...AND CHEAPER...:

Scientists have 3D printed the thin protective film over the eye, called the cornea, using human cells -- and it's the most advanced version of an artificial cornea yet. Should the technology improve, it could help millions of people see again.

It was tricky to find the right recipe for an ink that's thin enough to squirt through a 3D printer's nozzle, says Che Connon, a tissue engineer at Newcastle University who was one of the creators of the artificial cornea. This bio-ink didn't just have to be thin -- it also had to be stiff enough that it could hold its shape as a 3D structure. To get the right consistency, the researchers added a jelly-like goo called alginate and stem cells extracted from donor corneas, along with some ropy proteins called collagen.

WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

TESTING THE TRUMPBOTS:

The blowback began Tuesday night when Gowdy, pressed during a Fox News interview, insisted that the FBI acted appropriately when it deployed an informant to collect information during the 2016 presidential election from Trump campaign aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Both men had been suspected of having questionable Russian contacts and the FBI's attempt to follow the lead was appropriate and necessary, Gowdy said.

OBSTRUCTION:

...AND CHEAPER...:

Someday, the military will 3D-print missiles as needed, the U.S. Air Force's acquisition chief says. In the shorter term, he just wants to use additive manufacturing technology to get broken planes back in the air. The roadblock is legal, not technical.

"I have airplanes right now that are waiting on parts that are taking a year and a half to deliver. A year and a half," Will Roper, the assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in an interview.

Today's 3D-printers could make short work of those deliveries, but some of those parts' original manufacturers control the intellectual property -- and there not clear policy for dealing with that.

The reason "I can't say we're going to do it is we're talking about government contracts and IP, so I have lawyers that are helping me and other contracts folks," Roper said. "But it's an area I'm going to stay focused because I see a way for win-win. And that doesn't happen often in the government."

PROTESTANTISM:

IT WAS THE IDEA OF SELF-DETERMINATION THAT PREVAILED IN THE COLD WAR:

Long before the collapse of their empire, Soviet leaders endorsed this conception of state sovereignty by signing the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which committed signatories to respect one another's "sovereign equality," the "inviolability of frontiers," the "territorial integrity of states," "non-intervention in internal affairs," and the "peaceful settlement of disputes." Collectively, these resolutions constituted the act's "first basket" of agreements. The second basket incorporated trade and scientific cooperation, while the third committed states to uphold human rights, freedom of emigration, and freedom of the press. At the time, the Soviets were eager for such an agreement because it essentially legitimized their post-war domination of Central and Eastern Europe, where they had installed Communist puppet regimes (which, along with the United States and its Western allies, were also party to the Helsinki accords). While the Eastern Bloc governments had no intention of actually upholding the act's "third basket," their formal recognition of it came back to haunt them in the form of dissidents who cited these written commitments in making their case for great political freedom. So, too, were the Soviets and their allies taken by surprise when national independence movements referenced the act's sovereignty provisions to expose the fundamental illegitimacy of the Warsaw Pact, all along a façade for Russian colonialism. That the Soviets (and, later, Russians) never intended to take the human-rights and sovereignty provisions of the Final Act seriously is a repudiation not of the Final Act itself but of the leaders who disingenuously signed it.

Soviet leaders again endorsed the principle of national sovereignty when, in 1989, they supplanted the Brezhnev Doctrine, which permitted Warsaw Pact countries to intervene militarily against "forces hostile to socialism" in other member nations, with the "Sinatra Doctrine," whereby Eastern Bloc states could do it their way. Though it was not Gorbachev's intention, this momentous decision ultimately led to the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The first post-Cold War conflict to erupt between Russia and the West was in the Balkans, where the United States and its allies intervened militarily to avert ethnic cleansing carried out by Moscow's traditional ally, the Serbs. Confronting internal economic and political instability, and prosecuting a scorched-earth war in Chechnya, Russia was in no position to challenge NATO in the former Yugoslavia. This inability to contest Western intervention in what Moscow considered its imperial backyard bred feelings of resentment among a rising generation of Russian nationalists, who would later choose to fixate on the Western military alliance as the greatest threat to Russian security.

The subject of NATO's post-Cold War enlargement, and more specifically the false claim that Western leaders promised their Soviet counterparts that NATO would refrain from incorporating new members, has won credibility of late. Particularly after the Ukraine crisis, Russia's Western sycophants, seeking to justify Putin's aggression, trotted out the claim that NATO's "encircling" of Russia had somehow forced Putin into invading his neighbors. It is remarkable how pervasive this narrative has become. Touring the United States over the past year to promote my book about Europe, I have never addressed an audience in which someone did not mention, if not endorse, this argument.

Assertions of Western "triumphalism" with regard to NATO enlargement gained strength in December when an outfit called the National Security Archive at George Washington University selectively published a series of recently declassified U.S.-government documents purporting to show, once and for all, that Western leaders had indeed offered their Soviet interlocutors a "cascade of assurances" that NATO would not expand. Despite its official-sounding name, the National Security Archive is a left-wing organization committed to exposing the Cold War sins, real or alleged, of America through the highly selective publishing of tendentiously presented documents, and nothing in the latest dump tells us anything new. As is already known, James Baker, then the secretary of state, promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward." The archive attempts to embellish this statement by releasing some extraneous once-classified documents. But Baker made that pledge solely in the context of East Germany, a country that, like the Soviet Union, would soon cease to exist. At the time, it was inconceivable that places such as Poland or Czechoslovakia (another state not long for this world), never mind the soon-to-be independent Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, might one day join NATO.

Russia and its Western apologists can offer no evidence of a promise not to enlarge NATO, because such a promise was never made. Gorbachev should have the final word on this matter: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years," he said in October 2014. "I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991." Only years later would the prospect of former Warsaw Pact states' joining NATO become a subject of more than academic discussion, when the alliance offered membership to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. In 1997, all three joined.

But relitigating what assurances the West did or did not make to the collapsing Soviet Union about NATO's future status is a distraction from the more fundamental question: What right does Russia have to decide whether its former satrapies can join a defensive military alliance of their own free will? In the words of the former State Department official Kirk Bennet, "NATO enlargement was driven by demand, not supply." The newly independent countries of Central and Eastern Europe all desperately wanted to join NATO, and given their histories with Russia, it's not hard to understand why. The practice of invading European neighbors because they stray from the true socialist path -- employed by the Russians in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968, respectively -- is a model of interstate behavior that was supposed to have been forever discredited with the collapse of the Soviet Union. (As events in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine six years later demonstrate, however, it has unfortunately been revived.)

The principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity initially laid out in the Helsinki Final Act were later enshrined in the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, agreed to by the Soviet Union and, following its dissolution, its legal successor state, the Russian Federation. In 1994, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum with Ukraine, Great Britain, and the United States, which saw Kiev surrender its ample nuclear-weapons stockpile to Moscow in exchange for guarantees of its territorial integrity. As with practically every understanding it signed in the post-Cold War period, Russia later violated this pledge. [...]

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

The most reliable way for the intelligence community to gauge the effectiveness of its various transparency programs would likely be periodic public polling, but any attempt by today's intelligence agencies to measure public opinion in the U.S. would stir uncomfortable memories of Cold War-era projects. In this context, the Texas National Security Network fielded a nationally representative survey of 1,000 Americans with the survey market-research firm YouGov. The first round of the poll is intended to establish a stable baseline that measures Americans' overall perception of the American intelligence community, its effectiveness, regard for civil liberties, and democratic oversight.

Our goals in gathering and analyzing this information this year and in the future are: 1) to inform scholarly and popular debate on the proper role of intelligence in our democracy; and 2) to help intelligence community officials design public-facing programs that respond most directly to the actual knowledge, beliefs, and concerns of the American people. We view this project as a useful complement, and not a challenge, to Lawfare's monthly polling on public confidence in U.S. national-security institutions, including the intelligence community.

Here are several key takeaways from the initial report:

56 percent of respondents indicated that the U.S. intelligence community "plays a vital role in warning against foreign threats and contributes to national security" while only 7 percent of those questioned thought our intelligence agencies were "no longer necessary". Large differences were noted in this pool based on respondents' general knowledge of foreign affairs;

75 percent of respondents regarded the intelligence community as effective in "preventing terrorist attacks against the U.S.", but only 43 percent judged the intelligence community equally effective at "protecting the privacy an civil liberties of Americans". More Democrats than Republicans credited the intelligence community with protecting their rights (see figure above);

More than 90 percent of Americans agreed with the longstanding charge by U.S. presidents that the intelligence community employ "[a]ll reasonable and lawful means" to ensure the government receives the best possible intelligence, but only 38 percent believe that in gathering this information the U.S. intelligence community should "respect the privacy rights of foreigners to the same extent as Americans". Democrats were more likely than Republicans or Independents to extend privacy protections to foreigners;

63 percent of Democrats believe the intelligence community can share more information with the public without compromising its effectiveness, while only 42 percent of Republicans hold that view;

From a shortlist, 24 percent of respondents selected the NSC as the institution primarily responsible for monitoring U.S. intelligence, while only 11 percent thought the president played this role. Only 20 percent of those polled associated the Congress with intelligence oversight, while 21 percent (incorrectly) believe federal courts and judges play a central role in regulating U.S. intelligence.

