permanent intelligence chief, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump announced on Wednesday that he was replacing Maguire with a vocal loyalist, Richard Grenell, who is the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Maguire had been considered a leading candidate to be nominated for the post of DNI, White House aides had said. But Trump's opinion shifted last week when he heard from a GOP ally that the intelligence official in charge of election security, who works for Maguire, gave a classified briefing last Thursday to the House Intelligence Committee on 2020 election security.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Jokes can go wrong in a number of ways. Here are two of them. When a joke is told too often, it stops being funny. Humor relies on the unexpected or at the very least incongruous, and once you've seen or heard something for the tenth time it's usually no longer surprising. Second, when one tries to explain the mechanics of a joke, it has already failed. If the audience didn't get it the first time, it won't do much good trying to present an argument for why it is supposed to be funny. Explaining your own jokes has the same aura of desperation as another comedic sin, laughing too hard at them. There are, of course, other ways that humor can go wrong. We flatter ourselves in thinking offensiveness is a uniquely contemporary malady, but the real problem with offensive jokes isn't that they are not funny; it's that they are too funny. Their issue is, as it were, external to their humor.

The compulsive jokiness with which so many modern Americans deflect the subject of aging can get pretty tiresome. But perhaps it's not the worst way to handle the matter. At least one avoids the undignified excesses of self-pity and despair by making light of an admittedly unwelcome condition, even while implicitly confessing one's susceptibility to an all-too-human vanity. That was the approach taken by the great comedian Jack Benny, whose trademark shtick included the comic pretense that he was perpetually thirty-nine. There was irony built into the joke, a self-mockery that was at least honest enough to acknowledge itself. Laughing at Jack Benny, we were also laughing at ourselves; he was so much like us, merely offering up a silly and exaggerated version of what so many of us are tempted to do.

But even great comedy has its limits. A jokey evasion is still an evasion, one that tries not only to hide a great deal of anxiety but also to distract us from seeking the deeper meanings in our experience. A joke may be a civilized way of coping, but it is not an answer to much of anything, and it may even be a veiled way of confessing to the dread that there are no answers to be had. "I'm not afraid of death," said Woody Allen, "I just don't want to be there when it happens." A very funny line, but what makes it so funny is the way it confirms the overwhelming force of the very fear it claims to deny.

ACORN?:

THE WAR ENDED IN 1776:

BUT NATIVISM IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT THAN NAZISM!:

WAIT! THEY'RE HUMANS? WHO WILL TELL THE TRUMPBOTS...:

A federal judge in Arizona has ruled that Border Patrol facilities in the Tucson sector deprive migrants of "basic human needs," saying the conditions at the temporary detention facilities are "substantially worse" than those in jails or prisons and violate the Constitution.

Overcrowding was at times so severe, U.S. District Judge David C. Bury found, that migrants were forced to sleep on the floor in bathrooms and in toilet stalls.

The Wednesday ruling permanently enjoins U.S. Customs and Border Protection from detaining migrants in holding cells at its Tucson sector stations for longer than 48 hours -- "unless CBP can provide conditions of confinement that meet detainees' basic human needs."

That means migrants staying any longer than two days must be provided a variety of things they have not been getting: sleep free from constant disruption, in a real bed with a blanket; nutritious food; access to a shower and a medical assessment by a medical professional.

The ruling also says CBP must immediately stop making migrants sleep in "toilet areas" due to overcrowding.

"Regardless of whether a detainee is sleeping on a mat or directly on the concrete floor, being forced to sleep in a toilet area due to overcrowding offends the notions of common decency," Bury, a George W. Bush appointee in the District of Arizona, wrote in the 40-page order. "It is unsanitary and degrading for all detainees who either have to sleep in the toilet area or try to use the toilet when others are sleeping there."

NEED A WALL TO KEEP THE NATIVES OUT:

For the past five years, Syria was the most common country of birth among new arrivals in Sweden, as people fled the war-torn region. But last year the number of Syrian immigrants (6,128 people) more than halved compared to 2018, and decreased by almost 90 percent on 2016.

Instead, Sweden, India and Afghanistan made up the top three countries of birth last year, with 7,389 Indian-born people moving to Sweden (an annual 1.1 percent increase) and 6,845 people from Afghanistan (a 15.4 percent decrease). 

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

The goal of modern cosmology is to explain the evolution of the Universe from its inception to the present time using our limited understanding of its composition and physical laws. This is even harder than it sounds! The first difficulty materialized in 1929 when initial estimates of the present expansion rate -- known as the Hubble constant or H0 -- rewound to the Big Bang singularity implied that the Universe was younger than the age estimated for the Earth and Sun. In retrospect, both figures were well off the mark, but there has been tremendous progress in the meantime. The measurement of H0 improved from 10% uncertainty at the start of the 2000s to less than 2% by 2019. In the past few years, reduced uncertainties from both the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- the afterglow of the Big Bang -- and local Universe measurements have revealed an underlying discrepancy that is growing harder to ignore.

Scientists now have a 'standard model of cosmology', called ΛCDM (lambda cold dark matter), economically crafted from six free parameters and a number of well-tested ansatzes. The model characterizes a wide range of phenomena including the accelerating expansion, structure formation, primordial nucleosynthesis, flat geometry of spacetime, fluctuations of the Big Bang afterglow and the first combination of baryons into atoms. Remarkably, dark components (matter and energy) account for 95% of the Universe, as described by ΛCDM, their presence robustly inferred from their gravitational effects. Yet despite the success in better understanding our Universe confirmed by a wealth of precise measurements, in the past few years there has been growing evidence that the expansion of the Universe is still exceeding our predictions. [...]

If the Universe fails this crucial end-to-end test (it surely hasn't yet passed), what might this tell us? It is tempting to think we may be seeing evidence of some 'new physics' in the cosmos. Indeed, a large number of theoretical solutions have been proposed and are reviewed in ref.10. For example, if we lived near the middle of a vast and deep void in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this could cause excessive, local expansion. However, the odds of a void this large occurring by chance is incredibly low. Calculations show that it exceeds 10σ (ref.11) and is also strongly ruled out empirically by the lack of evidence of any end to the void from SNe Ia at greater distances12. Dark energy with an equation of state lower than vacuum energy could produce stronger acceleration and explain the discrepancy, but this possibility is disfavoured by other intermediate-redshift measurements.

Greater success in explaining the H0 measurement discrepancies has been achieved by altering the composition of the Universe shortly before the emergence of the CMB. An additional component in ΛCDM, such as a new neutrino or scalar field (the latter called early dark energy or EDE), could have increased the early expansion, decreased the sound horizon of primordial fluctuations and raised the predicted value of H0 depending on the approach used, to 70-73 km s−1 Mpc−1 (ref.10) in plausible agreement with the local value. New particles tend to create new conflicts with the CMB, whereas EDE is claimed to improve agreement with the CMB. A criticism of EDE is that its scales must be finely tuned, although the same may be said of the other two episodes of dark energy (inflation and present acceleration). This raises the question of whether apparent episodes of such anomalous expansion are common or even related

CO-CONSPIRATOR IS A BAD LOOK:

Arizona Senate GE:
Mark Kelly (D) 46% (+7)
Martha McSally (R-inc) 39%@azhighground 2/7-9https://t.co/qcFfG0ktSs #AZsen

— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) February 19, 2020

CO-CONSPIRATOR IS A BAD LOOK:

Gideon leads Collins 43-42 in the survey, which has a margin of error of 3%. Fourteen percent of Maine voters remain undecided.

The poll was the first conducted in Maine in many months. The last poll, conducted in June, showed Collins leading Gideon by 16 points. Collins has never lost re-election and won her last race by nearly 40 points.

The Colby College poll finds that 54% of Maine voters have an unfavorable opinion of Collins, compared to 42% who have a favorable opinion of the senator.

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

For this study, lead author David Tomasi, a psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Vermont, alongside the center's Sheri Gates and Emily Reyns, built a gym for the hundred-or-so members of the inpatient psychiatry unit. Tomasi says that most patients in the U.S. are first treated with medications, with exercise-based treatments offered in either a limited capacity or not at all. The center is the first to prescribe exercise as the first form of treatment.

The results were stunning. After leading the patients in structured exercises -- each 60-minute session included a combination of strength training, flexibility training, and cardio -- 95 percent of patients reported feeling better, while 63 percent reported feeling happy or very happy instead of sad, very sad, or neutral. A whopping 91.8 percent said they were pleased with their bodies during the sessions. Tomasi continues,

The general attitude of medicine is that you treat the primary problem first, and exercise was never considered to be a life or death treatment option. Now that we know it's so effective, it can become as fundamental as pharmacological intervention.

Blame, in large part, Cartesian dualism. The mind-body split has destroyed our understanding of our inherent animal nature. The notion that there's an ethereal process inside the biological workings of our bodies -- the ambiguous "soul" -- has resulted in a severe disassociation between physical movement and psychology. We've come to believe we can treat the brain separately from the body.

HARMONY OF LIBERTY:

The contemporary re-emergence of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" arguably began when Beyoncé sang its opening lines as she took the stage at the Coachella festival, a watershed moment in and of itself. The first black woman to headline the festival, the singer delivered a dazzling knockout performance that was dedicated to historically black colleges. When Beyoncé sings a song it gets heard, and this performance helped bring "Lift Every Voice and Sing" straight onto America's playlist.

The song was written long ago and began as a poem by James Weldon Johnson.

A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln's birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. -- James Weldon Johnson

According to "Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora" by Shana L. Redmond, Johnson later recalled, "I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so."

Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children. Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used. -- James Weldon Johnson

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) named "Lift Every Voice and Sing" the "black national anthem" in 1919, but not everyone agrees with that designation since it implies the need for a separate American black anthem. Nonetheless, listening to this American hymn is a haunting, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting experience.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

Edward Fitzgerald, Assange's lawyer, said Wednesday that a message had been passed on to Assange by former Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.

Fitzgerald said a statement produced by Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, showed "Mr Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

I want you to steal what the lawyers self-interestedly call "intellectual property": Hoffman's book or my books or E=mc2 or the Alzheimer's drug that the Food and Drug Administration is "testing" in its usual bogus and unethical fashion. I want the Chinese to steal "our" intellectual property, so that consumers worldwide get stuff cheaply. I want everybody to steal every idea, book, chemical formula, Stephen Foster lyric--all of it. Steal, steal, steal. You have my official economic permission.

What?! A liberal (in the classical sense) wants people to steal? You bet. Here's why. An idea, after it is produced, has no opportunity cost. If one more person reads Hamlet, there's no less of it available for the next person. That's not true of, say, your house. If the neighbors treat your house as common property, there's less of it for you to use. George is in the bathroom right now. Sorry.

It's true of your labor, which also has an opportunity cost--an alternate use necessarily forgone--to you. If you become a slave, you can't use your own self. The master in Kentucky gets those hours in the field away from the little cabin floor, yet he doesn't pay you for their opportunity cost.

The correct price for such scarce items is their opportunity cost, because then, as Adam Smith said, "As every individual...endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital [and labor and land and other items with opportunity cost so] that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can."

But ideas have no opportunity cost. So the optimal price, socially speaking, is zero.

THERE IS NO YEMEN:

The operation succeeded Jan. 26 after less than a week, taking over nearly 2,000 square kilometers (1,243 square miles) mostly consisting of mountains and rugged terrain. This means that any force's attempt to return to the land will require time, effort, money and sacrifice.

Because of Nahm's strategic and geographic importance, the Houthis have fought several fierce battles for the area over five years against the forces of the UN-backed government of exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Despite intermittent calm, the battles kept reigniting, with neither side able to impose full control.

By capturing Nahm, the eastern gateway to Sanaa, the forces of the Houthi National Salvation Government secured all paths leading to the capital. During this recent battle, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of the Houthi Supreme Political Council, described Nahm on Twitter as "the most important front in the Sanaa governate."

Iran-backed Houthi militias already controlled the capital.

With the fall of the Nahm front, stretching more than 35 kilometers (21 miles), the Houthis warded off a major threat they have faced since the war began in March 2015.

Moreover, the Houthis -- officially known as Ansar Allah -- now control the chain of highlands overlooking the provinces of al-Jawf and Marib, most notably a strategic rim of the Yam Mountains and the camp of Hadi's 312th Armored Brigade. This position gives them an advantage in monitoring and controlling fire lines along these areas.

WHY THE KEY TO HEALTH CARE REFORM IS REDUCING CONSUMPTION:

...AND CHEAPER...:

SOMEONE HAS TO KEEP THE BUBBLE FACT FREE:

While Solomon's columns on Ukraine were labeled as opinion, they largely read like news stories. Adding to the potential confusion between opinion and news, Solomon was identified as "an award-winning journalist" in his column tagline. When appearing on television to discuss his Ukraine columns, Solomon was not typically labeled an opinion writer by the broadcast programs. The Hill did not contact television producers to label Solomon as an opinion columnist. It should have. 

Lending further support to an impression that the columns were more like news stories, rather than opinion columns, Solomon's Ukraine columns were longer than typical opinion pieces, in many cases contained what could be viewed or was identified by him as original reporting, and stuck to one general topic. This may have suggested to many readers it was an investigative series, which normally resides in the news department, rather than opinion. Solomon's subsequent appearances on Fox News where he was often identified as an investigative journalist further potentially blurred the distinction between news and opinion in the minds of some readers.

Certain outlets, including The New York Times and ABC News, followed Solomon's work on Ukraine with news articles of their own.

In many of his columns, Solomon did include caveats that Ukraine is infamous for corruption and disinformation operations, including Russian interference, and he did seek comment from parties who were mentioned critically in his columns. While appropriate for news reporting, that is not typical of opinion writing; it had the consequence of further blurring the distinction between news and opinion for some readers.

Unlike other employees, Solomon had a hybrid role at The Hill, working in Hill.TV, opinion and/or news. Solomon did not report to a specific management official in the newsroom, which was an unusual personnel situation at The Hill. This hybrid role further undermined the distinction between opinion contributor and news-based journalist, since Solomon could be seen as writing an opinion column in one section while reporting news as an interviewer on Hill.TV.

In certain columns, Solomon failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation. In other cases, the sources were his own attorneys.

Solomon's first three Ukraine-related pieces ran on March 20, 2019. One was an opinion column titled, "As Russia collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges," and the two others were Hill.TV interviews with then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko. All three pieces were derived from a Hill.TV interview with Lutsenko. In the Hill.TV interview, Lutsenko made two significant claims: that he had opened a probe into alleged attempts by Ukrainians to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and that then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch had given him a do-not-prosecute list. Solomon quoted the U.S. State Department as dismissing Lutsenko's assertions as unfounded and also supporting Ambassador Yovanovitch. Solomon went on Fox News the same day to promote the story, which was highlighted by Trump in a tweet.

Notable questions about Lutsenko being a reliable source have been raised, especially when the events of the last year are reviewed. Although Solomon identified Lutsenko as an anti-corruption crusader, State Department officials, more than a year before the interview, had deemed the prosecutor general's office to be an untrustworthy partner in that cause, suspecting him of undermining those very efforts. Most notably, Lutsenko's story has changed repeatedly. In April 2019, he told a Ukrainian newspaper that he himself had reached for pen and paper and asked Ambassador Yovanovitch for the do-not-prosecute list. He altered his comments again, in an interview with The New Yorker in November, when he said that he'd written the list himself, then ripped it up while Yovanovitch looked on.

According to Polygraph.info, a joint project of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, there was a "critical mistake" in the translation of Hill.TV's initial March interview. Polygraph.info said that Lutsenko said Yovanovitch did not provide a written list but, instead, "voiced" it -- using the Ukraine word "oholosyla."

Contradicting assertions in Solomon's columns, in Politico and in some other media reports, State Department officials, U.S. national security agencies and the Senate Intelligence Committee have concluded that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian government officials, who have denied meddling in the 2016 election, have pushed the narrative that Ukraine interfered in that U.S. election.

To this day, Solomon has stood by his columns on Lutsenko, Yovanovitch and Ukraine meddling. He also has taken issue with assertions that he smeared Yovanovitch, noting that he included supportive remarks about her by the State Department in his columns.

Since the publication of Solomon's Lutsenko/Yovanovitch columns, numerous media reports and documents have disclosed that Giuliani was working with others inside and outside the U.S. government to oust Yovanovitch from her Ukraine post. U.S. diplomats testified in House impeachment hearings that Trump empowered Giuliani to play a leading role in Ukraine foreign policy, specifically as it related to Yovanovitch and the Bidens.

In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, administration officials described Solomon's articles about Yovanovitch as central to a "smear campaign," spearheaded by Giuliani on behalf of Trump, and characterized them as false or inaccurate.

Yovanovitch was recalled from Ukraine in May 2019 and recently retired from the State Department.

On April 1, 2019, The Hill published a Solomon column titled "Joe Biden's 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived." This column highlighted that Joe Biden was a key player in convincing Ukraine to fire its then-prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in 2016. Shokin was replaced by Lutsenko, who at the time was regarded highly by some U.S. officials and deemed to be someone the U.S. could work with.

The column suggests that Joe Biden was protecting Hunter Biden because Burisma was the subject of a "wide-ranging corruption probe." That account has been disputed by officials in both Kyiv and Washington and others who maintain the investigation had grown dormant, and that Joe Biden was pushing for Shokin's removal, not because he was investigating corruption allegations, but because he was neglecting to do so. British officials investigating fraud at Burisma backed this account, dropping a case against the company in early 2015 -- months before Joe Biden's push to remove Shokin -- citing a lack of cooperation from the prosecutor general's office in Kyiv. Furthermore, seeking Shokin's ouster was the official position of the U.S. and the European Union. The Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove Shokin in 2016. Like Lutsenko, Shokin's reliability as a source is in question. Shokin was among the figures Solomon interviewed during his research.

Hunter Biden, who had little to no energy expertise at the time he was hired by Burisma, has said it was "poor judgment" to accept the position on Burisma's board, acknowledging that he likely received the job offer because of his last name. State Department officials also said in impeachment inquiry testimony that they were concerned with Hunter Biden sitting on the company board while Joe Biden was overseeing the U.S. government's Ukraine policies.

There has never been any proof of legal wrongdoing by the Bidens. Pressed on the matter in a recent interview, Joe Biden said the Bidens' dual roles in Ukraine led some to say it set "a bad image."

Lutsenko himself in May 2019 said there was no evidence of legal wrongdoing. At the time of Lutsenko's initial interviews with Solomon in March 2019, there was tension between Lutsenko and Yovanovitch amid official U.S. concerns about Lutsenko's commitment to anti-corruption efforts.

Giuliani has indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling The New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon.

"I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon," Giuliani said.

The former New York City mayor later told The New Yorker he encouraged Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, "I said, 'John, let's make this as prominent as possible,' " adding, "'I'll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.' "

Disputing this notion, Solomon has said that he began working on Ukraine stories in 2018 before the issue was mentioned by Giuliani, the Trump White House or other U.S. government officials, but he did not have enough information and on-the-record sources until 2019. Solomon has said the notion of Giuliani being a principal source for his Ukraine columns is a "bogus narrative." In November 2019, Solomon said Giuliani was "never an on-the-record, off-the-record or on-background source for any of those stories."