We see this as a preliminary point of departure for our assessment of the public's view of the U.S. intelligence community. 

Two overlapping developments in particular have greatly influenced the growth of open-source intelligence.

First, the explosion of social media has given us instant access to a wealth of user-generated content. From Facebook to Twitter to Google+, we are now only ever a few keystrokes away from a potentially global audience. And as these tools increase global connectivity, people seem increasingly willing to project their thoughts, opinions and observations into cyberspace. The process of information generation has produced what has been described as "new digital commons of enormous size and wealth".

Second, and on a larger scale, the scope of open-source intelligence has been completely changed by the rise of big data. The meaning of this term is contested but it is commonly used to describe "data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems". According to some estimates, some 1,200 exabytes of data now exists in the world and 90% of it was created in the last two years alone.

Social media is a good example of big data in practice. Users are generating 500m tweets and 90m blog posts on Tumblr per day. Every minute, 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. The social media universe is expanding at an astronomical rate.

Little surprise, then, that this networked society has spawned new analytical approaches and opportunities. From everyday policing to counter-terrorism to civil war, information gleaned from open sources can provide insights into world events like never before. Finding what you want in this sea of information can be like looking for a needle in a haystack - but it can be done.

Eliot Higgins pieced together his analysis of weapons use in Syria by trawling through hours of video footage uploaded to YouTube, refining and cross-referencing what he found with information drawn from other websites and platforms.

But the Brown Moses approach represents just one end of a spectrum. At the other end, at the cutting edge of informatics and computing, researchers are developing complex algorithms aimed at automating the process. This will enable them to make big data work as a source of intelligence too. In between are those who combine the manual searches with freely available and often very useful analytical tools.

A recent report by Demos hinted at the potential for social media analysis to support police investigations, for example. Tweets and status updates can provide eyewitness testimony and pictorial evidence of incidents or be used by police to "measure groundswells of emotion". Left unchecked, bubbling tensions could develop into episodes of collective violence. Monitoring them online could enable a faster response, or even preventative measures.

This is not open-source intelligence as it has traditionally been understood. The move towards automated analysis hints at something more akin to signals intelligence. It is perhaps for this reason that researchers active in the area of social media analysis have coined their own term: social media intelligence or SOCMINT. Fundamentally, however, this is open-source intelligence in the sense that publicly accessible information is being exploited for intelligence purposes.

Technology has breathed new life into open-source intelligence. Whether it is derived from the work of internet investigators like Brown Moses or complex algorithms, it is more valuable than ever before.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

KOLD BATH, KRIS:

The state Attorney General's Office has no evidence that out-of-state voters were ever bused into New Hampshire to illegally sway the outcome of an election, a top official said on Tuesday, dismissing an oft-repeated claim that's spread from the Granite State to the White House.

OOPS, TRUMPBOT PROGRAMMING ERROR:

After attending classified Justice Department briefings last week about the FBI informant, "I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump," House Oversight Committee Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) told Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Tuesday night.

"President Trump himself in the Comey memos said if anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it, and it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did," Gowdy said. "I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard. ... We run toward the criminality, but I would think everyone would want to know what Russia did."

Former Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Trump favorite, followed Gowdy, and he was similarly unimpressed with the claims being made by Trump and Giuliani. The FBI spying allegations "seem to be baseless -- there is no evidence for that whatsoever," he told MacCallum. "But this other allegation with this professor -- whose name we're not supposed to mention -- that is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and criminal investigations."

JUST ANOTHER COMMODITY:

 As I described in a recent PwC Health Research Institute report, they include:

Vertical integrators such as Cigna and Express Scripts, which hope to build efficiencies of scale and condense the value chain

Employer activists such as Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, who seek a better health care offering for their employees

Technology invaders such as Google or Uber aiming to gain better footholds in the industry

Health retailers such as Amazon looking to gain market share by better understanding consumer desires and behavior and provide some types of health care directly

AMERICAN ANTI-INTELLECTUAL:

Then, in 1970, he wrote his breakout piece, the work that made him a writer to be reckoned with. "Radical Chic" was an account of the most famous case of reverse slumming of its time: the party that Leonard and Felicia Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers. The phrase "radical chic" was a perfect description of the behavior of an upper class with nothing at risk cultivating fashionable progressive opinions to reinforce its own self-esteem and at the same time seeming to demonstrate its large-hearted sensitivity to the condition of the underclass. The point about the phenomenon was that it was risk-free. As Wolfe later noted: "A Radical Chic protester got himself arrested in the late morning or early afternoon, in mild weather. He was booked and released in time to make it to the Electric Circus, that year's New York nightspot of the century, and tell war stories."

The roster of guests gathered at the Bernsteins' Park Avenue penthouse duplex for an evening of fundraising for the Black Panthers was a splendid combination of the well-known and the well-to-do. Included were Jason Robards and Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson and Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman and Larry Rivers, Aaron Copland and Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, Adolph and Phyllis Green and Betty Comden. A party for the Panthers had its complications: Black servants had to be replaced by Hispanic ones, for a start. Then there was the question of the Black Panthers' taste in hors d'oeuvres and so much more with which the thoughtful hosts had to contend. The Bernsteins' mistake, of course, was letting Tom Wolfe in the door.

What he set indelibly on display in "Radical Chic" was that people who can afford them can wear their opinions as if they were designer clothes. Some opinions, like some clothes, were more comme il faut than others. Expressing support for the Black Panthers, a group that should its members' dreams come true would have everyone in the Bernstein apartment that evening on a tumbril on the way to the guillotine, was the political equivalent of Dior, Hermès, or Givenchy.

Just behind the Panthers in progressive social prestige in those days came Cesar Chavez and his National Farm Workers Association. In the same essay, Wolfe gave a brief account of a fundraiser arranged for them by Andrew Stein in Southampton. "From the beginning," Wolfe writes of Stein's fête, "the afternoon was full of the delicious status contradictions that provide much of the electricity for Radical Chic."

The men in their Dunhill blazers and Turnbull & Asser neckerchiefs, the women in their Pucci dresses, Gucci shoes, and Capucci scarves listened to heartrending accounts of grape pickers and their children rising at 3 a.m. for 12-hour days in the blistering hot fields with nothing to eat but a baloney sandwich. How sad, how gripping, how unjust it all was, until, Wolfe interjected, "the wind had come up off the ocean and it was wrecking everybody's hair." Perfecto!

Perfecto, that is, if one wishes to show how feeble, thin, and ultimately fraudulent was the sympathy of the rich and famous for the poor and downtrodden. "Radical Chic" put a serious dent in the radical movement that was then sweeping America and that today chiefly finds a home in the much shabbier surroundings of university humanities and social-science departments. Many thought the essay the work of a right-winger, but they were wrong. The essay was the work of a man who enjoyed the comedy of rich contradictions played out by people prepared to desert their common sense in the hope of boosting their status. And Wolfe didn't in the least flinch when naming names: Jean vanden Heuvel, Jules Feiffer, Carter and Amanda Burden, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and other glittering names all hosted events like that of the Bernsteins. "Who do you call to give a party?," Wolfe quoted the then-high-profile New York art dealer Richard Feigen asking.

Wolfe never minded making enemies. Early in his career he took on William Shawn and the New Yorker in an essay called "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!," guaranteeing that he would never appear in that magazine's pages. Later, he wrote of Robert Silvers, the Anglomaniacal editor of the New York Review of Books, that "his accent arrived mysteriously one day in a box from London. Intrigued, he slapped it into his mouth like a set of teeth." In those two strokes, he made himself permanently non grata with two of the most powerful editors in the land. He was no more tender about the leading intellectual figures of the day. He described Susan Sontag as "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review."

Along with conferring greater fame on him than he had hitherto known, "Radical Chic" gave Wolfe a strong taste for provocation. Literary and intellectual provocateur was a role he felt comfortable playing. He seemed greatly to enjoy a ruckus of his own devising. After "Radical Chic" came his book The Painted Word, a dazzling takedown of the pretensions of the contemporary art world and its star critics, which was excerpted in 1975 in Harper's. (Six years later, in From Bauhaus to Our House, he would perpetrate a similar massacre of modern architecture.)

Wolfe was a brilliant titlist, and "The Painted Word" conveys the chief idea in the work--namely, that no contemporary painting could have any serious standing without a critical theory certifying and explaining it. Twenty-five years from the time of his essay, he prophesied, there would appear on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art "huge copy blocks, eight and a half by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages. . .. Beside them will be small reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of the Word from that period such as Johns, Louis, Noland, Stella, and Olitski." The essay is a reminder that in Joseph Roth's novel Left and Right, the criterion a wealthy character sets for buying art is "that a picture should repel his sense and intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work."

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER:

[W]e're trying to discover just how much influence sexist discrimination has on women's earnings relative to men's, we've controlled for full-time status, and now we're saying that--ceteris paribus--sexism alone accounts for a gap of 21 to 23 percent between men and women?

Shouldn't we try to compare women and men who studied the same things in college and selected careers in the same fields?

Come on.

Granted, controlling for full-time status is important, but surely we can do better than one measly factor. I mean, there are a ton of other things that play into comparing the earnings of men and women, right?

For example, shouldn't we try to compare women and men who studied the same things in college and selected careers in the same fields? Seems relatively important--and when we do that, the American Association of University Women finds that women actually make 93 percent of their male coworkers.

What about comparing work experience? Lengthy career interruptions? And, heck, what about overtime? Controlling for those things, a report prepared for the US Department of Labor found that women actually make 95 percent as much as their male coworkers.

I'd say a rise in women's pay from 77 percent to 95 percent is quite an improvement, wouldn't you agree?

But wait, there's more!

Starting a family makes up a large (and growing) proportion of the total wage gap, and women tend to accept "family-friendly fringe benefits" (flexible hours, child-care, and parental leave, for example) in lieu of higher wages. When we account for these kinds of non-wage compensation, the gap in total compensation falls to 3.6 percent.

Neat, right?

LEATHERMAN:

The most interesting player in the MLB draft this June is a switch-hitting catcher.

And a right-handed pitcher. And a left-handed pitcher. A starter. And a closer. An infielder. And, oh yes, an outfielder.

He's Anthony Seigler, an 18-year-old high school senior from Cartersville, Georgia, and trust me, you've never seen anyone quite like him. He's Shohei Ohtani, if Ohtani turned around and started throwing left-handed too. He's the switch-pitcher Pat Venditte, if Venditte started a game behind the plate and ended it on the mound.

He's the guy who could play all nine positions in one game, except he could do it one day throwing right-handed and the next day throwing left-handed.

WE ARE ALL POST-MODERN:

In 1906, the year after Einstein's annus mirabilis, Kurt Gödel was born in the city of Brno (now in the Czech Republic). As Rebecca Goldstein recounts in her enthralling intellectual biography "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel" (Atlas/Norton; $22.95), Kurt was both an inquisitive child--his parents and brother gave him the nickname der Herr Warum, "Mr. Why?"--and a nervous one. At the age of five, he seems to have suffered a mild anxiety neurosis. At eight, he had a terrifying bout of rheumatic fever, which left him with the lifelong conviction that his heart had been fatally damaged.

Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato's theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians. In the philosophical world of nineteen-twenties Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city's rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, their reluctant guru, the members of the Vienna Circle regarded mathematics as a game played with symbols, a more intricate version of chess. What made a proposition like "2 + 2 = 4" true, they held, was not that it correctly described some abstract world of numbers but that it could be derived in a logical system according to certain rules.

Gödel was introduced into the Vienna Circle by one of his professors, but he kept quiet about his Platonist views. Being both rigorous and averse to controversy, he did not like to argue his convictions unless he had an airtight way of demonstrating that they were valid. But how could one demonstrate that mathematics could not be reduced to the artifices of logic? Gödel's strategy--one of "heart-stopping beauty," as Goldstein justly observes--was to use logic against itself. Beginning with a logical system for mathematics, one presumed to be free of contradictions, he invented an ingenious scheme that allowed the formulas in it to engage in a sort of double speak. A formula that said something about numbers could also, in this scheme, be interpreted as saying something about other formulas and how they were logically related to one another. In fact, as Gödel showed, a numerical formula could even be made to say something about itself. (Goldstein compares this to a play in which the characters are also actors in a play within the play; if the playwright is sufficiently clever, the lines the actors speak in the play within the play can be interpreted as having a "real life" meaning in the play proper.) Having painstakingly built this apparatus of mathematical self-reference, Gödel came up with an astonishing twist: he produced a formula that, while ostensibly saying something about numbers, also says, "I am not provable." At first, this looks like a paradox, recalling as it does the proverbial Cretan who announces, "All Cretans are liars." But Gödel's self-referential formula comments on its provability, not on its truthfulness. Could it be lying? No, because if it were, that would mean it could be proved, which would make it true. So, in asserting that it cannot be proved, it has to be telling the truth. But the truth of this proposition can be seen only from outside the logical system. Inside the system, it is neither provable nor disprovable. The system, then, is incomplete. The conclusion--that no logical system can capture all the truths of mathematics--is known as the first incompleteness theorem. Gödel also proved that no logical system for mathematics could, by its own devices, be shown to be free from inconsistency, a result known as the second incompleteness theorem.

Wittgenstein once averred that "there can never be surprises in logic." But Gödel's incompleteness theorems did come as a surprise. In fact, when the fledgling logician presented them at a conference in the German city of Königsberg in 1930, almost no one was able to make any sense of them. What could it mean to say that a mathematical proposition was true if there was no possibility of proving it? The very idea seemed absurd. Even the once great logician Bertrand Russell was baffled; he seems to have been under the misapprehension that Gödel had detected an inconsistency in mathematics. "Are we to think that 2 + 2 is not 4, but 4.001?" Russell asked decades later in dismay, adding that he was "glad [he] was no longer working at mathematical logic." As the significance of Gödel's theorems began to sink in, words like "debacle," "catastrophe," and "nightmare" were bandied about. It had been an article of faith that, armed with logic, mathematicians could in principle resolve any conundrum at all--that in mathematics, as it had been famously declared, there was no ignorabimus. Gödel's theorems seemed to have shattered this ideal of complete knowledge.

That was not the way Gödel saw it. He believed he had shown that mathematics has a robust reality that transcends any system of logic. But logic, he was convinced, is not the only route to knowledge of this reality; we also have something like an extrasensory perception of it, which he called "mathematical intuition." It is this faculty of intuition that allows us to see, for example, that the formula saying "I am not provable" must be true, even though it defies proof within the system where it lives. 

WORSE THAN USELESS:

There were, however, a few apparently advantageous supplements. Folic acid and B vitamins with folic acid were found to possibly reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. Niacin (a form of vitamin B3) and antioxidants, meanwhile, were actually associated with a higher risk of death for any cause, albeit a very small increase.

SATING WIMPY:

 A new U.S. intelligence assessment has concluded that North Korea does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons any time soon, three U.S. officials told NBC News -- a finding that conflicts with recent statements by President Donald Trump that Pyongyang intends to do so in the future. [...]

"Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearize," said one intelligence official who read the report, which was circulated earlier this month, days before Trump canceled the originally scheduled summit.

In an odd twist, a list of potential concessions by North Korea in the CIA analysis included the possibility that Kim Jong Un may consider offering to open a Western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang as a show of goodwill, according to three national security officials.

It suggests Kim is interested in a peaceful gesture to an American president whose love of fast-food burgers is well known -- and who, during the 2016 campaign, had said he wanted to talk nukes over a burger with the North Korean leader.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

In summary, the German radical Left has accepted the Russian master narrative about Ukraine, including the most blatant propaganda lies. At the beginning, many people (including this author) supposed that this was just an aberration, albeit deplorable, and one subject to correction by factual critique. But four years on from the beginning of the Maidan, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this impression was wrong.

No German leftwing newspaper ever apologized for spreading so many lies about Ukraine, although the great bulk of them could have been avoided by simple fact-checking (even without any knowledge of Ukrainian or Russian).

Dietmar Bartsch, the co-chair of the Die Linke faction in German parliament, has never withdrawn his statement that there is an institution to train political activists in Ukraine which is named after Joseph Goebbels. Moreover, he was never admonished, at least not openly, by his colleagues from the party. The allegation that the Maidan was financed by five billion dollars from the US, made by another Die Linke co-chair, Sahra Wagenknecht, during parliamentary debates, is still to be found on her official website, without any comment.13The statement is simply a lie produced by the Russian propaganda machine, still circulating in the leftwing milieu despite being comprehensively refuted.14

To the best of my knowledge, nobody from Die Linke has ever apologized for calling the Ukrainian trident a 'Nazi symbol'.