Since the publication of Solomon's columns, Parnas delivered Ukraine-related communications to Congress that show repeated contact among Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, and Victoria Toensing of the Washington law firm of diGenova & Toensing, among others.

In one exchange released by the House Intelligence Committee, an aide to House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who frequently brings up alleged Ukrainian election interference, asks Parnas, "Any documents for us or are you going to keep working through Solomon?"

Solomon has denied any coordinated effort with Giuliani, Parnas or others, insisting that he was merely dealing with those individuals in the course of reporting for his columns, and he has called Parnas a "facilitator" who helped him in setting up interviews with Ukrainian officials, including Lutsenko and Shokin.

Joseph diGenova and Toensing are attorneys who have long represented Solomon. In an article that ran in October 2019, diGenova stated that Solomon has been a client of his firm "for a very long time." Aside from Solomon, diGenova and Toensing had other clients with interest in Ukraine. According to Bloomberg, diGenova and Toensing were paid $1 million by a Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, to find negative information on the Bidens. Firtash is fighting extradition to the U.S. on conspiracy charges, and the effort was designed to help win Giuliani's help in the case, Bloomberg reported. They have also met with Lutsenko, according to The New York Times.

In his Sept. 26 column, Solomon links to a Sept. 4, 2019, affidavit by Shokin that was made at the request of lawyers representing Firtash. According to media reports, diGenova and Toensing represented Firtash at that time.

Solomon also wrote about "Firtash's U.S. legal team" in a July 22, 2019, column and links back to that column in an Aug. 7, 2019, column. According to a July 2019 press account, Firtash cut ties with his prior counsel on July 20 and decided to be represented by diGenova and Toensing.

Solomon did not disclose that diGenova and Toensing represented him at the time of this column.

In addition, Solomon wrote several news articles for The Hill in 2017 that quoted Toensing but did not disclose that she was his attorney. Toensing and diGenova also appeared on Hill.TV at the time that Solomon was both their client and running the show.

In November 2019, Solomon said that diGenova and Toensing were his longtime lawyers during an appearance on Fox News. Pressed on why he did not disclose in his writings that Toensing was his attorney, Solomon initially denied he had quoted her while she served as his attorney and then said he would look into it and that if he did write about her, he should disclose the relationship. As part of this review, The Hill is adding disclosures -- to Solomon's news stories, opinion columns, and relevant Hill.TV appearances -- that should have been made at the time of publication.

In the fall of 2019, it was reported that before one of his columns was published in The Hill, Solomon emailed a draft of it to Parnas, diGenova and Toensing without the knowledge of editors at The Hill. Solomon has defended the email, saying he has long done this as a normal practice to ensure accuracy and for legal reasons. Parnas, diGenova and Toensing are not mentioned in the column. It is worth reiterating that The Hill has legal counsel who reviews certain articles and opinion columns before they are published.

In a recent podcast, Solomon said he was fortunate that his attorneys had key contacts in Ukraine: "I was lucky. It turns out Joe [diGenova] and Victoria [Toensing] have a lot of relationships in Ukraine."

The true nature and extent of Parnas's role in Solomon's work remain unclear but potentially troubling.

THE BLUE WAVE:

Roughly 80 percent of those surveyed ranked "taking steps to lower the cost of health care" as "extremely" or "very" important, including 89 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans. Reducing prescription-drug costs saw similar support at 75 percent, with majorities in both parties ranking it as extremely or very important. [...]

Americans' focus on health care costs is consistent with polling over the past two years, and has underpinned congressional Democrats' emphasis on passing legislation designed to lower drug prices and shore up the Affordable Care Act.

IT'S WRONG TO THINK THE PALEOCONS ARE JUST NOW ARRIVING HERE...:

 It was more than six years ago that my article "Against Libertarian Brutalism" raised a conjecture: a libertarianism, rendered simply as nothing more than a "leave me alone" outlook, with no larger aspiration for the good life, and no interest in the subject of social cooperation, could find itself divorced from a historical conception of what the advent of liberty has meant to human life and society as a whole. Without that, we fail to develop good instincts for interpreting the world around us. We are even reduced to syllogistic slogans and memes which can be deeply misleading and feed even illiberal bias.

And where does this bias end up? Where are the limits? I see them daily online. In the name of fighting the left, many have turned the other direction to embrace an alternative form of identitarianism, restrictions on trade and migration, curbs on essential civil liberties, and even toyed with the freedom of the press and the rights of private enterprise, in the name of humiliating and eliminating the enemy. Some go further to celebrate anything they believe the left hates, including even odious causes from the authoritarian past.

The rhetoric at the extremes approaches nihilism. The press isn't really free so why not impose restrictions, censorship, and litigated punishments? The borders aren't private so why not prohibit all entry? Some speech doesn't support freedom so why permit it the rights that freedom entails? Social media companies aren't really private enterprises, so why not force them to carry and promote some accounts that I like? That large company has a government contract so why not bust it up with antitrust? 

The gradual evolution of language has unleashed all kinds of confusion. Activists denounce "the establishment" without a clear distinction between government and influential media voices. They will decry "globalism" without bothering to distinguish the World Bank from an importer of Chinese fireworks. They promote identitarianism and racial collectivism without the slightest understanding of the illiberal origins and uses of these ideologies in 20th-century history. After all, they say, there is nothing "inherently un-libertarian" about casting down an entire people, religion, gender, language, or race, so long as you don't directly use violence.

It takes a special kind of circuitous sophistry to justify, in the name of liberty, collectivistic animus and state violence against voluntary association. But the history of politics shows people are capable of making huge mental leaps in service of ideological goals. All it takes is small steps, little excuses, tweaks of principle here and there, seemingly minor compromises, some element of confirmation bias, and you are good to go, ready to make as much sense as the old communist slogan that you have to break eggs to make omelets.

J'ACCUSE!:

R.D. Hooker Jr., a retired Army colonel, served in the White House during the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. He worked in the National Security Council during the latter three presidencies.

In the late 19th century, a French army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason, in a national scandal that became a cause celebre affecting civil-military relations in France into modern times. The Dreyfus affair, as it was known, transfixed the nation, bringing to the surface the worst in French politics of the day. Dreyfus was a Jew, a rarity in the French officer corps. He was Alsatian and spoke German and, therefore, was suspect as not a "real" Frenchman. Though he was later proved innocent, Dreyfus was convicted on forged evidence, publicly degraded in a military ceremony and shipped to Devil's Island. Condemned by his government, his leaders and the public, Dreyfus maintained his innocence and patriotism with dignity and composure. Many years later, he was rehabilitated and served during the First World War. His is a cautionary tale that reverberates to this day.

The parallels between the Dreyfus affair and the treatment of Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman are striking. As a senior director on the National Security Council staff early in the Trump administration, I recruited Alex based on his brilliance, language skills and remarkable military record. Alex is a Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and Russian was his first language. His is a quintessential American story. I know him to be a patriot and a professional military officer in the best sense: apolitical, nonpartisan, selfless and deeply committed to this country and its values. He proved his loyalty above all by serving this nation in combat in Iraq, where he was wounded. To this day, he wears the reminders of that service on his uniform and in his body.

He is among the finest officers I have ever known.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The project, which in the six months since its launch has already been incorporated into select curricula across the country, has its merits. Skillful storytelling forces readers to reckon with the horror of human beings ripped from their homes, families, and communities, only to find themselves -- if they survived the excruciating journey across the ocean -- in forced-labor camps in a distant land surrounded by strange people and practices. Short essays highlight the connections between the abominable institution of slavery and the economic development of the nation; Wall Street and the finance industry, for example, acquired vast sums mortgaging and insuring enslaved people as property. The essays also explore the widespread racial discrimination that persisted long after slavery was formally abolished -- the effects of which, the project argues, still linger.

Recovery of the truth about slavery and its painful legacy is laudable. But many of the Times' 18 original articles advance a false and inflammatory contention. That claim, which is rooted in fashionable academic theories about structural oppression, is that slavery -- not the idea of fundamental rights belonging to all persons heralded in the Declaration of Independence -- is the defining feature of America's founding.

The ambiguity at the core of the 1619 Project -- whether its goal is to recover the truth on behalf of the public interest or to promulgate a hyperbolic critique for partisan advantage -- is on display in the project's lead essay. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, asserts harshly but, in one sense, accurately, "The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie." The ideal is, "'all men are created equal' and 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'" The founding lie, according to Hannah-Jones, is twofold: First, that "the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst"; and, second, that unalienable rights "did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country."

But Hannah-Jones's description of the lie distorts a complex reality. Yes, the American Constitution gave legal protection to slavery in violation of the Declaration's radiant promise. Yet, many of those who signed the Declaration -- among them principal drafter Thomas Jefferson -- believed that black Americans, like all people, possessed "unalienable rights." The government whose foundations those signers helped lay, moreover, provided the framework in which slavery would be outlawed. The lie at the founding was that black people were deprived of fundamental rights that, according to the principle inspiring the Declaration, did apply to them by virtue of their humanity. It was for this reason that, many years later, Jefferson wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." [...]

Although she obscures the role of white people who were on the side of justice in the centuries-long struggle to secure the rights of black Americans, Hannah-Jones writes powerfully about the larger and inspiring significance of that struggle. "Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves -- black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women's and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights."

With this crucial observation, Hannah-Jones confirms the centrality to the American experiment, and the continuing vitality, of America's founding principles. For her critique would have little force in a dictatorship or in a society dominated by an aristocracy based on blood and land -- or where racism permeated political idea and institutions. Only in a country dedicated to the Declaration's central convictions -- that all human beings are created equal, that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and that the chief purpose of government is to secure those rights -- could her dire assessment appear in a marquee venue, singe her readers' consciences, and prompt fellow citizens to carry forward the work of improving the alignment of American practices with American ideals.

To preserve such an America, it will be necessary to tell the truth -- disguising none of the betrayals but also concealing none of the luster -- about the Declaration's essential truths and the nation's inspiring progress, born of shared struggle, in honoring them. 

A RELIGION, NOT A RACE:

"To be for the Israeli people and to be for peace in the Middle East does not mean that we have to support right-wing, racist governments that currently exist in Israel," Sanders responded, drawing applause from the audience.

Saying he feels "strongly about it as someone who is Jewish and knowing how much our people have suffered over the years," Sanders added that American foreign policy in the region should be "about bringing the Israelis, bringing the Palestinians together under the banner of justice."

US policy, he said, "cannot simply be one that we're just pro-Israel and we ignore the needs of the Palestinian people."

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

Even as Trump commands rock-solid support among Republicans, voters' interest in going to the polls appears to be growing faster among those who disapprove of Trump than among those who approve of him, according to experts who reviewed the data.

The advantage in urban political engagement extends deep into the most competitive battleground states that Trump won by razor-thin margins four years ago, the data shows.

In large urban areas of the upper Midwest, a region that includes swing states Michigan and Wisconsin, for example, the number of people who said they were "certain" to vote in the upcoming presidential election rose by 10 percentage points to 67% compared with survey responses from 2015.

In smaller upper Midwest communities, the number of people similarly dedicated to voting rose by only about 1 point to 60% in that same four-year period.

Overall, the number of "certain" voters rose by 7 percentage points nationally from 2015 to 2019. It increased by more than that in the largest metropolitan areas, rising by 9 points in communities with between 1 million and 5 million people and 8 points in metros with at least 5 million people.

Smaller and rural communities lagged behind. 

NO ONE ACTUALLY BELIEVES HE'S THAT HONORABLE:

U.S. Attorney General William Barr is considering resigning over President Donald Trump's tweets about Justice Department investigations, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters, while the department said he was not leaving.

THERE'S NO PROFESSIONAL COURTESY, LIKE SHARKS AND LAWYERS?:

Agra will be under a security lockdown when United States President Donald Trump arrives in the city. Nobody will be allowed to venture out of their homes on the route that Donald Trump would take from the Agra airport to the Taj Mahal. Even mobile communication is being expected to be interrupted along the route during Donald Trump's stay in Agra. However, this security lockdown does not apply to the hundreds of monkeys living in and around the Taj Mahal.

LET IT BE BIBI'S LEGACY:

MK Nitzan Horowitz, head of Meretz and no. 3 in the joint Knesset slate, vows the faction would "renew the partnership with the Arab community in a Gantz government. The Oslo agreement that the right-wing loves to vilify is still in operation, and no one dares to cancel it, because its principles guarantee the future existence of both peoples."

NO WONDER NO ONE LISTENS TO HIM:

In a series of tweets and in comments to reporters Tuesday, Trump said national security concerns, which had been cited as reasoning for the plans, should not be used as an excuse to make it difficult for foreign countries to buy U.S. products.

The president's comments came after weekend reports by Reuters and other news media that the government was considering whether to stop General Electric Co from further supplying engines for a new Chinese passenger jet.

His views on the issue contrasted with the sharp restrictions his administration has placed on U.S. companies trading with Huawei Technologies, the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker, also for national security reasons.

"We're not going to be sacrificing our companies ... by using a fake term of national security."

YOU KNOW WHAT THE rIGHT REALLY HATES?:

"The goal, long term, is to think about what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be," said Cass. "One of the reasons we think this is such an important project is that, even four-plus years after Trump emerged on the scene, there really has been very little new and interesting ferment in the right of center. It's pretty much the same set of institutions and publications and so forth. ... By and large, the establishment is what it was. And it seems to be keeping its head down and sort of hoping that everything can just go back post-Trump to the way that it was pre-Trump. To the extent that the future should sound different, and certainly I think it should, now is the time to start building the institutions and efforts that are going to make that a reality."

Cass acknowledges the problems animating populism are very real, but he argues that they won't be solved by the governing ideologies he blames for creating the crisis, nor by the populism itself, "which has demonstrated no ability to formulate or implement a coherent response."

"An earthquake clears a lot of space for rebuilding, but an earthquake does not rebuild," Cass explained. "And there are a lot of people who want to rush right back in and build what you already had after the earthquake. But something an earthquake shows you is which of the things that you'd already built were really not built very thoughtfully. It's important to learn lessons from this disruption that has occurred. It's important to go back to first principles and ask: What do we actually believe and why? What do we care about and why?"

Inside the GOP coalition, Cass argues, traditional economic conservatives ceded economic policy to libertarians as part of a "bargain" to win the Cold War. Ronald Reagan called it a three-legged stool: economic libertarians, social conservatives and national security hawks. Cass believes this "fusionism" worked well - in the past.

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

IF YOU END THE STORY THERE IT SEEMS LIKE THE KILLER MATTERED:

It isn't normal to begin reviews of detective novels by discussing their last chapter. But Maigret and the Man on the Bench is not a normal detective novel - and its conclusion is so striking that it demands immediate attention.

If you've read the novel, you'll know exactly what I mean. If you haven't, I don't think it's giving away too much to say that in just 10 pages in David Watson's (excellent) translation, Maigret discovers the identity of the murderer of Louis Thouret, the eponymous man on the bench. This murderer has barely been mentioned before in the novel, and Maigret doesn't care about his identity. "This was the most boring part," he reflects as he is writing up the case. Just six lines later, the book ends.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER:

Blagojevich has been serving a 14-year sentence for corruption linked to his efforts to sell off Barack Obama's former US Senate seat, which he vacated to become president. He was seeking campaign contributions in exchange for filling Obama's vacant seat. 

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Humans have decoded the basic structure of our home planet, our solar system, and even our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, we have scaled our observations up to the entire universe, which is the biggest entity known to science and among the most challenging to map out and define.

Scientists think the universe is undergirded by a cosmic web of filaments and knots made of dark matter, a mysterious substance that accounts for most of the mass in the cosmos. These large-scale structures guide the evolution of galaxies, but their exact mechanics are currently unknown and hard to observe because dark matter, annoyingly, does not emit light like stars or galaxies.

Enter Dark Emulator: a sophisticated artificial intelligence tool created to model these immense cosmic processes. Using machine learning, the program is able to generate complex virtual universes that predict the behavior of large-scale structures, according to an October 2019 study in The Astrophysical Journal.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

To be an extremist is, first and foremost, to have an extremist mindset. It is often pointed out that people at opposite ends of the political spectrum have much in common. What they have in common is their mindset: their preoccupations, attitudes, thinking styles and emotions. To understand these elements is to understand why the extremist label is not one that anyone should be happy to own. 

A key extremist preoccupation is victimisation - the perception of themselves as victims of persecution. While extremism can be a reaction to genuine persecution, many extremists are obsessed with fantasies of persecution. For example, so-called "incels", men who describe themselves as "involuntarily celibate", believe that they are oppressed by women who refuse to have sex with them. This is a classic extremist persecution fantasy.  

Another extremist preoccupation is purity. The purity that extremists are obsessed with can be ideological, religious, or ethnic. Ideological extremists are not just strongly committed to a specific ideology or belief system. Their commitment is to what they see as the purest or most unadulterated version of their favoured ideology. Their biggest fear is dilution, and they see themselves as virtuous because of the purity of their beliefs. 

Extremism's preoccupation with purity explains one of its key attitudes: its attitude to compromise. Extremists hate compromise because it detracts from purity. Being an extremist is as much a matter of how one believes as what one believes. Extremists see compromise as a form of betrayal, and while extremists may hate their opponents, this is usually milder than their hatred of people on their own side who have, as they see it, "sold out". 

Another key extremist attitude is indifference to any adverse consequences of one's actions or policies. To not be deterred by the practical or emotional damage incurred is the essence of fanaticism, so it follows that extremists are also fanatics. The reverse, however, is not true; one might be indifferent to practicalities, but not preoccupied with purity and victimhood as extremists invariably are. 

[See also: How to get on with your political enemies]

As for extremist thinking styles, these are powerfully articulated in Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Extremists are prone to both utopian and conspiracy thinking. They think in terms of a future utopia to which their policies will lead, and they see conspiracies everywhere. Many extremist conspiracy theories, such as the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are anti-Semitic.

In Hofstadter's terms, extremists are also uncommonly angry, and this points to the emotional components of the extremist mindset. Extremist anger is rooted in feelings of resentment about their lot. Another fundamental extremist emotion is self-pity. Anger, resentment, and self-pity are a potentially lethal emotional cocktail, especially in combination with other elements of the extremist mindset.  

SOUNDS LIKE A JOB FOR RUDY!:

IMPEACH HIM AGAIN:

A national association of federal judges will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday after Justice Department officials intervened in the case involving a close confident of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The head of the independent Federal Judges Association, District Judge Cynthia Rufe, tells VOA the judges are "concerned about the attacks on individual judges" and it will be the main issue to be discussed.

DONALD IS WESTMORELAND:

The European Union has approved a trade agreement with Vietnam, disproving skeptics who thought the EU's divorce with Britain and Vietnam human rights concerns would delay the vote.

Members of the EU Parliament last week voted 401 to 192 in favor of ratifying the agreement, which would roll back almost all import tariffs between the bloc and Vietnam. The EU is looking for new economic tailwinds amid concerns with other partners: the British exit from the union threatens commerce, while U.S. President Donald Trump has turned his attention from the China trade war to issue more tariffs against the European Union this month. The vote was also welcomed as good news by Vietnam, which worries its economy will be hurt by the U.S.-China trade war and the spread of the new coronavirus.