As of the beginning of 2018, basically nothing has changed since 2014. The item on the agenda of Die Linke which demands the dissolution of NATO and the creation of a collective security system with the participation of Russia remains unchanged despite Russia's redrawing of borders by means of war.15

The pro-Russian stance goes so far that another prominent member of the party, the ex-chairman of its parliamentary faction, Gregor Gysi, can state that it would be better for the rest of the world if Trump and Putin were to come to an agreement about the division of their respective spheres of influence16

whereas another high-ranking representative of Die Linke, Alexander Neu, has denied Russia's bombing of Aleppo - at a point when Russia had been bombing Syria, more or less openly, for eleven months.17Each time Assad's regime is accused of using chemical weapons, representatives of Die Linke never tire of casting suspicion on the facts. They demonstrate 'against the bombing of Syria' only when the United States threatens to intervene. At the same time, their silence about the bombing carried out by Russia and the regime itself is deafening.

Notwithstanding some remarkable exceptions, the narrative about Ukraine as generally accepted by the German Left can be summarized as follows: Maidan is a putsch financed by the western forces; Ukraine is currently ruled by radical nationalists and fascists; Russia was provoked by western intrusion and was forced to protect itself; even if Russia does support the breakaway 'people's republics', the conflict in the Donbas is an instance of civil war instigated by NATO; Russia never invaded Ukraine; and so on, and so forth. As contradictory as this narrative is, it's vivacity and even a kind of a peculiar coherence becomes clear in the light of some intrinsic features of the leftwing worldview and its correlation with the relevant agenda of the far right.

THE NUNES SCHOOL OF RECUSAL:

By the time Attorney General Jeff Sessions arrived at President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort for dinner one Saturday evening in March 2017, he had been receiving the presidential silent treatment for two days. Mr. Sessions had flown to Florida because Mr. Trump was refusing to take his calls about a pressing decision on his travel ban.

When they met, Mr. Trump was ready to talk -- but not about the travel ban. His grievance was with Mr. Sessions: The president objected to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request.

Mr. Sessions refused. [...]

Investigators have pressed current and former White House officials about Mr. Trump's treatment of Mr. Sessions and whether they believe the president was trying to impede the Russia investigation by pressuring him. The attorney general was also interviewed at length by Mr. Mueller's investigators in January. And of the four dozen or so questions Mr. Mueller wants to ask Mr. Trump, eight relate to Mr. Sessions. Among them: What efforts did you make to try to get him to reverse his recusal? [...]

DONALD WHO?:

Iranian officials are plotting with U.S. allies across the globe to develop a series a measures meant to counter new sanctions by the Trump administration following its abandonment of the landmark nuclear deal, setting up a global economic showdown between America and its allies over their future business dealings with the Islamic Republic.

Iranian leaders disclosed on Tuesday that they had recently held high-level meetings with European Union nations and leaders in India and Thailand to explore options for skirting new U.S. sanctions.

VICTORY LAP:

After Roseanne Barr insulted Valerie Jarret and George Soros in language condemned as racist, prompting ABC to cancel Barr's hit sitcom, Jarrett said the matter should be a "teachable moment."

"First of all, I think we have to turn it into a teaching moment. I'm fine. I'm worried about all the people out there who don't have a circle of friends and followers coming to their defense," the former Obama adviser said during an MSNBC town hall on racism.

WHAT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND...:

"I don't understand it to be anything other than free speech," said Outnumbered Overtime host Harris Faulkner.

RINSE, LATHER, REPEAT:

The biggest issue that Democrats hope to capitalize on is healthcare. Repeal of Obamacare has been a Republican goal since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, but after last year's failure to pass a reform bill, the GOP has gone silent on the issue. Meanwhile health insurance premiums are increasing both for Obamacare policies and the market as a whole.

Democratic primary winners believe that the solution to the health insurance crisis is to expand Medicare to cover all Americans, a back-door plan to institute a single-payer health care system. Axios reports that Democratic candidates who support varying versions of Medicare-for-all are often winning primaries against candidates backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Although it is tempting for conservatives to assume that single-payer health care would be a nonstarter for most Americans, the idea polls pretty well. A March 2018 poll from the nonpartisan Kaiser Foundation found 59 percent of Americans like the idea of Medicare-for-all. When the national health plan was made a voluntary option, the share of those in favor increased to 75 percent, including 64 percent of Republicans.

Perhaps ominously for Republicans running against the idea, 74 percent of independents favored the idea of an optional national health insurance plan. The big question is how voters in swing House and Senate districts will view the idea.

"People are increasingly happy with the Affordable Care Act, but they are increasingly unhappy with the health-care system writ large," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). "I think there is a greater willingness to accept a bigger role for public programs in repairing the health-care system." [,...]

A second plan of attack for Democrats is to blame high gas prices on the Trump Administration. [...]

In early May, Patrick DeHaan of Gas Buddy told the New York Post that prices were already affected, even before Trump announced the decision to withdraw from the Obama Iran deal. "The market has already baked in that Trump is going to opt out of the Iran deal. Oil is several dollars per barrel higher because of it, DeHaan said.

"It's well known that geopolitical instability drives oil prices, and gas prices, around the world higher and higher," said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). "The Trump administration's chaotic approach to foreign policy not only served instability around the world, it certainly serves to drive up oil prices higher and higher."

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The law was initially blocked by a federal district court judge in Arkansas, but a three-judge panel at the court of appeals in St. Louis vacated the decision.

If the ban permanently goes into effect, two of the state's three facilities that perform abortions would very likely close and surgical abortion would be the only option for women in the state.

"This is very good news for people who care about the safety of women in Arkansas," said Family Council Executive Director Jerry Cox in a statement, adding, "This is a pro-life victory not only for the women of Arkansas, but for women across the nation. I'm sure other states will be looking at Arkansas and considering following our example."

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Roseanne Barr's Twitter feed has long been a cesspool of right-wing conspiracy theories and dogwhistle racism, but early this morning she swapped out the dog whistle for a foghorn. In response to a tweet about former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is black, Barr tweeted "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj."

rEPUBLICAN:

At a time when journalists are being attacked constantly for doing our jobs, I appreciated this closing remark from @MittRomney - at a public campaign event where I was the only reporter present - a great deal. More tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/HPGshT3yt6

— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) May 29, 2018

WINNING THE WoT:

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION:

The annual gathering of students typically sees some complaints but at least one speech on Monday night frankly discussed economic troubles Iran faces after US President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the nuclear deal. [...]

Khamenei acknowledged many of the shortcomings, saying "removing problems is not as easy" as students expect.

In recent months, Iran has been beset by economic problems.

Politicians now offer the idea of possible government referendums or early elections. Even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei acknowledged the depths of the problems ahead of the 40th anniversary of Iran's Islamic Revolution.

"Progress has been made in various sectors in the real sense of the word; however, we admit that in the area of 'justice' we are lagging behind," Khamenei said in February, according to an official transcript. "We should apologize to Allah the Exalted and to our dear people."

PROGRAMMING THE TRUMPBOTS:

As a candidate, Donald J. Trump claimed that the United States government had known in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks. He hinted that Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice who died in his sleep two years ago, had been murdered. And for years, Mr. Trump pushed the notion that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya rather than Honolulu, making him ineligible for the presidency.

None of that was true.

Last week, President Trump promoted new, unconfirmed accusations to suit his political narrative: that a "criminal deep state" element within Mr. Obama's government planted a spy deep inside his presidential campaign to help his rival, Hillary Clinton, win -- a scheme he branded "Spygate." It was the latest indication that a president who has for decades trafficked in conspiracy theories has brought them from the fringes of public discourse to the Oval Office. [...]

But Mr. Trump's willingness to peddle suspicion as fact has implications beyond the Russia inquiry. It is a vital ingredient in the president's communications arsenal, a social media-fueled, brashly expressed narrative of dubious accusations and dark insinuations that allows him to promote his own version of reality.

A record number of women running for office in America. The #MeToo movement taking down men worldwide. Ireland voting two-to-one to legalize abortion. Some Silicon Valley companies promising to make 50% of their workforce female. Young women increasingly dominating men in high school and college classrooms. 

Why it matters: Everywhere you look, women are rising and forcing results. It's sparking debate about whether this is a landmark, '60s-style liberation and empowerment -- but on a global stage.  [...]

The data:

After upsetting headlines about harassment in Silicon Valley, women feel increasingly empowered and hopeful. Tech companies are taking steps to improve figures for women in their workforces, which range from 45% at Pinterest to 35% at Facebook to 26% at Microsoft, according to Recode.