THAT SALINGER-PORTIS MEETING SEEMS FICTIONAL:

LISTEN, I BOW to no one when it comes to expertise on the myth and reality of secret societies in America, in distinguishing the dark nimbus of paranoia and conspiracy theory surrounding them from the peculiar human truths at their heart.

As the author of the still-definitive study (which appeared first in these pages) of America's ultimate secret society, Skull and Bones, I have seen the much-whispered-about photos that the all-woman break-in team took of the interior of the Skull and Bones "Tomb"--complete with its candid shots of that sanctum sanctorum of America's clandestine ruling-class cult: the Room with the License Plates of Many States. I could tell you the secret Skull and Bones nicknames of the class year of D 154, in the coded Skull and Bones calendar of the years.

(Let's give a shout out to good old J. B. "Magog" Speed, for instance.)

I say I bow to no one, but that's not true. When it comes to knowing and limning the heart of the heart of the secret-society-esoteric-knowledge-weird-nickname-ancient-mysteries-ofthe-East racket, I bow--we should all bow--to one man, one novelist. Not Pynchon or DeLillo or any of the other usual suspects on the secret-society subject, but a maddeningly underappreciated American writer who in a brilliant and shockingly little-known novel has somehow captured more of the truth about this aspect of America, about the longing for Hidden Secrets, the seductions of secret societies, than all the shelves of conspiracy-theory literature. The only man to penetrate the true heart of dimness. I'm speaking of Charles Portis and his now-almost-impossible-to-find novel (suppressed by You Know Who?), Masters of Atlantis.

It's an indictment of the dimness of our culture that the film Conspiracy Theory made millions while Masters of Atlantis languishes in the recesses of secondhand bookstores, out of print, not even in paperback, and Portis gets neither the popular nor the literary-world acclaim that he deserves. In a way, Portis has not helped matters; he lives off the beaten path down in Arkansas with an unlisted phone number, doesn't do publicity, has never networked, and refused, politely but firmly, to talk to me for this piece.

Who is this man Portis? 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Writing in the journal Nature, electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, introduce the Air-gen (or air-powered generator), which Lovely describes as "the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet".

Air-Gen has electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter, which Lovley discovered in the Potomac River three decades ago and has been working with ever since, in particular investigating its potential for "green electronics".

The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapour naturally present in the atmosphere.

It requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top.

The film adsorbs water vapour from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes.

Developed in Yao's lab, Air-gen is low-cost, non-polluting and renewable, and needs neither sun nor wind, the researchers say. It can work indoors, or in extremely low humidity of the desert.

NOTHING LIKE A YELLOW SCARE:

Sen. Tom Cotton claims he's not spreading a coronavirus conspiracy theory--that it's a "hypothesis." https://t.co/Mvxiprb5nq

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 17, 2020

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

The truth of the matter, it would seem, is that the cost of GM keeping up with the transition to electric mobility inevitable means it must prune what has become a dead branch - a fact that was made clear in a statement from GM boss Mary Barra.

"I've often said that we will do the right thing, even when it's hard, and this is one of those times," said Barra in a statement regarding the shutdown.

"We are restructuring our international operations, focusing on markets where we have the right strategies to drive robust returns, and prioritizing global investments that will drive growth in the future of mobility, especially in the areas of EVs and AVs."

General Motors, like other auto giants on a global scale, is increasingly making commitments to a transition to electric and autonomous vehicles.

CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

In Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis, Jiwei Ci, a philosophy professor at the University of Hong Kong, makes an elaborate but cogent argument about how the party will only overcome its illegitimacy, along with other tears in the national fabric, by choosing to usher in political democracy, a change that Ci declares is "of dire necessity rather than moral luxury".

Unlike those who predicate China's embrace of democracy on the fall of the party, Ci envisions that as the party continues to confront crises involving its legitimacy and strains to "perform well" for its population, top leaders will wisely seek out a parachute to stave off the party's annihilation. The party would still be indispensable, its eventual sharing of power and influence being essential not only to its own survival but to the health of Chinese society.

Ci argues that China, largely due to advances made since the early 1990s, is already democratic in the sense that society possesses "equality of conditions". That term, taken from Alexis de Tocqueville, entails a "basic human sameness ... captured in such notions as universal human rights, careers open to talents, and equality of opportunity".

Again borrowing from de Tocqueville, Ci notes how democracy is a social condition - part of a society's "nature and dynamic" - more than a political phenomenon or "regime type".

As Ci puts it: "The question is not whether China will be ready for democracy, as if democracy were something totally new and alien, but whether China will be able to complete a process that is already well under way - a comprehensive transformation for which only the last, political steps are yet to be taken."

Ci does not think China is near the brink of transitioning to political democracy. But he figures that within the next 10 to 20 years - depending on when President Xi Jinping leaves the stage - the party will face an unprecedented crisis of political authority and legitimacy, unable to draw on the two main factors that have allowed the one-party apparatus to largely resist challenge: its communist revolutionary past and its capacity to help boost the "quality of life" of Chinese people.

CAN'T BE A CHRISTIAN AND A TRUMPIST:

On a day in which pastors were encouraged to remind their flocks of the Christian duty to "welcome the stranger," a Catholic priest in Minnesota used the opportunity to sow fear and suspicion about Muslims.

Calling Islam "the greatest threat" to Christianity and to America, the Rev. Nick VanDenBroeke argued that Muslim immigration to the United States should be curtailed.

"We do not need to pretend that everyone who seeks to enter into America should be treated the same," he said. 

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

Key patents are starting to run out for Intuitive. That has spurred a range of new companies to move into the market. Medtronic, a massive medical device company employing more than 80,000 people, is moving into the space. U.K.-based CMR Surgical has raised $380 million in capital to challenge Intuitive. And both Alphabet -- Google's parent company -- and Johnson & Johnson are backing the startup Verb Surgical to push its own robots. It's little surprise then that the global market for surgical robots is expected to nearly triple, from $4.5 billion in 2016 to $12.1 billion in 2025.  

This push could make robotic surgery more accessible, and greater competition could prompt quicker innovation in the field, say experts. For patients, long recovery times might become a thing of the past for a range of surgeries.

"Robotic surgery is here to stay," says O'Reilly. "The biggest barrier to its global takeover is the fact that it has been monopolized by one company, and that it's been very expensive. But in the next two to three years, competition could bring the price down."

LITTLE FINGER BRINGS THE WHORES:

There is only one reason why anyone even knows Avenatti's name, and it has nothing to do with Nike. It's because Trump had an affair with a porn star and paid her hush money to keep her from telling the story to voters before the 2016 election.

Remember that? Sorry, not sorry, Trumpsters. That story is always going to be newsworthy, despite attempts from the Trump campaign to make it about anything else. Trump's old lawyer Michael Cohen would love to tell you more about it . . . when his three-year prison term for perpetuating that falsehood and various other crimes on behalf of the president expires.

So, who is the good guy here? Trick question! None of them.

There are no heroes in this story. It's scuzzbucket politics, all the way down. Which is the type of thing that conservatives used to try to avoid. First there's Trump, the man who cheated on his lovely wife, who was at home caring for their new baby, with random women he met while "out on business." Then there are the two women who had affairs with him: porn actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal. They both knew Trump was married. They both tried to sell their stories before the election and they both accepted hush money to stay quiet.

Sprinkled here and there are skeezy men such as the National Enquirer's David Pecker, Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and, rushing onstage during the third act, to make sure he got some of the spotlight, too, Michael Avenatti--all of whom were facilitating the various deals while serving their self-interests, too.

TRUMPONOMICS:

"China Trade War Walloped More Than Half of U.S. States in 2019" https://t.co/YlhF2nHyqv pic.twitter.com/FradBUASvR

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) February 15, 2020

ALMOST LIKE THE rIGHT USED HIS DEATH:

ALL THE POPULAR KIDS OPPOSE DONALD:

CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

A recent poll conducted by the independent, U.S.-based International Republican Institute (IRI) spotlighted what many in Bangladesh already know: the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is immensely popular. Its approval rating in 2019 was 83 percent. Seventy-six percent of those polled said they believe the country is headed in the right direction.

The reason? Per capita income has nearly tripled. Extreme poverty has been cut in half. Educational opportunities abound, especially for women. The Asian Development Bank says Bangladesh has the fastest-growing economy in the Asia-Pacific region. Lately, Bangladesh's Gross Domestic Product has been closing in on double-digit annual growth.

Since 2009, Bangladesh's economy has grown 188 percent. Last year, Bangladesh posted record high GDP growth of 8.1 percent, up from 7.9 percent in 2018. By comparison, other South Asian countries suffered significant dips in GDP growth. HSBC Bank recently predicted that Bangladesh would be the 26th-largest economy in the world by 2030.

People from every walk of life have benefited from this success. Since 2009, 15.8 million people were lifted out of poverty. During that period, the poverty rate fell from 31.5 percent to 21.8 percent. Simultaneously, per capita income rose nearly threefold. 

HO WON A BATTLE; WE WON THE WAR:

Last year companies like Coca Cola and Tetra Pak, an international food packaging and processing company, collaborated with Vietnam's biggest city to lower garbage levels. Their work included putting recycling bins around Ho Chi Minh City and investing in the waste management system.

Garbage collection is still a local government responsibility.

The collaboration, though, shows how Vietnam is increasingly looking at private companies to fulfill its national development needs.

Vietnam is at a turning point. The country used to rely on aid from nations such as Sweden and Canada, and that foreign funding helped Vietnam improve education, health care, and other public goods, and transform into a lower middle-income nation.

Foreign governments are cutting aid budgets globally, though, and Vietnam no longer qualifies for as much aid, so it is trying a new approach to development, making it a business.

It matches marketing strategy to a need for investment dollars.

That means getting more companies involved in activities traditionally performed by government, with the intention of reaching Vietnam's development goals."

A series of ongoing market reforms is giving Vietnam a market-leading status in Southeast Asia, making it an increasingly attractive place for investors," Nirukt Sapru, who is the chief executive officer for Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and South Asia at Standard Chartered Bank, said.

MAKE AMERICA WILSONIAN AGAIN!:

The students were assembled in the auditorium of their high school on Chicago's North Side, there to celebrate Hispanic heritage -- but first, their teachers told them, they had to stand for the national anthem.

A group of students, who thought the request unusual, decided to remain seated. It was a silent but recognizable condemnation of racial injustice. Yet, before the anthem had even ended, they said, their demonstration made them the target of just the sort of discrimination they were protesting.

When one student -- a Latina and U.S. citizen -- refused a teacher's pointed direction to stand, she said he replied with an infamously racist line: "Go back to your country." The same teacher turned to a black student, who was also sitting down, and asked whether she was part of the public school system's free and reduced lunch program, telling her she should stand for the people who have died for the country, the students said.

They were then told to leave the assembly.

THANKS, DONALD!:

I got involved in politics in 2014, when I started college. In that world, I still would have been the guy who thought that the GOP was the party of the smart and honorable, and that everything that the Democrats did and said had a malicious angle.

Donald Trump changed that.

He ran against every principle that I, and virtually every other Republican, held dear. His character was flawed. His foreign policy was Obama 2.0 but open about intending to commit human rights violations and war crimes. He was against free trade. He ran against cutting entitlements. The list goes on--and never stops!

And, naturally, virtually every single of those Republican officeholders came out against him, making the same arguments I just made. You see? My party was great! Here were my party's leaders, the smart and the honorable, standing against the frontrunner of the field.

Then, Trump became the nominee. One by one, those honorable party leaders fell, and so did much of the conservative intelligentsia. As Jonah Goldberg likes to say, it was like the invasion of the body snatchers.

Beneath the tragic circumstances, there was a great awakening for the young college kid that I was: Politicians are human and prone to human temptations and failings, and party affiliation doesn't change that. Some are good, and some are not so good.

The Trump moment has taught me that politicians can be honorable no matter how wrong I think they are. And they can be complete hacks with zero principles, even if they like judicial originalism and entitlements cuts.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Irked by Iraq's close ties to neighbouring Iran, Washington has begun following through on threats to squeeze Baghdad's fragile economy with delays to crucial cash deliveries and shortened sanctions waivers.

This week, the US granted Iraq last-minute leave to import Iranian gas for its crippled power grids, despite American sanctions on Tehran.

But Washington's patience seems to be running out - the latest waiver was reduced from the usual 90 or 120 days to just 45.

"This is the beginning of death by a thousand cuts," warned financial analyst Ahmed Tabaqchali, of the Iraq-based Institute of Regional and International Studies.

"The shorter the waiver, the more we can't afford for things to go wrong in that time."

Iraq is at a crucial crossroads. Its new premier is struggling to form a cabinet, anti-government protests are filling the streets and skyrocketing tensions between its two main allies, Tehran and Washington, have already spilt blood on its territory.

While Iran enjoys tremendous political and military sway in Iraq, the US still holds a major trump card - the economy.

DONALD WHO?:

On Tuesday, when asked about Alexander Vindman's dismissal from the White House, Trump said that "the military can handle him." Asked what that meant, Trump replied, "If you look at what happened, they're going to certainly, I would imagine, take a look at that."

McCarthy, however, said Friday that there was no such move to look into Vindman, who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a child and went on to become a decorated combat veteran in his two decades in the U.S. military.

David Pressman, a lawyer for Vindman, rejected the notion that Vindman did anything wrong, noting in a statement last week that his client spoke publicly only once, pursuant to a subpoena from the U.S. Congress, and served in his post honorably.

"There is no question in the mind of any American why this man's job is over, why this country now has one less soldier serving it at the White House," Pressman said. "LTC Vindman was asked to leave for telling the truth. His honor, his commitment to right, frightened the powerful."

"The truth has cost LTC Alexander Vindman his job, his career, and his privacy. He did what any member of our military is charged with doing every day: he followed orders, he obeyed his oath, and he served his country, even when doing so was fraught with danger and personal peril," Pressman added.

Trump's former chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, earned the president's ire by defending Vindman in public remarks this week.

When Trump asked Ukraine's president to investigate Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, it amounted to hearing an illegal order for Vindman, Kelly said.

NOT THE ONION:

Insider: "A Very Stable Genius" has an episode where Trump meets Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the president tells him, "It's not like you've got China on your border." You wrote that a number of top White House officials were aghast at Trump's ignorance. Why was this particular instance such an issue for them?

Leonnig: We did interviews with more than 200 former and current senior level officials, advisers, friends, and aides to the president. The reason they shared these stories is they feel that the president rejects facts and information. It's like he can't be bothered with it. And his rejection of a briefing before he went to meet with Prime Minister Modi had terrible consequences.

Modi went from being a person who was trying to have a real serious negotiation with Trump about partnership, about how to protect himself from China and Russia and Pakistan. And as a result of the president not knowing that India shares a very significant border with China, Modi began to withdraw a little and, as told to us by aides, viewed Trump as just not serious enough to make a deal with.

CHILDREN OF THE LORD:

Perhaps the quickest way around a billion-dollar wall is over it.

Smugglers in Juárez have engineered camouflage hook-and-ladders made of rebar that blend in so well with the border wall that it can be hard to detect, according to U.S. Border Patrol. The ladders are the same rust brown color as the mesh panels or steel beams of the fence.

El Paso's urban stretch of border is littered with the rusted rebar ladders at the base on both sides -- ladders lying in wait on the Mexican side, ladders pulled down by border agents or abandoned by smugglers on the U.S. side. One of the rebar ladders was poking out of a dumpster in a lot near the Chihuahuita neighborhood on Thursday. 

"Somebody is making money off those ladders," said Agent Joe Romero, pointing to a mangled version tossed in the dirt on the U.S. side. 

BEWARE THE TENTOPHOBES:

In an unredacted arrest report obtained by News4Jax, Timm admitted to purposefully driving into the tent because "someone had to take a stand" and said his disapproval of Trump was a motivating factor. Witnesses said he "flipped off" the people near the tent before driving away.

Timm spoke to News4Jax on Friday about the "divisiveness" of the current political climate in the United States and said it'll be interesting to see what's to come in the next year.

He said he intentionally waited about 20 minutes in the parking lot "for people to clear out" of the voter registration tent and that he never intended for anyone to get hurt. No injuries were reported after the incident.

BANKER RACISM WON'T STOP BANKER FRAUD:

In the 1970s, community groups came to Congress to protest the fact that whole neighborhoods were being denied credit by banks. I happened to be working as chief investigator for Sen. William Proxmire, then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee. After several days of hearings and extensive investigation, we wrote and persuaded Congress to enact two laws.

The first, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, required banks to disclose where they were lending. The second, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), created an affirmative obligation not to redline and to provide credit without regard to location, "consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions," which is to say with responsible lending standards.

We made sure to add that phrase so the legislation would neither pressure banks to make bad loans nor be faulted for doing so. Regulators defined that phrase to mean lenders should serve their entire communities, but not water down sound underwriting standards. The banks regularly received CRA scores, which were used to permit or deny mergers and acquisitions. One of the constructive effects of the CRA was the creation of a whole generation of loan officers who took pride in being able to extend credit to low- and moderate-income borrowers without subjecting the bank to undue risk.

It wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that Wall Street investment bankers and local mortgage originators came up with the scheme that led to the subprime collapse. This was all about inflating profits and passing along risks to someone else. It had nothing whatever to do with the Community Reinvestment Act.

The investment bankers would bankroll local mortgage bankers to make subprime loans with low "teaser" rates. By definition, a subprime loan is a loan to a customer who would not qualify for credit at the usual rates. After a few years, the interest rate on these loans would double or triple. Many borrowers defaulted.

How could lenders make money on a product with a high risk of default? The investment bankers packaged the loans into bonds, known as collateralized debt obligations. These were blessed with Triple-A ratings by private credit rating agencies and bought by unsuspecting investors all over the world.

The investment bankers got the loan originators off the hook, and the bond buyers got the investment bankers off the hook. So local lenders could make unsound loans and investors could underwrite them, making a lot of money and passing along the risk to someone else. The whole process was corrupt, but in an era of deregulation, the regulators looked the other way.

YEAH, BUT DURHAM'S THE ONE WHO'S GOING TO DELIVER!:

Justice Department attorneys struggled with mounting frustration and skepticism from a federal judge about producing documents related to the investigation of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, according to transcripts of closed-door conversations released in response to a lawsuit from a government watchdog group. 

The McCabe case--and President Donald Trump's personal involvement in it--prompted federal judge Reggie Barnett Walton to call the government's handling of it "disturbing," a "mess," and veering close to a "banana republic."

"I think it's very unfortunate," Judge Walton told prosecutors as the case hung in limbo in late September. "And I think as a government and as a society we're going to pay a price at some point for this."

The comments were made in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) against the Justice Department.

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, said the eventual release of the court transcripts on Friday, after a lengthy court battle, showed that the government was "trying to cover up the fact that they were stringing this [lawsuit] along while looking for a reason to indict McCabe."

BACK TO BENGHAZI:

Federal prosecutors have declined to charge former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, closing an investigation into whether he lied to federal officials about his involvement in a news media disclosure, McCabe's legal team said Friday.

NO ONE WONDERS:

IMPEACH HIM AGAIN:

Before the meeting, Trump floated what appeared to be an offer he hoped New York couldn't refuse. Cuomo "must understand that National Security far exceeds politics," he tweeted, an apparent reference to the administration's purported rationale for blocking New Yorkers from the programs. "New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment [sic]." New York Attorney General Letitia James -- who won a $2 million settlement from Trump over his canceled family charity and is suing him and his business on multiple fronts, including for his financial records -- clapped back.

JERRY SHOULD HAVE RUN FOR PRESIDENT:

WHEN YOU HAVE TO SOOTHE YOUR CANDIDATES INSECURITIES:

President Donald Trump's historic showing in both Iowa and New Hampshire wasn't an accident.

While Trump didn't have a serious Republican primary challenger in either state, the re-election team and the Republican National Committee launched a successful general election style effort to run up the score in both states.

Trump held preemptive rallies in both Iowa and New Hampshire and blanketed both states with dozens of top surrogates, including members of the first family, sporting red Trump 2020 hats and custom Team Trump quarter-zip pullovers who campaigned at caucus sites and polling stations while volunteers on the ground carried out a massive get-out-the-vote effort.

IT'S NOT TERRORISM WHEN WE DO IT:

The Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, has issued a "rare public attack" on Defence Minister Naftali Bennett, reported the Jerusalem Post, over the cancellation of an administrative detention order for a radical Jewish Israeli right-wing activist.

According to the paper, the Shin Bet told Channel 12 that Bennett's decision to rescind the order "had given a green light to Jewish terror like the 2015 arson murder of a Palestinian family at Duma".

A RELIGION, NOT A RACE:

A group of undergraduate students at Harvard University has formed what they call an "anti-Zionist Jewish organization" that supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

The Harvard Jewish Coalition for Peace introduced itself in a public statement posted Monday on Facebook as "a new organization founded in the idea that Jewish liberation is inextricably bound up with the liberation of all people."

The group said it will focus on Palestinian solidarity work; fighting anti-Semitism and for the safety of Jews and all people through solidarity; and creating Jewish spaces and events outside of Hillel.

"We build on a long history of Jewish anti-Zionism which teaches us that Jewish safety or liberation will never come at the expense of other people's lives and land, and are committed to following the leadership of Palestinians in supporting the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement on and off Harvard's campus," the group said.

OUR PEERS:

Former Memphis schools board member Tomeka Hart is speaking out about her role on the jury that found Roger Stone, an ally of President Trump, guilty of lying to Congress and obstructing an investigation into Russia to protect Trump and his presidential campaign. 

Hart was the foreperson, or head juror, for the November 2019 trial. 

She spoke up about her experience in support of the four attorneys who recently quit the prosecution team after the Justice Department, in an unusual move, backed away from the stiff prison sentence recommended for Stone.

"I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis - the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial," Hart wrote. "It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice."

Since we delivered that verdict, I have been taken aback by the accounts of pundits and politicians that our decision was somehow the product of a deeply polarized, partisan divide. Let me be clear: We did not convict Stone based on his political beliefs or his expression of those beliefs. We did not convict him of being intemperate or acting boorishly. We convicted him of obstructing a congressional investigation, of lying in five specific ways during his sworn congressional testimony and of tampering with a witness in that investigation.

Our jury was diverse in age, gender, race, ethnicity, income, education and occupation. I'm a 51-year-old white man from New England. My favorite person on the jury was an African American woman from Tennessee. Given that the trial took place in the District, the likelihood of having government employees in the jury pool was high and, indeed, we had such individuals. Like jurors everywhere, none of us asked for this responsibility but each of us accepted it willingly. We served the proposition that everyone is entitled to a fair trial and that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

Stone found guilty: The colorful, weird and bizarre parts of the indictment, explained

Roger Stone was found guilty on Nov. 15 of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice over remarks about WikiLeaks' 2016 email releases. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

Interest in this case was high, and the court took special steps to prevent us from being harassed or improperly influenced. Each morning, we assembled at a building several blocks away and made our way to the parking garage, where federal marshals would load us into vans with tinted windows for the trip to court. On arrival, we moved through the building via a freight elevator and back corridors.

The evidence in this case was substantial and almost entirely uncontested. Stone's testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in September 2017 was a matter of record; both the prosecution and defense agreed on the facts. The real dispute was whether Stone had lied under oath and whether that mattered. The defense offered by Stone's attorney can be summed up in to two words: So what?

Our unanimous conclusion was this: The truth matters. Telling the truth under oath matters. At a time when so much of our public discourse is based on deception or just lies, it is more important than ever that we still have places where the truth can be presented, examined and discerned. Congress is one of those places. That's what the case was about.

MAKE IT A CONDITION OF EMPLOYMENT:

About 35% of employers are enrolling new workers in 401(k) plans, according to 2019 fourth quarter data from Fidelity Investments, which analyzes its customers' investing and saving trends. Typically, the default rate for automatic contributions into 401(k) plans hovers around 3%, but more than a third of plans in the fourth quarter had default rates around 5% or 6%, according to the report, which was released on Thursday. Only about 12% of plans used that rate in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Choosing a higher default rate is critical for building an adequate nest egg for retirement, Murphy said. "The reality is, over the length of someone's entire career, that 1-3% difference can be massive for income in retirement," she said.

Employers are also increasingly boosting their employees' contribution rates each year, too. The number of plans that had auto-escalation more than doubled in the last decade, from 9% at the end of 2009 to 19% at the end of 2019.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

For years, Tom Holland preferred the ancients over Christian "virtue." However, Dominion relates that these last few years, he has become increasingly disturbed and anxious when researching Athens and Rome. He is now disturbed by ancient cruelty and anxious after realizing that his kind-hearted, benevolent humanitarianism (his wokeness, in other words) is a Christian sentiment. Why are we sweeter than medieval Londoners? Not because we are heirs of Athens, but because we are even more Christian than they were.

Having fallen in love with stories of the glory of the ancients as a boy, Holland now recoils from the pervasive cruelty of the age. No longer a Nietzschean, Holland still thinks Nietzsche--who became a professor of classics at age 24--got his history right. Nietzsche:

It appears to me that the delicacy, even more the hypocrisy of tame domestic animals (by this, I mean modern man, I mean us) is loath to envisage to what extent cruelty constituted the great festivity and pleasure of mankind in earlier days, and even an ingredient in almost all of its pleasures.

Holland's thesis is that those least likely to feel comfortable acknowledging any debt to Christianity--the woke--are, in fact, Christian revolutionaries. Contrary to the commentariat, Dominion arrestingly claims that Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary--that Western (or even world) history is best viewed as a series of ruptures wrought by Christian revolutions making us all kinder: "to dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern. Rather, it is to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian."

Put differently, history is really a contending with the writings of St. Paul. Paul's letters, argues Holland, are the most powerful letters ever written. Penned about a decade after the death of Jesus--the Gospels were written years later--Holland likens them to depth-charges sounding down the ages, scrambling settled patterns of life. For Paul, the crucified criminal Jesus is, in fact, a metaphysical, personal love structuring the core of reality. Love dissolves the distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, man and woman. Henceforth, citizenship in the real kingdom would be a matter of belief, not social standing. Paul announced a Spirit permeating all people, no matter their status, and permeating the world: "You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3:3).

When set against corruption and injustice, this Spirit, by animating human hearts, has shaken dynasties and, in Holland's telling, still does. As Nietzsche puts it, the carpet-maker Paul defeated the Roman Empire.

TREND-SUCKING DILETTANTES:

The 1,500-percent rise was seen among teenagers defined as girls at birth and aged 13-17, but other groups also saw an increase according to the report.

In the same period, between 2008 and 2018, the number of registered men aged 18-24 and diagnosed with gender dysphoria grew by 400 percent.

IT'S STILL OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE IF YOU ADMIT IT PUBLICLY:

WHILE THE GENERALS COLLABORATED:

"He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave," Kelly said at an event at Drew University in New Jersey, according to The Atlantic. "He went and told his boss what he just heard."

The remarks from Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, come after Vindman was removed Friday from his role as the top Ukraine specialist on the NSC and escorted from the White House grounds. Vindman's twin brother Yevgeny, who served as a senior lawyer on the NSC, was also forced from his post.

Their removals were widely viewed among Democratic lawmakers and administration critics as an act of political retribution after Vindman informed White House lawyer John Eisenberg of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and proceeded to cooperate with the House impeachment investigation.

Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff from 2017 until early last year, said Vindman's decision to escalate his concerns about the call were in line with military training.

"We teach them, Don't follow an illegal order. And if you're ever given one, you'll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss," Kelly said Wednesday of Vindman's flagging of the call, during which Trump pressured Zelensky to open foreign probes into his domestic political rivals.

Kelly also appeared to affirm that he believed Trump did indeed condition hundreds of millions of dollars in vital military aid to Ukraine on Zelensky's agreement to assist in the investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

"Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the U.S. was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against .... the Russians," Kelly said. "And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that's what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in."

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Sanders' reversal on health records--just last fall he had pledged that he would "certainly" release "comprehensive" health information before votes were cast--is notable in at least three respects.

One, it shows how pervasive the Trump precedent is. Even politicians who stand against him on every issue, and who speak solemnly about the need to restore norms shattered during this presidency, are ready to follow trails he has blazed in taking flight from public accountability.

Two, the Sanders' evasion highlights the dilution of mainstream media's institutional power. There has been no aspirant or occupant of the White House during the modern presidency who has not wished to say go to hell to uncomfortable inquiries about health, finances, or aspects of personal lives that affect public duties. Trump and Sanders are hardly the first to do so. But the reason most politicians historically have refrained from the impulse is that it came with a high cost: It was unpleasant and politically expensive to be in the cross-hairs of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or a major broadcast network like NBC.

Three, the episode highlights how little public comprehension there is of the historic shift in political culture away from transparency, accountability, and the traditional levers used to enforce both. In an earlier generation, editors at major news institutions possessed enormous power--through their story selection and story framing--to summon sustained national attention on subjects they deemed important.

On both left and right, a lot of media criticism is based on the assumption--a fantasy, actually--that this editorial power exists in the same fashion it did three or four decades ago. 

MITCH HAS TO GUARD THE bASE:

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., blocked Democratic efforts to unanimously pass three bills related to election security despite warnings that Russia will interfere in the 2020 election.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., tried to pass a bill that would require campaigns to report offers of foreign election assistance to the FBI, and another that would require campaigns to report such offers to the Federal Election Commission.

"The appropriate response is not to say thank you, the appropriate response is to call the FBI," Warner said, according to The Hill.

"There is no doubt that [Trump] will only be emboldened in his efforts to illegally enlist foreign governments in his reelection campaign," Blumenthal added.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., also tried to pass the Securing America's Federal Elections Act (SAFE Act), which would provide additional funding to the Election Assistance Commission and would ban voting machines from being connected to the internet as well as machines that were manufactured in foreign countries.

"America is 266 days away from the 2020 election, and Majority Leader McConnell has yet to take any concrete steps to protect our foreign elections from hacking or foreign interference," Wyden said.

WE'RE JUST GOOD AT STUFF:

A nationally known computer hacker, a term he wears proudly, helped keep an eye on New Hampshire's primary Tuesday but says you didn't need computer smarts to see that it went well.

"One big thing is no lines. When you go around the United States, usually the first thing you see if there are problems are long lines of people who can't get to vote," said Harri Hursti, a cybersecurity analyst who founded DefCon, the nation's best-known gathering of people interested in computer security.

Hursti has worked with the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office since about 2005, when he met Secretary of State Bill Gardner at a conference. His presence here for Tuesday's primary was of particular importance because of the meltdown of the Iowa caucuses caused largely by the use of an untested app. During a discussion Wednesday morning as election officials completed counting votes from around the state he was almost effusive about how things went.

"I talked to people ... There was only one person in the whole of yesterday who said, 'I'm not happy.' That is amazing! There's always that one, but normally it's, like, hundreds who are not happy ... with an election," said Hursti, who is Finnish. "I really like how people are happy and how smoothly everything went."

Hursti was quick to echo a comment that New Hampshire election officials have been making for many years: In voting, low-tech is often good tech.

"Paper ballots, they are important! That gives a lot of confidence, people understand what they're doing," he said. "It is a permanent mark of the vote, and it's understandable to transfer."

DANGER, LOW CEILING:

WELL-EARNED:

Weinstein, who was appointed in 1967, was the last federal judge in the country named by President Lyndon Johnson.

Still sharp, with a clear memory -- but slower to speak than he used to be and relying on a walker -- the judge spoke with the Daily News while his wife, stepdaughter and two clerks looked on.

The levelheaded judge denied he was sad about leaving the job he's enjoyed for more than a half century. Asked if he'd miss being a judge, he paused.

"Yes, I think so, of course. This is an excellent court. I love my colleagues. And the ability to work with them on a daily basis was one that I treasured."

TRUMPONOMICS!:

In a presentation to the energy department oil industry reps pointed out that meeting Trump's $52.4bn energy sales spree target to China would require China to purchase more crude oil than the federal government has predicted the U.S. will produce by 2021. https://t.co/ZVJ1jqjG7z

— Shawn Donnan (@sdonnan) February 13, 2020

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

DONALD WHO?:

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Stanford University biologist and "overpopulation" alarmist Paul Ehrlich famously predicted that "The battle to feed all of humanity is over ... hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Between 1968 and 2017, the world's population increased by 113 percent from 3.55 billion to 7.55 billion. Over the same time period, the average global food supply per person per day rose from 2,334 calories to 2,962 - a 27 percent increase.

To put the magnitude of that achievement into proper perspective, consider the basic food consumption needs of your fellow human beings. The U.S. government's Dietary Guidelines for 2015-2020 estimate that calorie needs per person per day range from 1,600 to 2,000 for women and 1,900 to 2,500 calories for men. That amounts to an average of 2,000 calories per person per day across sexes and over the entire human lifespan. Hence the crude "2,000 calorie diet" that every American knows about. [...]

Since the discovery of agriculture some 12,000 years ago, most people worked from dawn till dusk to produce enough calories - from fieldwork and husbandry - to see the next day. English records suggest food consumption of 1,500 calories per person per day in the 13th century, rising to 2,000 calories in the 14th century (an unexpected consequence of Black Death, which made land cheap and labor dear), and then falling well below 2,000 calories until the 17th century. It was only in the 18th century that food consumption stabilized above 2,000 calories per person per day.

England was one of the world's most developed regions. In France, calorie consumption remained stuck below 2,000 until the beginning of the 19th century. Not only were people before the Industrial Revolution very inefficient in producing food, but access to food was very precarious. Many people were only one bad harvest away from starvation. Children were routinely employed in agricultural tasks at the age of 4, and woe unto an old or sick peasant without a family or charity to depend on.

According to the most recent estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, food supply in only two out of 173 countries surveyed stood below 2,000 calories per person per day in 2017 - the Central African Republic (1,758) and Madagascar (1,903). In Afghanistan it stood at 2,000. Everywhere else, it stood above 2,000 calories. Belgium and the United States topped the survey with 3,768 and 3,766 calories respectively.

BLOOMBERG SHOULD HAVE RUN AS A REPUBLICAN:

Former White House strategist Stephen Bannon said Monday that President Trump will need the GOP establishment on his side in order to secure reelection in 2020 given that the president has Republican challengers.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Bannon warned that GOP primary challengers such as former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld could pose a threat to Trump should they gain any traction among GOP moderates.

"We need the Republican establishment on board," Bannon told the AP.

"If these guys can peel off 3% or 4%, that's going to be serious," he said of Weld and other GOP candidates.

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

[I] am not saying that L.G.B.T. people who don't pass are somehow morally superior to L.G.B.T. people who do. But these two distinct experiences are in some ways correlated with two divergent tracks in L.G.B.T. politics. One kind of queer politics is rooted in ideas of liberation, revolutionary change, and solidarity. The vision of this politics is a society that is radically changed by many kinds of people fighting many kinds of injustice, a society in which economic, social, political, and sexual relationships have been transformed. The roots of this politics are acknowledged in an open letter authored by a group called Queers Against Pete. (The letter was signed, according to the organizers, by more than two thousand people.) They wrote, "We are clear that LGBTQIA people are directly and disproportionately impacted by police violence, incarceration, unaffordable healthcare, homelessness, deportation, and economic inequality among other things." The strategy of this brand of politics is to work across differences to bring about change.

The other, more mainstream, and often more visible kind of L.G.B.T. politics aims to erase difference. Its message to straight people is "We are just like you, and all we want is the right to have what you have: marriage, children, a house with a picket fence, and the right to serve in the military." The vision of this politics is a society in all respects indistinguishable from the one in which we live now, except queer people have successfully and permanently blended in. 

THE WAR ON RELIGION:

Ted Norris Jr., chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation, just east of Organ Pipe Cactus, decried the entire project as senseless destruction of ancestral land. "The Tohono O'odham Nation is adamantly opposed to the construction of the 30-foot, fortified border wall, which would irrevocably harm cultural sites, sacred sites and the environment," Norris said in a statement. "It is all the more tragic that billions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted on an empty campaign slogan that will do little to address border security challenges."

US Customs and Border Protection confirmed the activity. 

THE TRUMP BRAND:

Adam DiSabato, a former captain of the OSU wrestling team during the late 80s and early 90s, told members of the House Civil Justice Committee that Jordan and other team officials knew about open-shower team facilities that facilitated sexual harassment and abuse of team wrestlers​, an allegation Jordan has denied.

He also said Jordan called him repeatedly in July 2018, after media outlets quoted his brother, Michael DiSabato, saying Strauss' abuse was common knowledge to those surrounding the wrestling program, including Jordan.

"Jim Jordan called me crying, groveling... begging me to go against my brother...That's the kind of cover-up that's going on there," he said.

SALVATION BY WORKS:

The thing that makes Bloomberg different is he can knock on all doors at once. Bloomberg is running aggressively to win the Democratic nomination but he is simultaneously building out a general election machine to defeat President Donald Trump, with a new structure - data, field organizing, advertising and policy - that aims to elect Democrats up and down the ballot even if the party's voters reject the former New York mayor this spring.

The party he is moving to transform, which he only rejoined in October, has become little more than a bystander to his ambition. With more than 800 employees, $200 million in ad spending so far and a fully catered Times Square office that houses hundreds of employees, "Mike Bloomberg 2020, Inc." does not resemble a primary campaign in any traditional sense. It is an experiment in what happens to democracy when a single faction operates without economic constraints.

While most presidential efforts start early and poor, the Bloomberg project exists in an inverted dimension, a fact that has caught the attention of Trump, who spent years tracking Bloomberg's political career closely in New York. The president has been closely monitoring Bloomberg's campaign, impressed by his extraordinary spending and fearful of his potential rise, according to Trump confidants with whom the president has discussed Bloomberg.

Bloomberg's aides, in turn, have delighted in trying to find ways to get Trump's attention and increase his anxiety, like the recent purchase of an $11 million Super Bowl ad that will run against a similar spot purchased by Trump's campaign.

The extravagance is part of the message, an attempt to demonstrate his competence and show that he can manage something big with good intentions.

"We also want people to know that we are building a juggernaut pointed at Donald Trump and the Republican Party," said Tim O'Brien, a senior adviser to the campaign who has been taking the message to state parties around the country. "One of Mike's goals is to make a machine that lasts. This idea that he wants to do a vanity run or is just buying exposure is belied by that."

IMPEACH HIM AGAIN:

DONALD WHO?:

[T]he threats, which included a plan to withdraw from the US intelligence-sharing relationship with the United Kingdom, appear to have failed, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson agreeing a deal with Huawei anyway.