Women will account for 55% of the full-time undergraduates in U.S. colleges this fall, according to a Department of Education projection, a trend that led The Atlantic to call men the "new minority on campus."

A record number of women are running for Congress this fall, and the N.Y. Times calculates that roughly half of the women running in primaries have won so far. Cook Political's David Wasserman says this Democratic primary season "is defined by women trouncing men," with women winning in 69% (45 of 65) of races where they faced a male non-incumbent.

EMPTINESS:

The 45th president is often described--and sometimes praised--as "authentic." That compliment, if it is a compliment, is not truly deserved. In many ways, President Trump is not the man he seems. He was not a great builder, not a great dealmaker, not a billionaire, not a man of strength and decisiveness.

But there is one way in which he truly is authentic: He is never able to play-act the generous feelings that he so absolutely lacks. "To show an unfelt sorrow is an office which the false man does easy." In that one sense, Donald Trump is not false. He does not feel sorrow for others, and he does not try to pretend otherwise.

Trump's perfect emptiness of empathy has revealed itself again and again through his presidency, but never as completely and conspicuously as in his self-flattering 2018 Memorial Day tweets. They exceed even the heartless comment in a speech to Congress--in the presence of a grieving widow--that a fallen Navy Seal would be happy that his ovation from Congress had lasted longer than anybody else's.

It's not news that there is something missing from Trump where normal human feelings should go. His devouring need for admiration from others is joined to an extreme, even pathological, inability to return any care or concern for those others. But Trump's version of this disconnect comes most especially to the fore at times of national ritual.

Donald Trump cares enormously about national symbols--the flag, the anthem--when he can use them to belittle, humiliate, and exclude.

Trump has called for revoking the citizenship of those who burn the flag. He has suggested that NFL players who do not rise for the Star-Spangled Banner should be deported. He scored one of the greatest victories of his presidency when the National Football League submitted to his demand to punish players who did not stand at attention for the anthem. Vice President Pence ran the victory lap for Trump on this one.

But when it comes time to lead the nation in its shared rituals of unity and common purpose, Donald Trump cannot do it. He is, at most, president of slightly more than half of white America, and often not even that.

DONALD WHO?:

India is currently a top destination for Iran's oil exports. Asked about the U.S. move to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions at a news conference on May 28, Swaraj said that India's policy was to honor only UN sanctions, not sanctions imposed by individual countries.

WINNING THE WAR ON WAGES:

MEMORIAL DAY MEANS BASEBALL:

IMPORTING HEROES:

AMEN!:

[A] black columnist for the New York Daily News, has a new suggestion for what the NFL should do.

Now that the patriot police have turned what was a peaceful protest about police brutality and social injustice into a flag-waving, jingoistic shame fest, the NFL can make amends with the black players it has insulted with its new no-kneel policy by singing a different tune.

For just one week of the league's 17-week season, the NFL should bench "The Star Spangled Banner," and replace it with -- wait for it -- "The Negro National Anthem."

The song, "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," was dubbed the "national black anthem" in 1919 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Greene points out that the song lyrics "inspire hope."

IT'S A START:

More than a dozen soldiers from Saudi Arabia have been killed in Yemen during operations along the border. This brings the total number of Saudi casualties since 2015 to over 1,000, according to state media.

SPIES IN THE HOUSE OF LOATHE:

Let me put my cards on the table: The counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by not one, not two, but multiple SIGINT reports which set off alarm bells inside our Intelligence Community. This has been publicly known, in a general way, for some time. A little over a year ago, the Guardian reported, based on multiple intelligence sources, that the lead was taken by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ - Britain's NSA), which "first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious 'interactions' between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the U.S. as part of a routine exchange of information."

NSA isn't just the world's most powerful intelligence agency, it's the hub of the whole Western spy system. In late 2015, based on GCHQ reports, the word went out to NSA's close friends and partners to be on the lookout for any intercepts touching on Russian efforts to infiltrate the Trump campaign. They found plenty. As the Guardian explained, in the first half of 2016, as Trump's presidential bid gained unexpected steam, Australia, Germany, Estonia, and Poland all had SIGINT hits that indicated a troubling relationship between Trump and Moscow. So, too, did the French and the Dutch--the latter being an especially savvy SIGINT partner of NSA's.

As the Guardian tactfully phrased the matter, "GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the U.S." In other words, Western intelligence agencies that were eavesdropping on the Kremlin and its spies--not Trump or any of his retinue--heard numerous conversations about Trump and his secret Russian connections. As I've told you previously, senior Kremlin officials got very chatty about Trump beginning in late 2014, on the heels of his infamous Moscow trip, and NSA knew about this.

In truth, NSA understood quite a bit about Trump's connections to Moscow, and by mid-2016 it had increased its efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery regarding the candidate's Russian ties. In response to urgent FBI requests for more information, NSA rose to the occasion, and by the time that Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination in mid-July 2016, "We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands," as a senior NSA official put it to me recently.

The official went on: "We had several reports in late 2015 and early 2016, mostly from Second and Third Party"--that being spy-speak for NSA's foreign friends--"but by the spring of 2016 we had plenty of our own collection." These reports, based on multiple intercepts, were tightly compartmented, that is, restricted to a small group of counterintelligence officials, given their obvious sensitivity, but they painted an indelible picture of a compromised GOP nominee. "The Kremlin talked about Trump like he was their boy, and their comments weren't always flattering." The NSA official stated that those above-top-secret reports left no doubt that the Russians were subverting our democracy in 2016--and that Team Trump was a witting participant in the Kremlin's criminal conspiracy: "Trump and his kids knew what they were doing, and who they were doing it with," the official explained.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

DONALD VS THE ECONOMY:

Phippsburg, Maine -- Frustrated by red tape and visa limits on foreign workers, tourism businesses from Maine to Missouri are turning to Puerto Ricans who are fleeing a shattered economy and devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.

Bob Smith, owner of Sebasco Harbor Resort in Phippsburg, hired a half-dozen Puerto Ricans last summer for housekeeping, landscaping and kitchen work, providing relief to his overworked staff. This summer he is doubling the number, and he would like to hire even more.

Louis Morales, 50, of Comerio, Puerto Rico, is happy to be here because he makes double the salary he would back home, where jobs are scarce.

"A lot of people lost their houses, their jobs, everything. It's not the same now," said Morales, a maintenance worker who worked at Sebasco last year and has recruited more residents from Comerio to join him.

Employers large and small are seeking alternative solutions as demand continues to outstrip the annual allotment of 66,000 H-2B temporary visas, which are issued for workers holding down seasonal, nonagricultural jobs.

Critics fear that immigration politics were playing a role in program changes starting last summer. Compounding the uncertainty for businesses was a lottery system and background check delays on workers who come from dozens of countries from the Caribbean to Croatia.

On Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced 15,000 additional visas and acknowledged reforms were needed.

With Maine's unemployment rate below 3 percent, there aren't enough local people willing to take those seasonal jobs, Smith said.

"People say you should give these jobs to Americans. If you can find 'em, then that's great," he said. "The only Americans we can find to do the work right now are in Puerto Rico."

LET RUDY SPEAK (TO THE PROSECUTORS)!:

"You are confident that there is no collusion?" host Dana Bash asked.

"I can't be confident in anyone but my client," Giuliani said. "Am I confident because I was in that campaign at a very intimate level? Nobody talked about or knew about Russians. This came as a surprise to me, to the president, to the top four or five people around him."

He went on to ask a truly stunning question, for a lawyer.

"Now, you go out to the outer orbit, how do I know what is going on?" he said. "I don't think that would matter. If there is collusion with a guy 50 rungs down on the campaign -- not that I'm saying it happened -- but if it did, I don't know what that means."

At least three of the "top four guys" on Trump's campaign -- Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort -- literally attended a meeting with Russians to discuss colluding, then emailed each other about it. One of the three, Manafort, is currently under indictment by Mueller.

But Giuliani's statement isn't just a stunning admission of potential criminality in Trump's presidential campaign. It's also a signal to anyone in Trump's orbit that they are on their own. Because apparently, Trump and Giuliani will happily throw them under the bus in order to save Trump's neck.

And by making public statements about what he saw as an "intimate" of the Trump campaign, Giuliani may have also succeeded in making himself a witness for Mueller.

THE REPUBLICAN CONSCIENCE:

[T]he Kochs are ramping up support for a DACA fix. And they aren't the only ones. Politico reports that former Exelon chairman John Rowe, a Republican mega-donor who has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to GOP candidates, "is threatening to choke off campaign resources" to congressmen who refuse to sign the discharge petition. "There's a whole bunch of Republicans like me," Rowe said he told Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, "who simply aren't going to keep giving money if you don't get an immigration bill done."