Trump reportedly reacted with rage to Johnson's decision and slammed down the phone on the prime minister in a call last month.

However, far from fearing a similar reaction from Trump, other European countries are now moving to take a very similar position to Johnson.

This week Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats backed a positions paper which ruled out an outright ban on Huawei.

Christian Democrat sources told Reuters that party leaders decided against backing an outright ban on the company because: "state actors with sufficient resources can infiltrate the network of any equipment maker."

The paper added that: "the use of strong cryptography and end-to-end encryption can secure confidentiality in communication and the exchange of data."

Other European leaders are also set to follow the UK's lead in backing Huawei, Politico reported last month.

The development has prompted former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich to label Trump's failure to persuade allies on Huawei as "the biggest strategic defeat for the United States since the early days of World War II."

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

EVEN A RACIST IS FASCISTIC ONCE IN AWHILE:

People are often at their most authoritarian-sounding these days when condemning others as fascist, and this month provides a few choice examples. Donald Trump will reportedly release an executive order requesting that new federal buildings be done in a classical or neoclassical style instead of off-putting brutalist or modernist fashion, as has so often been the case for the past several decades. Contrary to the tone of much of the media coverage, this is hardly some crank or extremist position on Trump's part but a long-simmering reaction to some truly butt-ugly buildings you've paid for, structures that look more akin to fallout shelters, abandoned airport terminals, and Martian art projects than to anything recognizably and endearingly American, historically-rooted, or user-friendly.

The National Civic Art Society has championed this modest revolt against the modernist orthodoxy, but so have people like Tom Wolfe over the years, chronicling the modernists' arrogant insistence that buildings should look functional and geometric even when they aren't really all that functional, as when gleaming glass walls look so much like adjacent glass doors, with no obvious frames, lintels, or knobs, that hapless users repeatedly struggle to find the exit, as I've watched happen at the modernist temple that is the Guggenheim Museum in New York, fittingly. 

I was startled once to see panicked modernist architecture aficionados react to a very mild, low-key anti-modernist lecture as if heresy were being spouted in their midst and we should all perhaps clear out of the building early to escape it. I'd thought such debates happened in sedate, glacial fashion. The speaker was the quietest, most low-key heretic I've ever seen denounced, which is admirable, I think.

But here's a typical establishment reaction now that Trump has taken up the anti-modernist cause, in the form of the final words of a piece on the New Republic site by architecture blogger Kate Wagner: "[O]nly a specific kind of person looks at architecture and feels the need to talk about the Grecian ideal or the backbone of Western Society. That person is usually either a white supremacist, a stuck-up nitwit trapped in the 1980s, or, in the case of Trump himself, both."

This, said the architects, establishes an official style and therefore authoritarian or totalitarian in spirit. But the architects are mistaken on several grounds. First, federal buildings are a small minority of all buildings, and the order says nothing about how the other buildings should or must be built. Second, classicism in architecture is capable of almost infinite variation, such that uniformity will not result (no one has any difficulty in distinguishing the Jefferson from the Lincoln Memorial, for example, or from the White House). Third, it ignores the fact that, as a result of Moynihan's Guiding Principles, there has long existed de facto an official style, namely that which the architects impose on the government at any given time, all of it in the modern idiom with its desperate and egotistical search for originality as a virtue in itself. Fourth, it ignores the historical, and in my view aesthetic, connection between modernism and totalitarianism. Le Corbusier was a fascist, Philip Johnson a Nazi, and Oscar Niemeyer (the architect of Brasilia) a communist. The totalitarian sensibility of much modernist architecture is to me so obvious that I fail to understand how anyone could miss it. For lack of any other means to achieve grandeur, it deliberately employs sheer size and inhuman coldness of materials to achieve prepotency, in the process reducing the individual to insignificance, as mere intruders or bacteria in a Petri dish.

The Brutalist-style FBI Building in Washington (built 1963-1971). (Wikimedia Commons)

Far from being dictatorial, the order is profoundly liberating for clients, architects, and public alike. One of the arguments of the ideological modernists, and of their disciples and successors, is that, irrespective of any results from an aesthetic point of view, technology has dictated from the end of the nineteenth century onwards that we simply cannot as once we did, or in the same style. But it is clearly not the case that moderns cannot build classical buildings of distinction: the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and the National Gallery of Art, are by no means ancient, and there are people living who remember the time before the Jefferson Memorial existed. Rejection of classicism, or of any other style is therefore a choice, not a fatality. 

The order will give renewed courage to patrons of architecture, who for a long time have been cowed by the architects' mastery of high-sounding verbiage and gobbledygook to promote their inhuman work, so much of which these days looks like a snapshot taken of a huge shack in mid-collapse during an earthquake. Patrons, like the courtiers of the Emperor with no clothes, have hitherto been afraid to confront architects for fear of appearing ignorant and unsophisticated, but will no longer have to accept the dictation of architects. Examples will show that things can be done differently, that patrons do not have to accept what Thom Mayne, the architect responsible for some of the worst of recent buildings, called "demanding art-for-art's-sake architecture that only other architects can appreciate."

IT'S NOT A PROGRESSIVE TOWN:

 U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., brought the vote home in blue-collar towns across the Upper Valley, as voters there said they were drawn to his consistency and progressive message that many think can help oust Republican President Donald Trump in November.

"I want to get rid of Trump, and I think he's the only guy who can do it," said Stefanie Barton, a 56-year-old Claremont resident who also backed Sanders in the Democratic primary four years ago. "I think he has better plans for America, and I don't believe that socialism is communism, I think that people are confused."

But former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg won in many of the more prosperous towns in the Valley, including Hanover, as many voters signaled they are interested in a fresh perspective in Washington.

The 38-year-old Buttigieg took 1,397 votes in Hanover, while Sanders' 1,078 votes barely outpaced U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who won 1,064 votes in Dartmouth College's hometown. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren finished fourth there with 973 votes.

According to unofficial results, Sanders won 674 votes in Claremont to 516 for Buttigieg and 260 for Klobuchar, who ran a strong third across the state. Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden took 161 and 158 votes, respectively.

IT'S NOT A PROGRESSIVE PARTY:

Buttigieg's acknowledgment of Sanders' triumph--25.9 percent to the former South Bend mayor's 24.2 with 90 percent of the vote counted--mirrored that of many in the political world last night, in that he quickly moved away from it. Yes, Sanders' margin of victory--at just under 1.5 points--was significantly tighter than the 7 or 8 percentage points that polls had projected for the senator whose home state of Vermont is next door to New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary. Yes, 25.7 percent is the worst showing ever for a New Hampshire primary winner and less than half the 60 percent of votes Sanders received in 2016. But the field is much bigger this time around, and with popular vote victories in each of the first two states, plenty of money in the bank, and strong national polling, it's hard to look at Sanders as anything other than the frontrunner.

But he's a weak one, with a high floor of (very passionate) support and--so far--a ceiling that would prevent him from amassing the necessary delegates once the field winnows further. With their impressive performances on Tuesday, Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota seem best positioned to convert the abstract campaign currency--momentum--into vote totals that could rival Sanders' base. But Nevada and South Carolina--with large Latino and black populations--will prove rockier terrain than Iowa and New Hampshire.

After pulling in 26.2 percent and 24.6 percent of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively, Buttigieg will now bring his version of hope and change to states where he is currently polling in the mid-single digits. The campaign has proved more than capable of elevating the 38-year-old's profile thus far, but it has primarily had to appeal only to white voters, and college-educated white voters at that.

DONALD WHO?:

WHEN EUROPE MET TEXAS (profanity alert):

"Honky Tonk Masquerade had just come out, and we were in London playing the Venue Club when all the Clash showed up one night. They came backstage and I guess they'd heard me on the radio and knew every song on my record. This was 1978 and coming from Lubbock; we had no idea what was going on in London.

"Pete Townshend was there that night, but I didn't know the Clash from Adam. They introduced themselves, and after we talked backstage, they invited us to come to the studio where they were working the next day. So we went and afterward hit the clubs in the East End, staying up all night and having a good time. It was like the West Texas hellraisers meet the London hellraisers. We were from different worlds, but it was like, 'All right! Let's hang out some more!' We were playing three nights in a row at the Venue and hung out the whole time.

"They told me they were coming to America and I asked where they wanted to play. 'Laredo, El Paso' -- they were naming off all these gunfighter ballad towns from Marty Robbins songs. 'Well I don't know about that,' I said, 'but we could play Lubbock together.' And they were like, 'Lubbock! All right!' They told their booking agent they didn't care about Houston or Dallas, they wanted to play Laredo, Lubbock, El Paso, and Wichita Falls. Somehow he put it together and we played Houston, San Antonio, Laredo, Lubbock, and Juarez. It was a great Europe-meets-Texas meeting.

SHRINKING THE GOP:

Republican voter registration in NH is down roughly 20k voters from 2016 to now. It's a reminder that Trump's increased GOP popularity is in part because in some places, the GOP registration rolls have shrunk. https://t.co/nkexApHCzy

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) February 11, 2020

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

New: Violent threats mailed to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation, which hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, were initially blamed on Antifa. Now it looks like they actually came from one of the reenactors themselves.https://t.co/19UvpfUkwN

— Justin Rohrlich (@JustinRohrlich) February 11, 2020

AS BILL MURRAY ONCE SAID OF THE METS...:

More than half of registered voters, or 52%, have a positive view of capitalism, the survey found. Meanwhile, 18% have a negative perception.

At the same time, only 19% of voters have a positive view of socialism. A majority, 53%, have a negative perception. [...]

Sanders leads Trump by a 49% to 45% margin in a potential general election matchup, the poll found.

NOT AN ADMINISTRATION FOR DECENT PEOPLE:

McCusker is losing her job because she attempted to follow the law. There's no cover story to rationalize it. That is the cover story. "This administration needs people who are committed to implementing the president's agenda, specifically on foreign policy, and not trying to thwart it," a White House official tells the paper.

McCusker's crime is quite literally having attempted to follow the law. Over the summer, the Office of Management and Budget was trying to hold up aid for Ukraine that Congress had passed into law, because it was trying to extort Ukraine to investigate Trump's rivals. Defense Department officials, who were supposed to allocate the funds, attempted to implement the policy. Just Security obtained the email chain through the Freedom of Information Act.

The emails show McCusker advising budget officials as to what the law said. She was not acting especially rigid about it. As Just Security's summary notes, "The emails show officials bending over backwards to make every conceivable accommodation to keep the process moving without actually being able to obligate the funding." One message shows McCusker writing to another official, "We need to continue to give the WH has [sic] much decision space as possible, but am concerned we have not officially documented the fact that we can not promise full execution at this point." That is, she was trying to do everything in her power to give White House officials room to set the policy as they saw fit, without violating the law.

Importantly, the Government Accountability Office later examined the question, and found that McCusker was right. Holding up the aid was indeed illegal. (It's not complicated: Congress passed a law providing the aid, so refusing to carry it out would obviously violate it.)

Upon learning the Department reversed course and said seven to nine years was "grossly disproportionate" given Stone's offenses -- which include lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstructing a House investigation related to 2016 Russian election interference -- prosecutor Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Zelinsky withdrew from Stone's case. However, it looks like he'll be sticking with the Justice Department and returning to his old job in Maryland.

Another prosecutor, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Jed, is doing the same. Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kravis, is resigning from the department altogether.

Kirk Douglas used dying words to endorse Michael Bloomberg for president, says son Michael https://t.co/YrwFe7ie5Y If I do that to my kids they have my permission to smother me.

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 11, 2020

(SELF-REFERENCE ALERT):

Don't blame me. #fitn pic.twitter.com/blXTjWKXKT

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 11, 2020

ENDING THE RATIONALE FOR HIS CANDIDACY:

I asked @JoeBiden if @BernieSanders can beat Donald Trump and he said "Mickey Mouse can defeat Donald Trump!" pic.twitter.com/D8Ty2pPSL8

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) February 11, 2020

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company's devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project.

The account identifies the CIA officers who ran the program and the company executives entrusted to execute it. It traces the origin of the venture as well as the internal conflicts that nearly derailed it. It describes how the United States and its allies exploited other nations' gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets.

The operation, known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later "Rubicon," ranks among the most audacious in CIA history.

"It was the intelligence coup of the century," the CIA report concludes. "Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries."

From 1970 on, the CIA and its code-breaking sibling, the National Security Agency, controlled nearly every aspect of Crypto's operations -- presiding with their German partners over hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets.

Then, the U.S. and West German spies sat back and listened.

They monitored Iran's mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina's military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco.

JUST WAIT TEN MONTHS:

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

A new survey of Victorian drivers has found that more people would prefer to purchase a hybrid vehicle, over a petrol engined vehicle, for their next purchase, with a further third of drivers saying an all-electric vehicle would be their preferred choice.

The survey undertaken by toll road mangers EastLink found that around 40 per cent of motorists would prefer to buy a hybrid vehicle as their next vehicle, beating out petrol vehicles which were the preferred choice of around 32 per cent of motorists.

The results highlight the substantial shift that appears likely to occur in the passenger vehicle market, with a substantial proportion of petrol-fueled vehicle owners indicating they are keen to switch to an electric alternative.

ALL THE ACTIVISM IS ON OUR SIDE:

At an event at Georgetown University's law school, moderator and federal appellate judge Margaret McKeown asked Ginsburg about an ongoing effort to revive the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which provides that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

Three-fourths of the states, or 38 total, are required to amend the Constitution. Last month, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA and one of only three states to do so since 1977 -- but there's a catch. Congress imposed a 1982 deadline on states hoping to ratify the ERA, though there's doubt about whether this deadline is binding.

Ginsburg's comments on Monday suggest that she believes this 1982 deadline should be considered binding. "I would like to see a new beginning" for ERA ratification, the justice told McKeown.

"There's too much controversy about latecomers," Ginsburg added. "Plus, a number of states have withdrawn their ratification. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said 'we've changed our minds?'"

OF COURSE THEY'RE LIBERALIZING; THEY'

What hasn't been widely reported yet is how Azerbaijan itself is diversifying its economy, moving away from its excessive reliance on the energy sector, a situation that means oil and gas represent a whopping 75% of government revenue. While Azerbaijani oil production has fallen over the last decade, it was the global crude oil plunge of 2014 that really refocused minds in Baku - as well as leading the country's central bank to devalue its currency, the Manat.

A reform process spearheaded by President Ilham Aliyev to boost the country's non-energy sector has seen  a number of high-profile ministers and administrators dismissed, while younger, Western-trained politicians were promoted. A good example is the US-educated Economy Minister, Mikayil Jabbarov, who is also responsible for taxation and the privatisation of state enterprises.

There is already evidence that the reforms are paying dividends. The World Bank's Doing Business Index ranked Azerbaijan among the top 20 reformers in the areas of registering property, obtaining credit, protecting minority investors and enforcing contracts, and the country's overall ranking is 34th out of 190 countries.

Sunday's elections were in keeping with this reform process, with the old guard making way for a younger group of legislators. 

ODD? IT'S THE TRUMPBOT DREAM:

TRUMPONOMICS DOESN'T WORK ANYWHERE:

What is clear is that, since clinching a historic re-election last May, the ruling party has prioritised Hindu majoritarianism over economic renewal.

The BJP has long promoted two core ambitions: Building a culturally Hindu-centric nation and aggressively advancing India's economic development. But, in the midst of a sustained slowdown and given the political dynamics at play, it has decided to subsume the latter to the former.

I have written elsewhere and believe it to be true that this strain of potent nationalism doesn't just distract from the economic task at hand; it actively undermines it. And, I think we are starting to see some of the costs show up.

WAGING WAR ON THE SUBURBS:

As student debt continues to climb, President Donald Trump on Monday released a budget for 2021 that would slash many of the programs aimed at helping borrowers.

Student loan spending would be cut by $170 billion in Trump's plan, titled "A Budget for America's Future." The reductions include "sensible annual and lifetime loan limits" for graduate students and parents and the end to subsidized loans, in which the government covers the interest for borrowers who are still in school or experiencing economic hardship.

It would also reduce the number of repayment options for borrowers and nix the popular, if challenged, public service loan forgiveness program.

IF ISRAEL WERE...THERE'D BE POGROMS:

Police on Tuesday opened an investigation into an apparent hate crime in the northern Arab town of Jish, where the tires of some 170 vehicles were slashed and Hebrew graffiti condemning interfaith coexistence was daubed on buildings.

One of the phrases spray-painted on the wall of a mosque read, "Jews wake up. Stop assimilating!"

NOTHING RESTORING THE FREE MOVEMENT OF GOODS AND PEOPLE WOULDN'T FIX:

As President Donald Trump takes the stage at his reelection rally here Monday and boasts of his economic record, there is one statistic he is likely to omit: He created 1.5 million fewer jobs in his first three years in office than predecessor Barack Obama did in his final three.

Newly revised figures from Trump's own Department of Labor show that 6.6 million new jobs were created in the first 36 months of Trump's tenure, compared with 8.1 million in the final 36 months of Obama's ― a decline of 19% under Trump, according to a HuffPost analysis.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

WHY JOE IS FADING:

Poof

There goes the media claims that Trump had best week and acquittal was big win for him.

Quinnipiac poll Feb 5-9:

Bloomberg beats Trump 51-42
Sanders beats Trump 51-43
Biden beats Trump 50-43
Klobuchar beats Trump 49-43
Warren beats Trump 48-44
Buttigieg beats Trump 47-43

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) February 10, 2020

OR MAYBE APPLY FOR A JOB?

In the years after World War II, Korea's economy was in tragic shape. In 1948, the country's per capita income of $86 put it on par with Sudan. Disastrous policies led to hyperinflation, snail-paced growth forced mothers to make choices about children along the lines of Sophie's, plus literacy rates in the country were among the lowest in the world. Analyzing the situation, one U.S. official concluded that "Korea can never attain a high standard of living." The reason, he observed, was that "there are virtually no Koreans with the technical training and experience required to take advantage of Korea's resources and effect an improvement over its rice-economy status." 

Happily, however, predictions are made to be discredited. The speculation about what became South Korea's future proved incorrect. Wildly so. Fast forward to the present, and South Korea now finds itself impressively prosperous. Though GDP isn't the most accurate or worthy of numbers, what was once wrecked by war (among other things) is now one of only two countries (along with Taiwan) to "have managed 5 percent growth for five decades" on the way to its economy presently ranking as the world's 13th largest. [...]

For background, Parasite is ostensibly the story of a down-on-its-luck Korean family that folds pizza boxes for a local chain as seemingly its primary source of income. The Kim family lives in a grungy basement apartment in Seoul, though old photos of the Pere Kim perhaps indicate a somewhat upwardly mobile past. Needless to say, the family struggles in the present.

Then luck of sorts find them. Even though none of the family members can find steady work, son Ki-woo is friends with a university student set to study abroad. For extra money, Ki-woo's friend works as an English tutor for the very rich Park family. The Parks have a daughter who aspires to learn English, so Ki-woo's friend tells him to pose as a university student in order to get the job. Right here it's fair to guess that those who haven't seen Parasite can see how thoroughly implausible the film is.

Simply stated, fluency in English is a rather lucrative skill to possess, Ki-woo ultimately gets the job tutoring the daughter, but if he's got these skills why on earth would he be folding pizza boxes? We're supposed to believe that the Kims are poor due to a lack of work options, but let's be serious. If Ki-woo is fluent in English such that he can immediately impress the rich Parks, why isn't he already lucratively employed by someone, somewhere in Seoul in consideration of English's seminal role in the global economy? More on this question in a bit.

Until then, it should be said that having secured the job as English tutor to Da-hye, Ki-woo is told that Da-hye's brother Da-song is obsessed with art. Sensing an opportunity for his strikingly beautiful sister, Ki-woo fibs to Mrs. Park that she's an "art" expert of some kind only for Ki-jeong to be hired to tutor Da-song. Once in the employ of the Parks, Ki-jeong frames Mr. Park's longtime driver for having sex in the car he chauffeurs Mr. Park around in by leaving a pair of underwear in the back seat, only for Pere Kim to become Mr. Park's driver. The three Kims then exploit the Park family cook's peach allergy to get Mrs. Kim hired as the cook.

To be fair, movies are supposed to be escapist to some degree. And the stories, to be good, must be a little bit implausible. Fine, except that with Parasite Bong Joon-ho is thoroughly insulting the intelligence of his viewers.

Up front, we're supposed to believe a son fluent in English, a daughter capable of betraying reasonable knowledge of art, a father knowledgeable of cars (and who can clean up to look the part of an elegant chauffeur), and a mother capable of cooking for those in possession of discerning palates, rate only the most menial of work unless they trick others into hiring them. We're then expected to believe that individuals so resourceful as to talk themselves into jobs by hyping their backgrounds can't do the same with the myriad high-end corporations based in Seoul?

FIRST BECAUSE WE'RE BETTER:

APPLIED DARWINISM:

The fact is that Margaret Sanger strongly believed the Aryan race to be superior and that it must be purified, a view that finds its roots from Charles Darwin's defense of evolution in The Origin of Species. Darwin argued that a process of "natural selection" favored the white race over all other "lesser races." Sanger advocated for eugenics by calling for abortion and birth control among the "unfit" to produce a master race, a race consisting solely of wealthy, educated whites. Sanger said she believed blacks were "human weeds" that needed to be exterminated. She also referred to immigrants, African Americans, and poor people as "reckless breeders" and "spawning...human beings who never should have been born."

Sanger once wrote "that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets." In an effort to sell her birth control and abortion proposals to the black community, Sanger said: "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." In 1926, Sanger was also the featured speaker at a women's auxiliary meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

Sanger opened her clinics in largely minority neighborhoods because she believed immigrants and the working class were inferior and needed their population controlled so as to purify the human race. That trend continues today where almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. In fact, although only 13 percent of American women are black, over 35 percent of all black babies are aborted in the United States every year. Abortion is the leading cause of death for blacks in the United States. According to Students for Life of America, "more African-Americans have died from abortion than from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined." Black babies are about five times more likely to be aborted than whites. On Halloween in 2017, Planned Parenthood's "Black Community" Twitter account tweeted: "If you're a Black woman in America, it's statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth."

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

To be haunted by history is ultimately to be haunted by phantoms of our own creation. Windows on the past turn into mirrors in which we see ourselves, our present concerns, reflected. That is why we looked in the first place. Likewise, when we tell stories about the past, we are most often talking to ourselves about ourselves, making of the past what we need it to be useful in the present. Increasingly, we seek to make a virtue of this natural tendency to anachronism, and simply recast the past culturally, ideologically and linguistically, as Lin Manuel Miranda did in his hit Broadway musical, Hamilton.

There's something to be said for that approach to binding past and present; Hamilton certainly deserves its accolades. But if this is the way the tide is going, then there's special value for us in artists who swim against it, who use modern forms to show us the strangeness of the past and thus refresh our nightmares with something once familiar but now eerily foreign.

Robert Eggers's first film, The Witch, did precisely that. Based on seventeenth-century New England folktales, it was in many ways a traditional horror film, with numerous elements familiar from the genre and copious references to classics like The Shining and Rosemary's Baby. But the film refused to cater to contemporary concerns or sensibilities. The witch that torments the isolated Puritan family is a solitary old woman, but the film doesn't treat her as a meaningful symbol, from a feminist or any other modern perspective. She is radical evil incarnate, an evil that finds purchase in entirely normal human frailty: in the husband's pride in his own rectitude, the wife's pain at losing a child, the son's just-awakening adolescence, even the littlest children's sense of imagination and play. And once active, the family cannot defeat it by courage or cunning, or even prayer; their earthly salvation is beyond human capacity to achieve. The story, which would ring terrible and true to a convinced Calvinist, to a modern audience might be irritatingly pre-psychological. The Witch is, in other words, the horror film that seventeenth-century Puritans might have made if they somehow had access to contemporary film technology and knowledge of film history.

NOTHING AGAINST MR. KAHN...:

But The Boys of Summer was just one part of a longer project that defined Kahn's career. Kahn's great achievement was the way his work helped recast professional ballplayers as emotional, vulnerable human beings. He trafficked in the classical notion of athletes as mythical heroes, but he simultaneously was hip to the fact that maybe being a hero isn't all it's cut out to be.

At the time Kahn was working, the popular conception of the ballplayer more or less ended as soon as they took off their uniform. But it was exactly because Kahn so admired ballplayers in uniform that his portraits of their humanity out of uniform turned out to be so moving.

For example, in 1956, Kahn collaborated with the Dodgers' center fielder Duke Snider on an essay for the now-defunct magazine Collier's. The essay (which, full disclosure, I discuss a bit in my upcoming book, Stealing Home) is a remarkable document for the time: an exhaustive account of all the ways that it sucks to be a professional baseball superstar.

The essay grew out of a conversation between Kahn and Snider at a bar called Holiday House on some Dodgers road trip. You can see Kahn's fingerprints all over it, especially in how he places Snider in the lineage of historically great baseball legends, simultaneously signaling the importance of baseball mythology and undercutting it.

"Sometimes you hear talk about 'the good old days when there were fellows like Ruth and Cobb who really loved baseball,' " Snider (really Kahn) writes. "Maybe they did, but they didn't exactly go broke playing it."

The piece brought negative attention to both writer and ghostwriter. Snider was accused of being ungrateful and a whiner. Kahn was accused of making the whole thing up to get a story, and of using Snider as a sort of dupe. But none of that was true. Both men addressed the fallout from the Collier's essay in Peter Golenbock's oral history book Bums. What Snider really wanted people to understand was that he took baseball seriously. But for Kahn, the piece aimed to correct for much more: He recited to Golenbock the names of some of the sports writers who mocked the essay, including the legendary Red Smith. "As one who writes books learns," Kahn said, "newspaper commentary isn't very perceptive." Nevertheless, the Collier's essay was unprecedented, and it was a preview of what Kahn would do with The Boys of Summer.

In that book, Kahn pulled back the curtain on the lives and vulnerabilities of once-beloved Dodger players. But he did so in a way that made their glories seem ancient and gauzy and literary in an almost Victorian sense, even though he was writing less than two decades after the fact. Imagine a self-consciously literary book coming out now about the late-'90s Atlanta Braves that takes its title from Dylan Thomas and has a preface called "Lines on the Transpotine Madness." Then imagine that the book also lays bare with devastating detail the post-baseball lives of its subjects. Imagine, like, Jeff Blauser, tending bar at an American Legion in rural central Pennsylvania.

In many ways, The Boys of Summer resembles other in-depth, immersive nonfiction writing that was happening at the time it was published in 1972. Kahn was about the same age, and had the same predilections and credentials, as many of the "New Journalists." But his work was never read as new journalism. It just didn't feel anti-establishment. Instead it ushered in a new way of thinking and writing about baseball: a more complicated form of nostalgia that empowered players and humanized them.

HIS CEILING IS 44%...:

THE KEY TO HEALTH REFORM IS REDUCING CONSUMPTION:

TWOE: @MartyMakary talks about his book on health care pricing: https://t.co/VTWiOk04gP

— Russell Roberts (@EconTalker) February 10, 2020

ALL THEIR MOST RADICAL POLICIES ARE POPULAR:

One poll that clearly spells out the problem for the president and his party is the Great Lakes Poll conducted published to little attention on January 21. It is important because it surveyed people in only four states--Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump won the last three states by a total of 77,000 votes in 2016, and their combined 46 electoral votes put him over the top. If the rest of the states were to vote in 2020 the same way they did in 2016 but just those three states flipped, Trump would lose in the Electoral College with 260 votes to his Democratic opponent's 278.

One question in the poll was especially relevant to health care, and unlike the questions in most previous national polls, phrased very directly: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling healthcare policy?"

The results show Trump and the Republicans have a big problem in these key states. When the survey was weighted to match the demographics of the polled states, 51 percent of Pennsylvania respondents said they "somewhat" or "strongly" disapprove of how Trump has handled health care, as did 53 percent of Michigan respondents and 56 percent of Wisconsin respondents. By contrast, only around 35 percent of the respondents in those states "somewhat" or "strongly" approve of Trump's handling of health care.

As bad as those numbers might seem for Trump, his real vulnerabilities become clear when you look into the poll's details. Women really dislike his handling of health care, with 53 percent disapproval in Pennsylvania, 59 percent in Michigan, and 58 percent in Wisconsin. Exit polls in 2016 showed Trump lost to Hillary Clinton among women in each of those states (by 42-55 in Pennsylvania, 42-53 in Michigan, and 43-53 in Wisconsin); he can't afford to lose even more ground.

More striking is how this could play out among independents. In each of these three swing states, a plurality of independents says health care is the issue most important to them--more important even than the economy or national security or climate change. And the numbers don't look good for Trump:

In Pennsylvania, independents made up 20 percent of the 2016 electorate and Trump won them 48-41. In the Great Lakes Poll, he is now losing independents to "the Democratic Party's candidate" by 26-37 (with 36 percent still undecided). And they disapprove of his handling of health care by 52-32.

In Michigan, independents were 29 percent of the 2016 electorate and Trump won them 52-36. In the Great Lakes Poll, he's losing them 23-40 (with 37 percent still undecided.) They disapprove of his handling of health care by 54-26.

In Wisconsin, independents were 30 percent of the 2016 electorate and Trump won them 50-40. In the Great Lakes Poll, he's losing them 22-41 (with 37 percent still undecided). They disapprove of his handling of health care by 62-26.

Among all the respondents in the Great Lakes Poll--that is, not just the independents--Trump is currently losing Pennsylvania by 37-47, Michigan by 34-47, and Wisconsin by 34-48.

ISLAMOPHOBIA ALL THE WAY DOWN:

While Myanmar has a relatively small Muslim population (4%), the populations of the other five are between 30% Muslim (Tanzania) and 86% (Kyrgyzstan), according to the Pew Research Center. [...]

Trump first announced a travel ban -- labeled by many as a "Muslim ban" -- in his first week in office.

It would have barred entry to refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen -- all Muslim-majority countries.

Mass chaos and large protests followed in airports across the country as refugees and travelers who had just arrived were told to return to their home countries.

The ban was temporarily blocked by a federal court, which began a more than year-long struggle between federal judges and the administration.

In June 2018, the Supreme Court upheld an amended version of Trump's ban.

The final version blocked most immigrants and many travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

It's had a dramatic impact. Between 2017 and 2018, the number of permanent visas given every month to nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen fell by 72%, according to Migration Policy Institute (MPI).

Collectively, those countries are more than 92% Muslim.

WHEN DONALD ISN'T YOUR AVATAR:

People fear and mistrust what they don't know--including people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. That lack of trust causes social and political divisions in the US and around the world, especially when it comes to immigrants.

Inspired by research in Hungary that found computer games could help players reduce their prejudice toward immigrants, my colleague Patrick Stewart devised a role-playing game as part of an American national government course at the University of Arkansas. I helped to develop survey measures for tracking changes in trust during the game.

Our hope was that by playing the game over the course of a semester, students would come to understand a bit more about what immigrants go through in the US, and as a result, perhaps trust could develop.

We found that it was possible for a role-playing game to help simulate shared experiences with immigrants, even in a group of mostly white, conservative students. This helped trust in immigrants to grow.

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

The "fetish" for keeping the public in ignorance is absurd and counterproductive, he argues. It led to disastrous wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) and to egregious acts by the spooks (MI6's collusion with the US in the abduction and torture of terror suspects, denied for years). Secrecy doesn't enhance national security. It radically undermines it, he thinks.

Norton-Taylor is especially scathing about the "sclerotic" and "secretive" ministry of defence. It has wasted billions on "ill-conceived" weapons irrelevant to modern conflict. He's critical, too, of the foreign office, which won't release files on colonial-era abuses. They include the torture of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya and the murder of Malayan villagers in 1948. [...]

It is this mystical culture that possibly explains why the committee didn't leak its own recent report into Russian meddling ahead of last year's election. Boris Johnson cynically sat on it. You would have thought at least one MP would put the public interest above medieval vows. And yet none did. Voters are still in the dark.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Australia's record renewables growth in 2019 has helped to deliver a dramatic decline in wholesale electricity prices in the year's final quarter - despite and possibly even because of a marked fall in output from the nation's coal-fired generator fleet.

In its Quarterly Energy Dynamics report for the fourth quarter of 2019, the Australian Energy Market Operator says spot wholesale electricity prices averaged $A72/megawatt hour (MWh), marking a 19 per cent fall from Q4 2018, and the lowest prices since Q4 2016.

DADDY, WHAT WERE WATCHES:

Watches had been around for a long time before we started wearing Apple's version, but it only took a few years for the Apple Watch to become the most popular wearable timepiece on earth. That's according to a new report from research firm Strategy Analytics, which says that Apple shipped almost 31 million units last year, while the entire Swiss watch industry shipped a little over 21 million.

MAYBE ELECTION APPS ARE A BAD IDEA?:

WHICH IS WHY THE rIGHT LOVES HIM:

Given his ruthless repression at home, Egypt's Pres Sisi spent the year as head of the African Union utterly ignoring human rights on the continent. https://t.co/brCICA3kS9 pic.twitter.com/6r3cQZA1Yw

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) February 9, 2020

PLUS, HE'LL BRING OUT THE WORST IN DONALD:

Having covered campaigns for a couple of decades, I've come to believe that some candidates are just get-to-yes candidates: Voters are looking for reasons to support them, because it feels ennobling. And the only question for the candidate is whether he or she can offer voters enough reassurance to make the leap.

Take, for instance, Barack Obama, whose age and lack of governing experience gave voters legitimate reasons, in both the 2008 primaries and in the general election, to choose someone else. They didn't, because Obama was a get-to-yes candidate; he made them feel good about themselves and the country. They found a way to overlook the rest.

For months now, a lot of Democrats have been telling us that Buttigieg inspires them. They love the idea of a Rhodes scholar with military credentials, a gay candidate who doesn't let identity define him, a candidate who came of age with social media and isn't pushing 80.

They just wish Buttigieg were even five years older or that he was the mayor of, you know, a real city. They'd like to be able to vote for him; it just seems like such a stretch.

But as we saw in Iowa, Buttigieg (who, full disclosure, was a friend of mine years before people started trying to pronounce his name) has given them enough reason to look past all that. He's lightning-quick on his feet, oddly self-confident, relentlessly disciplined and forward-looking. He's steadily getting them to yes, much as Obama did.

No one else in the field enjoys that advantage with voters who remain undecided at this stage.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

  

'The difference between my socialism and Trump's socialism is I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires.'

That's presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders responding on "Fox News Sunday" to President Trump calling him a communist.

IT'S PRETTY EASY TO RUN AS THE CONSERVATIVE AGAINST DONALD:

Pete Buttigieg called on Democrats to get more serious about lowering the national debt, portraying himself as the biggest fiscal hawk in the presidential field and taking a shot at chief New Hampshire rival Bernie Sanders for being too spendthrift.

Asked at a town hall here how important the deficit is to him, Buttigieg said it's "important" and vowed to focus on limiting the debt even though it's "not fashionable in progressive circles."

"I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable owning this issue because I see what's happening under this president -- a $1 trillion deficit -- and his allies in Congress do not care. So we have to do something about it," the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor said in a packed middle school gym, drawing cheers from the crowd.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

#FITN:

A taste of 1st in the nation--just took the dog for a walk; Warren canvasser at the door; went past Bernie and Yang on Dartmouth campus; Bernie canvassers on campus; Yang canvasser at Mother Judd's apt. building.

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 9, 2020

YOU CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON DONALD:

U.S. President Donald Trump will propose on Monday a 21% cut in foreign aid and slashing social safety net programs in his $4.8 trillion budget proposal for fiscal 2021, according to senior administration officials.

THE GOP IN A NUTSHELL:

Timm was arrested several hours later and charged with two counts of Aggravated Assault on a Person 65 Years of Age or Older...

TOTALLY NOT A CULT!:

President Donald Trump was more than halfway through his speech at a rally in Milwaukee when one of his hand gestures caught the eye of a supporter standing in the packed arena.

The 51-year-old woman believed the president had traced the shape of the letter "Q" with his fingers as a covert signal to followers of QAnon, a right-wing, pro-Trump conspiracy theory. She turned to the couple on her right and excitedly asked, "Did you see the 'Q'?"

"He just did it?" asked Diane Jacobson, 63, of Racine, Wisconsin.

"Was that a 'Q'?" added Jacobson's husband, Randy, 64.

"I think it was," replied their new friend, Chrisy. The Geneva, Illinois, resident declined to give her last name in part because she said she wanted to avoid negative "attention."

The Jacobsons met Chrisy and her husband, Paul, hours earlier in the line to get into the Jan 14 rally. The couples bonded over their shared interest in QAnon, which centers on the baseless belief that Trump is waging a secret campaign against enemies in the "deep state" and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles and cannibals.

What started as an online obsession for the far-right fringe has grown beyond its origins in a dark corner of the internet. QAnon has been creeping into the mainstream political arena for more than a year. The trend shows no sign of abating as Trump fires up his reelection campaign operation, attracting a loyal audience of conspiracy theorists and other fringe groups to his raucous rallies.

Trump has retweeted QAnon-promoting accounts. Followers flock to Trump's rallies wearing clothes and hats with QAnon symbols and slogans. At least 23 current or former congressional candidates in the 2020 election cycle have endorsed or promoted QAnon, according to the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, which compiled online evidence to support its running tally.

Conspiracy theorists aren't the only fringe characters drawn to Trump rallies. The Oath Keepers, an anti-government group formed in 2009 after President Barack Obama's election, has been sending "security volunteers" to escort Trump supporters at rallies across the country.

THERE'S NOTHING MORE TYPICAL OF THE lEFT...:

In the wake of his 2016 presidential run, the most lucrative thing he's ever done, the 77-year-old self-described democratic socialist is a three-home-owning millionaire with a net worth approaching at least $2 million, taking into account his publicly outlined assets and liabilities along with the real estate he owns outright. In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against whom he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of "the 1 percent" has found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical boogeymen. This development, seen mostly as the result of big bucks brought in by the slate of books he's put out in the past few years, predictably has elicited snarky pokes, partisan jabs and charges of hypocrisy. The millionaire socialist!

Sanders has been impatient to the point of churlish when pressed about this. "I wrote a best-selling book," he told the New York Times after he releasing the last 10 years of his tax returns. "If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too." Asked on Fox News if this sort of success was "the definition of capitalism," he bristled. "You know, I have a college degree," he said.