Extending permanent legal status to Dreamers may be anathema to seal-the-border restrictionists, but for most voters it is a no-brainer. A strong majority of voters, including most Republicans, has consistently told pollsters that DACA enrollees and Dreamers should be granted a path to citizenship, not threatened with deportation. Outside the fever swamps, there could hardly be a more mainstream position.

Nor, in historical terms, could there be a more Republican one.

For most of its existence, the Party of Lincoln was the party of immigration. The GOP platform of 1864 ringingly declared that "foreign immigration . . . should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy." Nearly a century later, when Richard Nixon first ran for president, his party called for opening the nation's gates even wider. Citing "Republican conscience and Republican policy," the 1960 platform urged that "the annual number of immigrants we accept be at least doubled."

Pursuing the GOP nomination in 1980, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush spoke with compassion and warmth about immigrants -- even those here illegally. "Rather than talking about putting up a fence," Reagan suggested, "why don't we . . . open the border both ways?" As president, Reagan championed a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants; he always envisioned America, he would say in his farewell address, as a land whose "doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here."

Admittedly, there has always been a nativist strain in American culture, and more than a few Republicans plainly share Trump's immigration sourness. But they don't reflect the Republican conservative tradition. It is Rowe and the Koch brothers who are being faithful to the GOP heritage, and the anti-DACA bitter-enders who are betraying it.

AND HE WONDERS WHY EVERYONE HAS FLED?:

[T]he president told Sadler she wouldn't be fired for her remark. He added, separately in the conversation, that he's no fan of McCain. Then Trump, who had grown obsessed with the leaking problem, told Sadler he wanted to know who the leakers were. Sadler then stunned the room: To be completely honest, she said, she thought one of the worst leakers was Schlapp, her boss.

Schlapp pushed back aggressively and defended herself in the room. And in follow up conversations after the meeting, some of Schlapp's colleagues also came to her defense. (In a prior meeting, she had said, "You can put this on the record: I stand with Kelly Sadler"). Sadler went on to name other people she also suspected of being leakers.

The allegation -- like a previous internal meeting to deal with leaking -- ultimately got leaked to us.

WHEN YOU HATE THE AMERICA THAT ACTUALLY EXISTS...:

Forty-eight percent of Republicans said they believe between 3 million and 5 million people voted illegally in 2016, while 17 percent said they do not, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. Another 35 percent of the GOP said they were unsure.

DUDE, IT'S THE SAME THING:

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he sees "no evidence" to support President Trump's claims that the FBI used an informant to gather information on his campaign, but that instead the federal probe was focused on "individuals with a history of links to Russia that were concerning."

"What I have seen is evidence that they were investigating individuals with a history of links to Russia that were concerning," Rubio, a Florida senator who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee told ABC News Chief Global Affairs Correspondent and "This Week" Co-Anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that investigations swirling around President Trump are interfering with improved relations with Moscow, noting he has had little contact with the U.S. president. 

"We are hostages to this internal strife in the United States," Putin said at an economic forum in St. Petersburg. 

LET RUDY SPEAK:

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Sunday that his repeated imputations of a supposed scandal at the heart of the Robert Mueller investigation - which Donald Trump calls "Spygate" - amounted to a tactic to sway public opinion and limit the risk of the president being impeached.

"Of course we have to do it to defend the president," Giuliani told CNN State of the Union host Dana Bash, who accused him of being part of a campaign to undermine the Mueller investigation.

THE PRODUCTIVITY BOOM:

[A]merican companies are pulling in monster profits right now.

A combination of faster economic growth, lower taxes and soaring oil prices are padding the bottom lines of large businesses. Call it the Great American Profit Machine.

Not only are S&P 500 profits sitting at all-time highs, but first-quarter earnings are on track to surge by 24.5% -- the fastest pace since 2010, according to FactSet.

The blockbuster results even managed to blow away Wall Street's lofty expectations. More than three-quarters of S&P 500 companies -- 78% to be exact -- beat earnings estimates. That's the most since FactSet started tracking the stat in 2008.

"Companies are absolutely crushing it on earnings," said Anthony Saglimbene, global market strategist at Ameriprise Financial.

IT'S NOT TERRORISM WHEN WE DO IT:

The grapes are shriveled. The vineyard is dead. Reduced to a large, dried-out, yellowing stain in the heart of the verdant region along Highway 60 where the road runs past the town of Halhoul, north of Hebron. The "yellow wind" that David Grossman wrote about 30 years ago is a dying vineyard here. Two plots of land, with hundreds of vines that were slashed, their stems and shoots sawed off - and within a week everything here had withered and died.

This is a particularly horrible sight because all the damage was wrought by the hand of man. A wicked, loathsome hand that hates not only Arabs but despises the land itself. In fact, we can assume that it wasn't just one individual who raided and destroyed this vineyard late Tuesday night last week. To saw off that many plants in such a short time requires a few pairs of nasty hands. And someone also had to smear the threatening words in Hebrew on a rock: "We will reach everywhere." All before first light illuminated the dark deed.

When dawn broke, the owner of the vineyard, Dr. Haitham Jahshan, a hematologist, arrived and couldn't believe his eyes. His vines had been ravaged. First he saw one sawed trunk, then another and another - a sea of butchered vines, whose grapes were grown to be eaten, not for wine - until the full scale of the calamity hit home.

For his part, Musa Abu Hashhash, a field researcher for the B'Tselem human rights organization, says he's never seen an act of so-called agricultural crime on this scale.

SHARE AND SHARIA ALIKE:

The consolidation of Protestantism, free trade, and free inquiry in England that led to the Enlightenment had something to do with the Ottoman-Elizabethan pact. By the end of her reign, English traders, diplomats, adventurers, and others lived or travelled through places such as Istanbul, Damascus, Fallujah, Aleppo, Raqqa, Algiers, Baghdad and Tripoli. The Queen was said to like Moroccan sugar so much that her teeth became quite black with decay.

The merchants who left England, writes the historian Jerry Brotton, transformed Elizabethan homes. The wealthy filled their houses with Turkish carpets, silk quilts and embroidered tapestries. The language of 16th-century England was filled with Arabic: 'sugar' from sukkar, 'crimson' from kirmiz, 'tulip' from tulband. The English fascination with Islam and Muslims did not end with the Elizabethans. In 1650, a Greek-Turk named Pasqua Rosee opened the first coffee house in the City of London. It was pious Muslims from Yemen who spread the drinking of coffee within the Ottoman Empire, to help believers stay awake at night for worship of Allah. In Arabic, qahwah, or kehve in Turkish, became 'coffee' in English. Samuel Pepys visited the coffee house in 1660 and wrote 'the first time that ever I was there, and I found much pleasure in it'.

During the Victorian era, hundreds of thousands of Muslims served in the British armed forces. During the Crimean war, Ottoman Muslims fought together with the British against the Russians. It was in Constantinople that Florence Nightingale invented the art of nursing. Queen Victoria's government was proud to remind the Ottoman sultan that she was an empress of more Muslims than he. Britain's first purpose-built mosque was in 1889 in Woking, Surrey.

Most importantly, it was Queen Victoria's patronage of and closeness to Munshi Abdul Karim that shows a warmth at the highest levels of British society towards Muslims. As part of the royal household, this pious Indian taught her Urdu, the poetry of Rumi, and gave her spiritual comfort. The 2017 feature film Victoria and Abdul captured some of the depth of that relationship.

Too often, too, we forget that half a million Muslims fought with Britain in the first world war and died in the trenches for God, King and Empire. That generation held these values worthy of the ultimate sacrifice.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, almost four million Muslims from the Empire and then the Commonwealth have made Britain our home. The freedom to worship and thrive here in Britain is unmatched by any other country. It was this freedom that drew my Muslim parents to this country. The raison d'être of Islamic civilisations and the shariah for a thousand years was to provide five things: security, worship, preservation of the family, nourishment of the intellect and protection of property. These are called maqasid, or the higher objectives of the shariah. Britain provides these in multitudes for every Muslim today. There is no French tradition of laicité or hostility to Islam in modern British history.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Mr. Trump is destroying every enemy that was an enemy of our rise. Who is the enemy of our rise? Is it the Department of Justice where we get none? Is it Congress where you make a law that favors us and then you turn around and destroy it? https://t.co/iK8VMI667b pic.twitter.com/Byk0Px2Avo

— MINISTER FARRAKHAN (@LouisFarrakhan) May 25, 2018

GREATEST WAR EVER:

The ministry said fighting erupted overnight when "several mobile terrorist groups attacked Syrian government artillery at night."

Two Russian military advisers were killed on the spot. Five other personnel were injured and taken to a Russian military hospital. Two of them died from their wounds.