Based on a deeper examination of his financial disclosures, tax returns, property records in Washington and Vermont, and scarcely leafed-through scraps of his financial papers housed at the University of Vermont, Sanders' current financial portrait is not only some stroke-of-luck windfall, it's also the product (with the help of his wife) of decades of planning. The upward trajectory from that jalopy of his to his relative riches now--as off-brand as it is for a man who once said he had "no great desire to be rich"--is the product of years of middle-class striving, replete with credit card debt, real estate upgrades and an array of investment funds and retirement accounts.

As an immigrant's son who started close to the bottom and has ended up near to the top, Sanders has a narrative arc that would form the backbone of the campaign story of almost any other candidate. But it's more complicated for him. 

AXIS OF EVIL:

Since he came to power, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi's rule has been decidedly anti-Palestinian. When Egypt's military overthrew Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013, one of the first things the generals did was close the Rafah Crossing and deport Palestinians arriving in the country through Cairo Airport. [...]

The price for Egypt's position was $9 billion, the amount promised at the economic workshop for the deal of the century in Bahrain last summer. It's a big chunk of money for Egypt, given the dire straits it has found itself in under Al-Sisi's mismanagement of the economy, and should provide some generous bonuses for the ruling generals, who we know through the whistleblower Mohamed Ali are getting rich through corruption and at the expense of their own people.

For its part, Israel has achieved political and economic gains it never imagined could be possible. This has been described as the golden age of Israeli-Egyptian relations symbolised by the transfer of Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia, which opened up the Straits of Tiran to Israel, and compounded by security cooperation between the Egyptian and Israeli army in Sinai.

As Yehya Okail, a former MP in Sinai, once told me:

Hosni Mubarak was a treasure to Israel, however Sisi is much more than that. Israel never imagined that it would be served by anyone in the history of Egypt as Sisi has done.

ALL THEIR MOST RADICAL IDEAS ARE POPULAR:

As staff writer Tim Camerato reported last week, delegates at the association's annual assembly voted 45-4 to back measures "to restrict possession of firearms on school property to authorized law enforcement personnel only."

Last month's vote now aligns the school boards association with the state's largest teachers union, NEA-NH, and the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police, which is backing a bill now pending in the New Hampshire House that would ban carrying a firearm on school property. Its president, Hanover Police Chief Charlie Dennis, told Camerato, "Our view of this is that it is a common-sense safety bill."

Among other findings, the poll found that:

90 percent of Granite Staters and 85 percent of Granite State gun owners support criminal background checks for all gun sales

81 percent of Granite State gun owners support ERPO legislation

ERPO legislation has strong bipartisan support: 71 percent of those who identify as strong Republicans and 88 percent of strong Democrats indicated support

75 percent of respondents support prohibiting guns in K-12 schools

81 percent of New Hampshire voters support a 7-day waiting period for gun sales

REALITY IS COLD:

Larry Hogan ran almost 40% better than Trump in Maryland and only got 28% of the black vote. https://t.co/DMF9xLG6VU

— J. Miles Coleman (@JMilesColeman) February 8, 2020

TRUMPISM FAILS AGAIN:

DO YA WANNA BUILD A SNOWFLAKE:

In early 2018, Niall Ferguson moderated a conversation with Francis Fukuyama and Charles Murray at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. The subject was "inequality and populism," and Murray made one of his favorite arguments: "Along with not understanding the lives of ordinary Americans, the cognitive elite increasingly despises, has contempt for ... ordinary Americans. I think that is at the heart of Donald Trump's election."

To illustrate his point, Murray happened to mention a place I know well. After observing that members of the cognitive elite often have an "intense interest in the most oppressed, deprived segments of American society," he went on to explain that "what they don't understand is the life of a pharmacist and a plumber and an insurance agent in Topeka, Kansas." And he had a dark message for his fellow members of the cognitive elite: "To those of you who have not spent a lot of time in Topeka and places like that ... the unanimity with which we are viewed with anger is really astonishing."

I was the opinion page editor at The Topeka Capital-Journal for almost two years.

If Murray has done more than spend a few minutes at a Topeka gas station, he should know that the picture of the city he presented at Stanford was a grossly inaccurate caricature -- just the sort of thing a disconnected coastal elitist would imagine about the American Midwest.

Topeka is one of the state's largest and most politically diverse cities. Had he been talking about my hometown of Salina, Kansas, he might have had a point. But he instead assumed that everywhere is like everywhere else in Kansas.

While Trump carried Kansas by more than 20 points in 2016, his margin of victory in Topeka was a mere two points. In nearby Douglas and Wyandotte Counties, Clinton won by 30 points. Topeka is also the capital of a state that elected Laura Kelly governor in 2018. Kelly is a Democrat who defeated Kris Kobach -- one of Trump's most rabid acolytes, who received the president's endorsement in 2018 -- by five points. Kobach ran on Trumpian campaign slogans like "drain the swamp" and "Kansans first," humiliated the state by defending Trump's ludicrous claim that "millions" of people had voted illegally in 2016 (one of the reasons the president awarded him the dubious role of vice chair of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity), and waged a long campaign of voter suppression as Kansas secretary of state. When Kobach announced his run for U.S. Senate, he did so in front of a banner that read, "Build the wall."

On Murray's analysis, Kobach is just the sort of politician that indignant plumbers and insurance agents in Topeka would predictably support -- his whole shtick is inflaming anti-elite resentment by ignoring the actual issues Kansas faces and focusing instead on conservative cultural grievances. During his gubernatorial campaign, the city of Shawnee apologized after he appeared at a parade in a Jeep with a fake .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back. So how did he perform in the Kansas capital, where anti-elite sentiment is so powerful that it would "astonish" Murray's audience at Stanford? Kelly crushed him by 24 points.

THEY AREN'T HUMAN SHIELDS WHEN WE DO IT:

"The recourse to civilian aircraft as cover or to block a riposte by Syrian forces during military air operations has become characteristic of the Israeli air force," Konashenkov disclosed in a statement reported by Russian media.

"At the time of the attack by Israeli planes... an Airbus-320 airliner was on approach to landing... in the death zone of airstrikes and artillery," Konashenkov added.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

The Breitbart founding editor and conservative political strategist has previously declared his intention to shape "the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement," and he clearly incorporates Sanders and his base into that vision. 

"I like Bernie," Bannon replied to Maher after the host expressed his own disapproval of Sander's socialist policies. "He's a populist."

BORN A CRUSADER STATE:

To break its addiction to war and overseas adventures, the argument goes, the nation needs only to rediscover its inner John Quincy Adams.

It is a curious argument, given the man's record. The Independence Day speech was not a blanket warning against American ambition and expansion. It was an argument against a specific policy proposal -- supporting a Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule -- that Adams worried would needlessly antagonize European powers at a sensitive time and divert the U.S. from more pressing matters.

It was also a provocative address that exhorted people everywhere to follow America's example in throwing off the chains of monarchy and absolutism: "Go thou and do likewise!" Most important, it was but one part of a broader diplomatic legacy characterized by vaulting ambition, audacious aggrandizement and the promotion of a distinctively American and deeply ideological form of realism.

Adams was a committed expansionist from the earliest days of his diplomatic career. He believed that the fate of U.S. security and democracy was tied to the creation of a strong, united country that would dominate the vast lands to the west. Attaining primacy within North America, Adams argued, was essential to avoiding the unhappy fate of Europe, where small, vulnerable states were constantly arming themselves and fighting one another.

The choice was between having "a nation coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the most populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact," and having "an endless multitude of insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war." Liberty and expansion went hand in hand.

As secretary of state, Adams focused on securing this continental empire. His most important diplomatic achievement was the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain of 1819. That pact was the product of wise tactical restraint -- namely, holding back from supporting South American rebellions against Spanish imperial rule. But it also resulted from not-so-subtle coercion, in the form of implicit threats to seize Spanish Florida and support for Andrew Jackson's military forays into Spanish territory.

The result was a treaty that ceded key Spanish territories in North America to the U.S. More critically, it secured recognition of America's claim to a western boundary on the Pacific Ocean, thereby paving the way for expansion across the continent and beyond. (It also paved the way for the spread of slavery into the American West, something Adams would come to regret.) There was nothing modest about Adams' statecraft.

That went doubly for Adams's other key diplomatic achievement. The Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823, offered an assurance that America would not meddle politically in Europe's affairs. But it also advanced the radical idea that the U.S. would not tolerate European efforts to establish new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, or to re-subjugate the nations that had just overthrown Spanish rule.

This was an astonishing assertion of American primacy. It was all the more audacious because Adams insisted on making the statement unilaterally, rather than in concert with the British, who also had an interest in the independence of the new South American nations.

America, Adams argued, would do better "to aver our principles explicitly ... than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war." And here Adams also testified to the deep connection between American values and American interests, by arguing that the U.S. had a vital interest in keeping autocratic regimes (monarchies, in this case) as far away as possible from its shores. It was impossible, he wrote, that European monarchies "should extend their political system to any portion" of the Western Hemisphere "without endangering our peace and happiness."

This was indeed a form of what today is called "realism." But it was a quintessentially American realism: An assertion that government type matters profoundly in global affairs, that powerful autocracies are inherently threatening to a democratic republic, and that the U.S. will be more secure and influential to the extent that it is surrounded by relatively liberal states.

IT'S MAGGIE'S WORLD:

This November will mark 30 years since former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher left office. After she had narrowly failed to secure an outright win in a 1990 leadership contest triggered by a challenge from Michael Heseltine, her former defense secretary, the majority of Thatcher's Conservative cabinet colleagues withdrew their support and forced her departure following what she described as "eleven-and-a-half wonderful years."

For Thatcher, the "coup," as she referred to the events of 1990, had been unexpected. But as journalist Charles Moore explains in the third and final volume of his authorized Thatcher biography, Herself Alone (2019), the writing had been on the wall for some time. Thatcher's style, which some considered abrasive, had turned senior figures against her. And many younger party members believed that if the party were to win a fourth consecutive election victory, in 1991 or 1992, it should be under a new standard-bearer (who turned out to be John Major).

An important underlying factor was the long-standing policy conflict regarding the European Community (or the EC as the European Union was then known), which pitted Thatcher against many in her own government, as well as against continental European leaders and George H. W. Bush's White House. She was perceived as a "Cold Warrior" who was overly cautious in regard to the future of Europe, especially the project of European political and economic integration. [...]

Moore's latest volume, which focuses extensively on Thatcher's views about Europe, shows her in a more nuanced light. In some ways, in fact, she was actually ahead of her time. And some of the current problems facing Europe, and the West more generally, might have been mitigated had her opinions been given a more generous audience.

hISTORY eNDED:

Wait, the furthest Left politicians in modern American history are arguing that the issuers should enjoy a 13% return? It's essentially defending usury. https://t.co/0jXfA3KN4q

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 8, 2020

A NATIONALIST ISLAMOPHOBE ALLIED WITH THEIR NATIONALIST ISLAMOPHOBE LEADER:

WHY THE AIR'S SO NOXIOUS IN THE BUBBLE:

An internal Fox News research briefing book obtained by The Daily Beast openly questions Fox News contributor John Solomon's credibility, accusing him of playing an "indispensable role" in a Ukrainian "disinformation campaign."

The document also accuses frequent Fox News guest Rudy Giuliani of amplifying disinformation, as part of an effort to oust former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, and blasts Fox News guests Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova--both ardent Trump boosters--for "spreading disinformation."  

The 162-page document, entitled "Ukraine, Disinformation, & the Trump Administration," was created by Fox News senior political affairs specialist Bryan S. Murphy, who produces research from what is known as the network's Brain Room--a newsroom division of researchers who provide information, data, and topic guides for the network's programming.

The research brief is especially critical of Solomon, a former opinion columnist at The Hill whose opinion pieces about Ukraine made unsubstantiated claims about its government interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Solomon's pieces for The Hill fueled Giuliani's efforts to dig up dirt in Ukraine, which eventually helped lead to President Donald Trump's impeachment. Trump has also frequently cited Solomon's questionable reporting on Twitter in his own defense.

While Solomon is portrayed on Sean Hannity's show as a crusading "investigative reporter"--despite The Hill overtly branding him an opinion columnist--the Brain Room document accuses the contributor of taking part in a Ukrainian smear campaign. "John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign," the Fox briefing book notes. 

Those smears, according to the briefing, were driven by people like disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko and the allies of Dmytro Firtash, an indicted Ukrainian oligarch and accused high-level Russian mafia associate (an accusation he denies). Both Lutsenko and Firtash have been seen as forces driving Giuliani's efforts in Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump's political enemies.

HE FINALLY DID SOMETHING RIGHT:

A controversial draft of an executive order from President Trump's office privileges traditional styles of architecture over more contemporary buildings. The document, "Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again," praises landmarks like the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial for their Greco-Roman pillars and stately, marble facades, whereas modern architecture is dismissed as "ugly."

So which buildings are seen as so offensive? Brutalist ones, for starters. The no-nonsense style was popular in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the proposed executive order points to three Brutalist federal buildings that "inspired public derision" when they were built: the Hubert H. Humphrey Department of Health and Human Services Building and the the Robert C. Weaver Department of Housing and Urban Development Building, both designed by Marcel Breuer, and the Frances Perkins Department of Labor Building, designed by Arthur Brown. 

IT'S NOT HALFTIME THEY HATE:

The sexuality of groups they hate has always made the Right hysterical. https://t.co/Kjhhlh9dOp

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 8, 2020

GLOBALIZATION:

It's cod season once again in the far north of Norway, and Røst--a remote scatter of rocky islets off the outermost tip of Norway's Lofoten Islands--is once more the honeypot for fishermen seeking jackpot paychecks in the lucrative dried cod trade, Norway's oldest export industry, dating back to the Viking days.

Every winter, for more than a thousand years, Norwegian fishermen have flocked to these parts to scoop up the bounty of big, meaty migrating cod that come streaming down by the millions from the Barents Sea to breed among the reefs and shoals around the Lofoten Islands, and most especially here around Røst.

The fish are cleaned and gutted and hung by their tails, in pairs, to dry in the traditional manner, on slatted wooden frames that can be seen all over the island. Then the catch is rendered into stockfish--the nutritious cod jerky that once sustained the Vikings on their long sea voyages and, today, is a highly prized delicacy in Italy, where it's a key ingredient in traditional regional dishes from Venice, Naples, Genoa, and Calabria.

"Stockfish isn't an Italian product, but sometimes you could almost imagine that it was," says Olaf Pedersen, a former CEO of Glea Sjømat, one of Røst's main stockfish companies, founded by his grandfather in 1936. "Over the centuries it has become deeply ingrained into their culinary and cultural traditions."

Indeed, the Ligurian town of Badalucco holds a stockfish festival every year to commemorate the time, back in the Middle Ages, when the townspeople survived a siege by Moorish invaders by eating only stockfish. And over near Venice, on the opposite side of the country, the town of Sandrigo hosts the world's largest stockfish festival--the Festa del Bacalà, held every September in celebration of the famed regional dish Baccalà alla Vicentina.

So important is the Italian market to Norway's stockfish producers that Pedersen recently moved from Røst to Milan, where he now looks after the interests of a collective of 22 stockfish producers. Lofoten stockfish was recently awarded Denomination of Origin status, meaning it enjoys the same legal protections as Parma ham and French champagne.

Any way you want to measure it, it's a long way from the warm Mediterranean sunshine to the moody skies over Røst, whose 365 islets and skerries are home to a few hundred hardy Norwegians and about a million seabirds. Yet the links between these two very different places go back nearly 600 years, to the shipwreck in 1432 of a Venetian merchant trader named Pietro Quirini. After his boat sank, he spent three enjoyable months with the islanders, and on his return to Italy, presented an account of his adventures to the Venetian senate.

He also brought back some stockfish. The rich, nutritious, intensely flavored cod jerky proved an instant culinary hit, finding its way into regional dishes all over the country. An improbable new trade route was born, linking the Renaissance city states then comprising Italy with the lonely windswept isles of Røst.

THANKS, DONALD!:

Instead, the proposal has infuriated many of Israel's Arab citizens, who view it as a form of forced transfer. They want no part in the Palestinian state envisioned by the Trump administration, with many comparing it to the areas set aside for black South Africans as part of the apartheid government's policy of racial segregation. [...]

Arab citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel's population. They face discrimination and higher levels of poverty. 

OF COURSE WE ARE:

Iran "does not pose a threat to any country," the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Saturday.

He said the Islamic republic must become strong enough to ward off the "enemy's threats" and prevent a war.

"We must become strong so that there will not be a war, become strong so that enemies' threats will end," Khamenei told a gathering of air force commanders and staff aired on state television.

TAX COLLECTOR FOR THE ETHNOSTATE:

The CBO, a nonpartisan congressional research arm, projected that the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and retaliatory tariffs imposed by countries like China will reduce economic growth while increasing prices to consumers.

"Tariffs are expected to reduce the level of real GDP by roughly 0.5 percent and raise consumer prices by 0.5 percent in 2020. As a result, tariffs are also projected to reduce average real household income by $1,277 (in 2019 dollars) in 2020," the report said. The figure is more than double the $580 projection in last year's CBO report.

By comparison, the median American household pays about $2,000 in federal income taxes, meaning the trade war effectively amounts to a tax hike of more than 60%.

WHILE DONALD ATTENDS HIS GODSON'S BAPTISM:

Here are some of the biggest takeaways from Sondland's testimony: 

Sondland confirmed a quid pro quo and implicated Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former national security adviser John Bolton.

"Members of this Committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a quid pro quo?" Sondland's opening statement said. "As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes."

"Everyone knew" about the quid pro quo, Sondland said.

Sondland said he pressured Ukraine "at the express direction of the President of the United States."

He said Trump told him to work with Giuliani on the shadow policy campaign and that Giuliani was clear on what Trump's interests were -- get Ukraine to investigate Burisma Holdings and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, as well as a bogus conspiracy theory suggesting Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.

Sondland's statement was significant because it undercut the GOP's attempts to paint Giuliani as a rogue agent who went off on his own to pressure Ukraine.

To that end, Sondland's claim that "everyone" -- including top brass at the White House and several government agencies -- was aware of the campaign also undermined the Giuliani defense.

Unlike Vindman, who's a nonpartisan career official and active-duty Army officer, Sondland had close ties to Trump and no government experience before becoming the EU ambassador. He got the role after donating $1 million to the president's inauguration committee.

ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

JUDENREIN:

SOMEONE HAS TO VINDICATE ANGLOSPHERIC VALUES:

As Richard Turnbull recently wrote here at Acton, reflecting on Prime Minister Boris Johnson's path forward, "Leaving the EU will allow the U.K. to set its own trade policies, to renew commerce with the rest of the non-European world, to lower prices and open markets, and lead to new sources of prosperity."

This week, in a speech in Greenwich, London, Johnson further confirmed that path, proclaiming the promise of Britain's post-Brexit role as a "catalyst for free trade across the world." Far from promoting narrow insularity, Johnson made clear Britain's intentions for their newly regained autonomy.

"We have the opportunity. We have the newly recaptured powers," he says. "We know where we want to go, and that is out into the world."