WHICH VLAD-TIED HIRE DID HE NEED TO BE WARNED ABOUT?:

The FBI warned Trump in August 2016 that the Russians would literally **try to infiltrate his campaign** https://t.co/6KPkKeN8jk https://t.co/YjhFULHCGh

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) May 27, 2018

OUR BETTERS:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The President lied and said the source didn't exist but rather was made up. When confronted with audio proving the source was WH staff on background, @MZHemingway goes with this excuse.

This is what you do when you just don't care about your own credibility anymore. https://t.co/SWdJCjMSjk

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) May 26, 2018

...AND CHEAPER...:

This blooming solar panel produces 40% more energy than regular solar panels pic.twitter.com/CLEJ4kAxjR

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) May 26, 2018

KELLY'S HEROES:

As the heart-wrenching stories of babies snatched from their parents' hands at the border start to be told, the outrage is growing. "There is something terrible happening here that Americans would not support if they understood it," F. Scott McCown, director of the Children's Rights Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, told NBC News earlier this week. It seems Americans are finally starting to wake up to the reality of what is happening in their country and outrage over the practice is growing now that is becoming more commonplace thanks to new policies being implemented by the Trump administration.

Earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to criminally prosecute "100 percent" of migrants illegally crossing the border with Mexico. That essentially meant it suddenly became official U.S. policy to separate children from their parents whereas before families would usually be kept together in shelters while they underwent asylum or deportation proceedings. But when he announced his new policy Sessions outright said the separation of children and their parents would be inevitable and brushed off concerns by saying that it would send a clear message to potential migrants. "If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law," Sessions said. "If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border." In other words, the government made it clear it was willing to traumatize children for life just to teach a lesson to their parents. Chief of Staff John Kelly seemed to put into words the administration's lack of interest on the fate of the children split from their parents in an interview with NPR: "The children will be taken care of -- put into foster care or whatever."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Imagine being the WH background briefer who led this briefing, who now has his boss - the president of the US - saying he/she doesn't exist. https://t.co/6tYHxp3ZFK

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 26, 2018

MONSTER:

6. May 10, 2018 -- This was Trump's own personal directive. He chewed out the Homeland Security Secretary for resisting the policy. https://t.co/Gtam8hK07O pic.twitter.com/RoZISya8Ix

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) May 26, 2018

CULT FIGURES:

NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

"Horrible law" = not a law. It's Trump administration policy that didn't happen under Obama or Bush. POTUS has the power to reverse it and Democrats have been pushing him to. https://t.co/TnmrBRGHOL pic.twitter.com/2ST9Pr8ljl

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 26, 2018

GOOFUS & GALLANT:

In which the @stlouisfed beautifully trolls POTUS in a new analysis:
"Understanding the Trade Imbalance and Employment Decline in U.S. Manufacturing" https://t.co/HsjvZC8pJN pic.twitter.com/ZXgIFDAqrh

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) May 25, 2018

ONCE YOU'VE SOLD OUT TO OUR ENEMIES TO WIN THE JOB...:

When it began, with a South Korean official standing outside the White House announcing that the leaders of the United States and North Korea would meet for an unprecedented summit, President Trump believed he had accomplished a historic breakthrough -- an accomplishment, he told friends, that would secure his legacy and his reelection. [...]

[W]hile Trump privately blamed Chinese president Xi Jinping for souring North Korea on the meeting, U.S. observers, including some close to the White House, said that all along, the prospects for the summit had been caught between two competing currents: Trump's unbridled desire to make history and his advisors' increasing skepticism that Kim was willing to come anywhere close to Trump's fundamental demand that he relinquish his nuclear arsenal.

Some of that tension played out in public as the North Koreans threatened to pull the plug within days of Trump musing publicly about winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

But the roots of the trouble took shape earlier, according to friends of Trump, national security veterans and Korea experts.

On one side was Trump, guided by the desire to captivate a world audience, prove the establishment wrong and win the type of legacy-building achievement that transcends scandals at home in the same way that President Nixon's opening of China survived the tarnish of Watergate.

YOU ONLY HAVE TO PUNCH SCUT FARKIS ONCE:

A TEMPORARY EMBARRASSMENT:

 In the last half-century, there have been four times when a weak presidential incumbent invited a primary challenger from within his own party. None of these weak incumbents -- Lyndon Johnson (1968), Gerald Ford (1976), Jimmy Carter (1980), or George H.W. Bush (1992) -- was re-elected (or in Ford's case, elected, given that he became president when Richard Nixon resigned). Let's take a closer look:

-- 1968: Growing opposition to the Vietnam War took Lyndon Johnson's approval (Gallup) from 79% in early 1964 to 41% four years later. Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) challenged him for the Democratic presidential nomination, nearly upsetting the president in the New Hampshire primary. Johnson's arch-enemy Robert F. Kennedy then declared his candidacy. LBJ, seeing the writing on the wall, announced that he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination.

-- 1976: Gerald Ford was a weak incumbent for two reasons: his pardon of Richard Nixon and a terrible recession. Former Gov. Ronald Reagan (R-CA) took him on in the Republican presidential nomination contest. After a tooth-and-nail fight that went all the way to the GOP national convention, Ford won his party's nomination. But Ford was badly weakened, and he lost to Jimmy Carter that fall.

-- 1980: Thanks to a recession and a hostage crisis with Iran, it was Carter's turn to earn an intraparty challenge, this time by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). Carter vowed to "whip his ass," and did -- only to be crushed by Reagan in a November landslide.

-- 1992: After winning the Gulf War in a rout, George H.W. Bush's approval soared to 89%. A shoo-in for reelection, right? But Bush, backing away from a major 1988 campaign pledge, supported a tax hike to lower the deficit. That, along with a mild recession, caused his approval to collapse. Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan challenged him for the GOP presidential nomination and won nearly a quarter of all primary votes. A weakened Bush survived to make the general election, but lost in a three-way race that November to Bill Clinton.

If that's not ominous enough for Trump, consider this: He's at or below the approval of all four of those unsuccessful incumbents at this stage (Trump is at 39% approval in Gallup right now). Gallup approval 15 months in:

Johnson (Feb. 1965): 68%

Ford (Nov. 1975): 44%

Carter (April 1978): 40%

Bush (April 1990): 67%

History is also against Trump in another big way: he's the fifth president to lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College. So what happened to the other four when they sought re-election? Only one was successful.

John Quincy Adams (1828): crushed by Andrew Jackson

Rutherford Hayes (1880): declined to run again

Benjamin Harrison (1892): lost to Grover Cleveland

George W. Bush (2004): won reelection

And Bush's 2004 win wasn't exactly a landslide. He got 50.7% of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes against Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).

PRO-LIFE/PRO-IMMIGRANT:

The region's economy depends on the price of gas and oil, which plummeted in recent years. But there are pockets of industrial vitality, too. Seventeen miles east of Lakin, in Holcomb, where Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, smoke rises from the steel towers of the Tyson Fresh Meats plant. Tyson's workers slaughter 6,000 head of cattle a day, making it one of the largest beef-packing plants in the world. East African refugees inspect beef beside immigrants from Burma, Mexico, and Ecuador. Those who don't find jobs at the plant labor on the surrounding dairy farms and ranches. In short, this part of western Kansas is like a lot of rural America, right down to the struggling county hospital.

Four years ago, Kearny County Hospital had to turn away patients because it didn't have enough doctors to treat them. It was losing $100,000 a year in its maternity ward. County commissioners wanted to avoid the fate of other rural communities, which have lost 83 hospitals across the country in the past eight years. Often, the solution is to stop delivering babies. More than half the rural counties in the country no longer have a labor and delivery unit in their hospitals; in Kansas, nine rural obstetrics units have shut down in the past 10 years, and six more are planning to close soon, says Michael Kennedy, associate dean for rural health education at the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

But Kearny County went the other way.

Officials hired an innovative CEO who came up with a way to make their rural hospital appeal to talented young physicians who want to deliver babies in Third World countries. You can do that work right here in Kansas, Ben Anderson told his new recruits, by serving immigrants and refugees. Once the new doctors arrived, Anderson applied for grants to upgrade the hospital's equipment and fly in a specialist to see women with high-risk pregnancies. The skilled doctors and luxurious birthing suites attracted immigrants from neighboring Garden City and wealthier patients from out of town, and the baby boom they created padded the hospital's bottom line. KCH went from delivering 187 babies in 2014 to 327 in 2017. In the span of five years, Anderson has turned the hospital into the county's largest employer, with a profitable maternity ward that draws patients from as much as two hours away for its superior care. "I think it's a huge success story," Kearny County Commissioner Shannon McCormick says.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Baseballs really have been getting extra lift since 2015, and it's not from the exaggerated uppercuts batters are taking, according to a 10-person committee of researchers hired by the commissioner's office.