HEADS ON PIKES:

TRUMPBOTS HIT HARDEST:

The Virginia House of Delegates voted on Thursday to approve a bill that would eliminate Lee-Jackson Day and replace it with an Election Day holiday. It is now almost guaranteed to be signed into law.

WHAT PART OF HATING SHI'ITES DO YOU NOT GET?:

But Iraqi officials told the Times that "based on circumstantial evidence and long experience in the area where the attack took place," there is good reason to be skeptical about U.S. claims that Khataib Hezbollah was behind it.

As the Times reported:

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces...

These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.

"We as Iraqi forces cannot even come to this area unless we have a large force because it is not secure," Brig. Gen. Adnan said of the area from which the rocket attack was launched. "How could it be that someone who doesn't know the area could come here and find that firing position and launch an attack?"

AND SO IT BEGINS:

Buttigieg's best venues so far have been debates, where he can surprise observers and opponents with his tough counter-punching that belies his seeming geniality. Pete likes a fight. You wouldn't necessarily know it, but he does.

"The last big debate is always important," said Ray Buckley, the Democratic Party chairman in the state. "But this one may be more important than any I can remember." 

In the New Hampshire primary, everything decisive happens starting Friday.

The rise of Pete Buttigieg feels less like a New Hampshire explosion - in the tradition of Gary Hart in 1984 or John McCain in 2000 - than a process of elimination. Turnout is expected to be level with 2016, or even down.

For college students and other mostly young voters in New Hampshire and elsewhere, Sanders is the man. Those kids are facing a future of massive student debt, an economy that is "thriving" because wages are being kept down, and a health care and retirement system that could collapse on them.

Bernie's final big events are, not surprisingly, at the University of New Hampshire and Keene State College. They will be massive and fervent. In Iowa, he was unable to expand his youth brigade to other voting groups. Here, he has half the support he had in 2016, although admittedly in a much larger field. His poll numbers put him tied for the lead so far, but they aren't moving.

Elsewhere in the field, Joe Biden is slowly fading here. Elizabeth Warren's cadre admires her, but it feels as if she has lost the moment. Klobuchar, who was endorsed by the largest paper in the state, the conservative Union-Leader, is liked by many - especially independents and Republicans - but is having a hard time finding a path in the same lane as Pete.

DUDE, YOU LITERALLY JUST VOTED IN FAVOR OF HIM USING GOVERNMENT POWER AGAINST HIS ENEMIES:

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, appearing in Maine for the first time since her vote not to impeach President Trump, said Friday that she disapproves of retribution against anyone who came forward with evidence during the process.

Trump is expected to fire Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council aide who testified against him during the House impeachment inquiry, the Washington Post reported Friday. He also has hinted, as have some supporters, that there should be payback against some of his critics.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

After Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical "Hamilton" opened in New York in 2015, getting your hands on tickets became a near-impossible feat. It went on to gross $500 million, won 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, and was staged for three US tours, a production in London's West End, and one in Chicago. Then there were the albums, remixed songs featuring the likes of Barack Obama, and the endless media coverage.

The modern retelling of founding father Alexander Hamilton's life is a full-blown cultural phenomenon, one that has rolled out like a well-planned military campaign. The target? The hearts and minds of America, and the world, as part of that thing every studio executive wants: hilariously lucrative branded IP.

And that's why Disney, perhaps the most skillful tactician of milking cultural touchstones for profit, would pay such an enormous sum for the worldwide rights of a filmed version of the stage production. [...]

And like "Star Wars," there's theme park opportunities. Disneyland could extend the "Hamilton" franchise to its own Hall of Presidents, the animatronic exhibit at Liberty Square at the Magic Kingdom inside the Walt Disney World Resort, in Orlando, Fla.

DONALD WHO?:

SHE IS DONALD (PROFANITY ALERT):

About a half-hour before Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's town hall here on Thursday, a guest at the Fireside Inn & Suites in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, ducked into the conference room to inquire about all the signs. When a volunteer filled him in, he sounded skeptical. "She's running for...president?"

Yes, and to hear some of the folks here tell it, she might even win.

THEY'RE YELLOW:

War Room: Pandemic launched on January 25 as a spin-off to War Room: Impeachment, Bannon's rapid response operation defending President Donald Trump during his Senate impeachment trial. Since the new show began, Bannon has repeatedly pushed the false narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from a covert biological weapons program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which includes a secure research facility where scientists study highly contagious and infectious diseases.

The unfounded narrative that the coronavirus was engineered and leaked from the lab has been wholly rejected by experts, with The Washington Post labeling it a "fringe theory," PolitiFact calling the claim made in the G News article "false," and Foreign Policy describing it as "an outbreak of nonsense." Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright told the Post that "based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus."

JUSTICE FOR BROTHER MALCOLM:

WINNING THE WoT:

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

House Democrats are clobbering their Republican challengers in the fundraising race, dramatically reducing the GOP's chances of winning back the majority.

The roughly four dozen most endangered House Democratic incumbents raised a collective $28.5 million in the last three months of 2019, a staggering total that is nearly twice the sum of all of their Republican challengers combined, according to a POLITICO review of the fundraising filings.

TROUBLE AT TASS:

Exclusive: A Fox News internal memo questions the credibility of several prominent Fox guests, accusing Fox contributor John Solomon of playing an "indispensable role" in a Ukrainian hoax and calling Giuliani "highly susceptible" to foreign disinformation. https://t.co/LlzSCuyCr5

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 6, 2020

THEY'RE BLACK:

While focused only on immigrant visas, the net impact of the newly issued restrictions is far-reaching, from splitting families to hobbling employment opportunities. But there is also the general sentiment that there will likely be increased scrutiny on non-immigrant visa applications by Nigerians--as anecdotal data already suggests.

And this presents a unique problem for Nigeria's fledgling tech ecosystem, industry insiders say.

"More than anything else, it's the kind of thing that sends the wrong signal to investors that are interested in Nigeria," says Seni Sulyman, vice president of global operations at Andela, the developer outsourcing firm which has raised around $180 million in funding mostly from US investors. Visa restrictions and the negative connotations they often imply "creates extra skepticism among people that might be interested but are not already involved," Sulyman says.

The visa restrictions come at a time when Nigeria's tech ecosystem has grown into being the continent's most dominant. Over the past decade, global tech companies including Google and Facebook have looked to deepen their roots in Africa's largest internet market. Nigeria is also increasingly bagging more startup funding--most of which has so far come from US-based venture funds--than any other African country. With the growing number of startup success stories over the past decade, renowned accelerator programs like Silicon Valley's Y Combinator have also become a lot more recipient of applications from Nigeria.

But increased scrutiny on non-immigrant visa applications could inadvertently impact progress on these fronts. "We were just starting to find our stride in terms of foreign venture capital funding and inclusion in all of these opportunities like accelerators and speaking engagements," says Odunayo Eweniyi, co-founder of PiggyBank and speaker at the World Bank fall meetings in Washington D.C. late last year. "I think it will certainly make it harder to take advantage of opportunities in the US. There's a lot of good being done here that needs outside attention and amplification, I'm worried about what this means for that," she tells Quartz.

Those fears are supported by recent data too. Last year, Nigeria recorded the largest global drop-off in visitors to the US.

CORRECTION, EVERYONE KNOWS WHY:

The US government has held up nearly $30 million in arms sales to Ukraine, in some cases for over a year, and the Ukrainian government wants its money back, according to a new report from BuzzFeed News. 

THE STATE PARTIES ARE HEALTHY BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY GOVERN:

"If they'd taken more testimony, maybe they'd have had more information and maybe other senators would have acted appropriately," Scott said.

When pressed about whether he would have voted to remove the president, Scott noted he isn't a member of the Senate.

"I believe that the president abused his powers. It's hard, in some respects for me, because I'm not a supporter," Scott said. "I didn't vote for the president, and I don't believe that he should be in office."

THE NEXT IMPEACHMENT:

Trump's holding a press conference to celebrate the Senate's abdication of its duty.
He starts by pointing out, yet again, that he fired James Comey to stop the investigations into him. pic.twitter.com/5vOPCySYcb

— The Moscow Project (@moscow_project) February 6, 2020

SADLY, RACISM IS NOT AN ILLNESS:

The scholars' outlook is not upbeat. "Mass violence has become one of the most alarming and defining crime issues of the twenty-first century," write the editors. "Mass shootings have plagued our country, and they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. There are, however, measures that we can take to limit the harm and damage." For instance:

Media needs to limit coverage. News stories encourage copycats.

Threat assessments work. When mental health, law, and legal experts work together to identify high-risk individuals in places such as schools, colleges, governments, and workplaces, it's successful. Put another way, usually someone (peer, family member, therapist, cop, gun shop owner, or similar) suspects ahead of time. This has not been widely adopted.

High-capacity firearms need to be limited. States that restrict large-capacity ammunition magazines have fewer mass deaths. The researchers suggest that magazine capacities should be no higher than 10 rounds, and older large-capacity weapons should be prohibited or heavily restricted.

Dangerous individuals need gun prohibitions. Close to half of recent mass shootings have been perpetrated by people who, legally, should have been prohibited from gun possession. Recent research and pilot programs show that the following protections are effective when enforced: universal background checks for gun buyers that include rigorous state and local screenings; restrictions for those under domestic violence restraining orders or convictions; and extreme-risk protection orders, which temporarily disarm high-risk people.

FUNNY WAY OF FAILING:

Shares of New York Times Co. vaulted toward a 15-year high Thursday, after the media company reported a fourth-quarter profit that was well above expectations, hiked its dividend by 20% and paid off all its debt.

The media company also boasted that it succeeded in doubling its digital revenue, a target set back in 2015, but did so a year earlier than its original goal.

The stock NYT, +12.87%  shot up 13% in active afternoon trading, which puts it on track for the best one-day performance since October 2009. Trading volume swelled to 4.6 million shares, compared with the full-day average over the past 30 days of about 1.3 million shares.

The stock, which is headed for the highest close since February 2005, has now run up 30% over the past 12 months, and has nearly tripled (up 190%) since the end of 2016. In comparison, the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.32% has gained 22% this year and rallied 49% since the end of 2016. 

SHOULD HAVE GONE PUBLIC:

POD PEOPLE:

Both Spotify and Simmons are insistent that nothing will change on the editorial side of the equation. Simmons tweeted that the site will remain the same "in every respect," while there are signs that Spotify intends to increase The Ringer's already sizable staff (the site, as of acquisition, has about 90 employees). Still, the deal highlights a fraught moment in online media, in which websites are increasingly moving further away from text.

Despite its significant editorial presence, The Ringer is, in many ways, an inversion of a traditional media company: It is a podcast company first and an editorial one second. The majority of its revenue comes from its 40 or so podcasts. Its website is visited by around three million visitors a month, but its podcast audience is more than ten times larger. And while the majority of its staff contributes to the website, the written work is really a sideline--a feeder system for The Ringer's diverse array of sports and pop culture podcasts.

Having a podcast empire is arguably the best way to fund an editorial company in 2020. Facebook and Google have destroyed the digital advertising market for publishers, forcing them to look for other sources of cash. Subscriptions and paywalls are always an option, of course, but reading ads from MeUndies and Caspar mattresses to millions of listeners is much easier and more lucrative, particularly for companies that aren't The New York Times. There's a reason why every major publication, legacy or digital-only, is investing heavily in podcasts, from the Times to Slate. (The New Republic launched its first podcast, The Politics of Everything, this week.)

Money isn't in text anymore. The pivot to video may have been a disastrous scam, costing thousands of media jobs. But the pivot to audio--led, it should be said, by The Ringer--has been a bonanza.

DONALD'S BASE:

After a string of sweeping indictments and arrests, court documents have illustrated how the neo-Nazi terror group The Base discussed derailing trains and plotted the assassinations of anti-fascist activists in the United States.

But the group also had international ambitions. The Base and its leader wanted to form concrete links between Ukrainian ultra-nationalist military units and the global neo-Nazi movement.

And one American connected to The Base had already traveled to the war-torn country in search of wartime experience, VICE has learned.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

In the mid-nineteenth century, racist ideas pervaded the scientific, philosophical, and religious worlds. Atheists and religious alike owned enslaved people, as did prominent scientists, politicians, and philosophers. While revolutions raged in Europe, the industrial revolution brought remarkable advances in technology and wealth, largely on the backs of the enslaved. Into this social context Charles Darwin introduced his theory of "evolution by means of natural selection" in 1859.  [...]

"Eugenics" (Greek for "well bred") was given its name in 1883 by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, the creator of the IQ test. Galton gained widespread support for eugenics by arguing, theologically, that eugenics was a proper application of the Gospel parable of the talents, while also arguing, culturally, that Darwin's idea of natural selection helped explain why white European men had conquered the world and were thus the most advanced examples of humanity. This intermingling of racism, science, philosophy, theology, and politics laid a terrible groundwork for mainstream scientific thought in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For Galton and most of the educated elite, the program of eugenics would allow humans to do intentionally what nature does randomly: favoring the most biologically capable, the "fittest," and gradually ridding the world of the unfit. Between 1883 and 1939--the year World War II began--eugenic philosophies, theologies, and laws spread like wildfire.

Before the rise of Nazi Germany, the most potent application of eugenics was in the United States, whose ruling class held tightly to racism, xenophobia, and cultural progressivism. Eugenics in the United States included campaigns to encourage the reproduction of the fittest human specimens, celebrations of the fittest babies, and efforts to determine, via Galton's IQ test and other measures, the "most fit humans." But it also included forced-sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws, forced birth control, forced abortions, concentration camps, and unethical scientific experiments on black and other nonwhite communities.

Beyond the United States, eugenics played into the hands of powerful people with sinister agendas. In Canada and Mexico, anti-indigenous biases determined the nature of most eugenic laws. In South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi, anti-black and anti-indigenous racism motivated both sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws, as well as death camps. In most of Europe, as well as Russia, China, Iran, Australia, and New Zealand, the eugenics movement channeled long-established hostility to Jews, Africans, indigenous peoples, women, and immigrants.

In all these countries, including the United States, people with disabilities and the poor were among the first to be sterilized, silenced, or killed. Thousands of scientific experiments were performed on people against their wills, and countless laws inspired by eugenics were passed in the name of scientific progress. The genocidal actions of Nazi Germany and all German-controlled countries were uniquely horrific in their implementation of eugenic ideas, but Hitler's program was largely inspired by the language and laws of the American eugenics movement.

While eugenics spread so quickly because of its standing as an accepted application of a scientific theory, it's important to remember that Christians played a large role in the dissemination of eugenics. Galton and many others used explicitly theological language to argue for eugenics from the beginning. As Christine Rosen writes in Preaching Eugenics, "one of the largest standing committees of the American Eugenics Society [in the first three decades of the twentieth century] was the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen." In fact, clergy of many religious traditions joined in the cause, writing, preaching, and lecturing widely in support of eugenics.

Anti-modernist Catholics were one notable exception to this. Together with fundamentalist Protestants, most Catholics opposed both evolution and eugenics.

DONALD IS NOT OF THE ANGLOSPHERE:

In the wake of that election, Johnson and senior members of his administration have staged a series of public attacks on the president and threatened to cut back on the country's longstanding alliance with the United States.

The interventions appear to be part of a co-ordinated attempt to put distance between the prime minister and Trump.

IT'S NOT JURY NULLIFICATION WHEN WHITE GUYS DO IT:

NO ONE HATES THE HEALTH SYSTEM MORE THAN THOSE WHO LABOR IN IT:

THERE ARE NO DARWINISTS:

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE:

But recent polls paint a bleak picture for Trump with black voters.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll of 1,088 African Americans showed that more than 8 in 10 say they believe Trump is a racist and has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 blacks disapprove of his job performance, overall.

A Pew Research Center analysis of people who participated in its polls and were confirmed to have voted showed Trump won just 6% of black voters in 2016.

Trump's public denouncement of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other professional athletes who knelt during the national anthem in protest of police violence against African Americans did little to endear him to black voters. Neither did Trump's professions that there was "blame on both sides" following a 2017 clash between white nationalist demonstrators and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The stakes are especially high in Detroit. The city is 80% African American and in a traditionally blue state, Michigan, that Trump won in 2016 by 10,704 votes. Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes and Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes, two other states that typically vote Democrat in national elections and where black turnout will be key.

Ninety-six percent of the city's registered voters cast ballots for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, but turnout was down in Detroit. It fell to 48% from 53% eight years earlier when Barack Obama won the presidency.

"People vote when they're passionate," said City Clerk Janice Winfrey. "People were passionate for Obama. And -- maybe not for the same reason -- they're passionate about Trump. And people are pretty mad." [...]

They are also frustrated by the racial climate under Trump, the toll of climate change on their neighborhoods and even Trump's past words and deeds before he became president.

Brown cites Trump's stance on the so-called Central Park Five in the 1980s, when five black and Latino teenagers were charged in the rape of a white jogger in New York's Central Park. That attack became a symbol of the city's soaring crime. Then-real estate developer Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty.

The teens said their confessions were coerced, and their convictions were overturned in 2002 after a convicted murderer and serial rapist confessed to the crime.

"He wanted 15-year-old boys murdered even though they were innocent," she said. "I don't think he's changed much."

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

So the prospect of a doubling of world GDP matters, not for its own sake, but for what it implies -- an expansion of human flourishing, and the risk of environmental disaster. So here's the good news: we might be able to enjoy all the good stuff while avoiding the unsustainable environmental impact. The link between economic activity and the use of material resources is not as obvious as one might think. There are several reasons for this.

The first is that for all our seemingly insatiable desires, sometimes enough is enough. If you live in a cold house for lack of money, a pay rise lets you take off the extra cardigan and turn up the radiators. But if you win the lottery, you are not going to celebrate by roasting yourself alive.

The second is that, while free enterprise may care little for the planet, it is always on the lookout for ways to save money. As long as energy, land and materials remain costly, we'll develop ways to use less. Aluminium beer cans weighed 85 grammes when introduced in the late 1950s. They now weigh less than 13 grammes.

The third reason is a switch to digital products -- a fact highlighted back in 1997 by Diane Coyle in her book The Weightless World [pdf]. The trend has only continued since then. My music collection used to require a wall full of shelves. It is now on a network drive the size of a large hardback book. My phone contains the equivalent of a rucksack full of equipment.

Dematerialisation is not automatic, of course. As Vaclav Smil calculates in his new book, Growth, US houses are more than twice as large today as in 1950. The US's bestselling vehicle in 2018, the Ford F-150, weighs almost four times as much as 1908's bestseller, the Model T. Let's not even talk about the number of cars; Mr Smil reckons the global mass of automobiles sold has increased 2,500-fold over the past century.

Still, there is reason for hope. Chris Goodall's research paper "Peak Stuff" concluded that, in the UK, "both the weight of goods entering the economy and the amounts finally ending up as waste probably began to fall from sometime between 2001 and 2003". That figure includes the impact of imported goods.

In the US, Jesse Ausubel's article "The Return of Nature" found falling consumption of commodities such as iron ore, aluminium, copper, steel, and paper and many others. Agricultural land has become so productive that some of it is being allowed to return to nature.

In the EU, carbon dioxide emissions fell 22 per cent between 1990 and 2017, despite the economy growing by 58 per cent. Only some of this fall is explained by the offshoring of production.