"The aerodynamic properties of the ball have changed, allowing it to carry farther," said committee chairman Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But the panel, which includes professors specializing in physics, mechanical engineering, statistics and mathematics, struck out trying to pinpoint the cause. [...]

"We have to admit, and we do admit, that we do not understand it. We know the primary cause is the change in the drag but we just simply cannot pinpoint what feature of the ball would lead to it," Nathan said during a conference call Wednesday, ahead of the report's release. "Therefore it was probably something very, very subtle in the manufacturing process, but again it has to be pretty subtle, because if it weren't, we would have found it."

HATING YOUR NEIGHBOR:

There is enough scholarly literature and social science on the effect of dehumanizing rhetoric from political leaders on their respective societies for any conservative with a proper fear of the state to find Trump's remarks disturbing. Throughout history and across wildly distinct cultures, such language from public officials has prepared the way for social unrest and, ultimately, statist oppression. This is hardly the first time Trump has described criminal immigrants as beasts and implied that individual immigrants were incapable of any independent thought that contradicts their ethnicity's hive mind. And we have reason to fear the extent to which this kind of rhetoric has greased the skids for inhumane policies that are happening right before our eyes.

The New York Times reported in late April that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children who were separated from their parents or were apprehended alone after they crossed the border illegally. They have simply fallen off the radar, prompting concerns that these children could end up in the custody of abusers or human traffickers. Hundreds of children have been separated from their parents at the border, which is a practice that is often legitimate and predates the Trump administration. What is new is that the Trump administration has openly floated the idea of breaking up families as a means of deterring future illegal immigration. The process would be entirely humane, said White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, because HHS does "a very, very good job of putting them in foster care or linking them up with parents or family members in the United States." Clearly, that is not the case.

What's more, the process to which illegal migrant parents are subjected is disturbing. No human being could fail to be moved by the all-too-common story of a young mother, forced to wear a yellow bracelet that identifies her as an illegal immigrant parent, weeping in an American courtroom as she is separated from her children. This is not "ordered liberty" or the dispassionate conduct of the affairs of a state. It's capricious and vengeful, and it is corrupting of the soul. Donald Trump isn't responsible for a mentality on the right that views this kind of treatment as a necessary evil to which any self-respecting country must appeal; he's a product of it.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

The FBI has obtained secret wiretaps collected by Spanish police of conversations involving Alexander Torshin, a deputy governor of Russia's Central Bank who has forged close ties with U.S. lawmakers and the National Rifle Association, that led to a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. during the gun lobby's annual convention in Louisville, Ky., in May 2016, a top Spanish prosecutor said Friday.

José Grinda, who has spearheaded investigations into Spanish organized crime, said that bureau officials in recent months requested and were provided transcripts of wiretapped conversations between Torshin and Alexander Romanov, a convicted Russian money launderer. On the wiretaps, Romanov refers to Torshin as "El Padrino," the godfather.

"Just a few months ago, the wiretaps of these telephone conversations were given to the FBI," Grinda said in response to a question from Yahoo News during a talk he gave at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Asked if he was concerned about Torshin's meetings with Donald Trump Jr. and other American political figures, Grinda replied: "Mr. Trump's son should be concerned."

RUN, MELANIA, RUN:

Reporters asked Trump about the first lady's absence on Friday, and the president pointed at a White House window, responding that "she's doing great. She's looking at us right there." But Melania was nowhere to be seen.

THUS GUNWALKER:

  

The only gun store in all of Mexico is located behind a fortress-like wall on a heavily guarded military base in Mexico City.

  

The only gun shop in all of Mexico is behind a fortress-like wall on a heavily guarded military base.

To enter the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, customers must undergo months of background checks -- six documents are required -- and then be frisked by uniformed soldiers.

The army-run store on the outskirts of Mexico City embodies the country's cautious approach to firearms, and a visit here illustrates the dramatically different ways two neighboring countries view guns, legally and culturally.

Like the 2nd Amendment in the United States, Mexico's Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but it also stipulates that federal law "will determine the cases, conditions, requirements and places" of gun ownership. For many Mexicans, even those who love guns, the thought of an unfettered right to owning one is perplexing.

Yet on this issue, like so many aspects of life in Mexico, the influence of its powerful neighbor to the north is keenly felt: Each day the army gun store sells on average just 38 firearms to civilians, while an estimated 580 weapons are smuggled into Mexico from the United States.

That paradox is increasingly relevant given Mexico's unprecedented levels of gun violence, which have claimed more than 100,000 lives over the last decade. Last year was Mexico's deadliest since the government began releasing homicide statistics in 1997. This year, it is on track to surpass that record.

American firearms are directly driving the violence, although U.S. appetites for drugs and rampant corruption among Mexican officials also play a role. About 70% of guns recovered by Mexican law enforcement officials from 2011 to 2016 were originally purchased from legal gun dealers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

DEBT COLLECTION:

Eleven days before the presidential inauguration last year, a billionaire Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin visited Trump Tower in Manhattan to meet with Donald J. Trump's personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, according to video footage and another person who attended the meeting.

In Mr. Cohen's office on the 26th floor, he and the oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, discussed a mutual desire to strengthen Russia's relations with the United States under President Trump, according to Andrew Intrater, an American businessman who attended the meeting and invests money for Mr. Vekselberg.

JUST REPARATIONS:

Shubair recounts how she set out with her family on March 30, the date Palestinians call Land Day to commemorate Israel's 1976 confiscation of Arab lands in the Galilee, for the border with "occupied Palestine." She vowed, "Each day until May 15, the anniversary of the Nakba ["catastrophe" when more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homeland to create Israel] we will camp by the border to remind the world that we have a right to return home ... Everyone there was united under one flag and one motto: We have a right to return to Palestinians' historic homeland. This overwhelming feeling of unity long has been missing, especially in Gaza ... None of us had anything more valuable to lose than what we already had: our home."

Shubair laments the home that was lost and insistence on her right to "return home." She is not asking to go back to the once predominantly Arab towns of Ashkelon or Jaffa, a demand that a priori nullifies the two-state solution to the conflict. Jews, on the other hand, are of course entitled to long to go back to their ancestors' homes in the West Bank's Hebron and to receive compensation for these homes. But these rights do not justify the expulsion of Palestinians from the buildings where they have lived for several decades. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also said in a 2012 interview on Israel's Channel 2 that despite being a refugee from the Galilee town of Safed, he does not expect to return there. "Palestine now for me is the '67 borders -- alongside the state of Israel," he said.

Three comprehensive polls conducted in the first half of 2003 among 4,500 families living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza indicate that most refugees favor Abbas' position. Only 10% want to return to Israel, compared with 72% who would rather live in a Palestinian state or receive monetary compensation. The results were met with harsh criticism by radical Palestinian factions opposed to any compromise on the right of return. They even threatened the head of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Khalil Shikaki, with violence.

After deliberating on a petition by Greek Cypriot refugees, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in March 2010 that claiming a certain land or property as "home" is insufficient to establish a right. An overwhelming majority of the 17 judges agreed that given that 35 years had passed since the petitioners lost their property when Turkey invaded northern Cyprus in 1974, and the local population had changed, the claimants were entitled to compensation in cash, but not necessarily in land. The judges warned that rectifying an old injustice could result in a new injustice. One can infer that UN Resolution 194 of 1948, stipulating that a refugee can choose between a return to Israel and compensation, does not grant every refugee a personal right to return. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative referred to this resolution as the basis for a just and agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem.

IT'S A PURITAN NATION:

When Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel The Scarlet Letter is read by modern Americans, it tends to provoke snickers, sneering, and judgmental tut-tutting at those awful Puritan prudes who would force an adulterous woman to wear an outward sign of the shame of her sin for her entire life and endure communal shunning over her violation of a social norm that we, in our own era, would not even regard as a crime. We would never do something like that today, would we? But actually we do, and -- in appropriate cases -- we should. And it's high time we stopped pretending otherwise.

That thought came back as I read the story of Aaron Schlossberg, a Manhattan lawyer who committed a sin last week -- letting fly a racially incendiary tirade at Spanish-speaking workers in a crowded Madison Avenue restaurant -- and had the misfortune of having it filmed and widely disseminated. For this, at least for the moment, he has been shunned as surely as Hester Prynne was, complete with government officials bidding to permanently end his livelihood:

Schlossberg was then kicked out of his office building, while lawmakers petitioned the New York state court system to review his behavior and potentially revoke his law license.

And on Friday, dozens of protesters rallied outside his building while a mariachi band played.

The 42-year-old also lost at least one client over his tirade...

This is very much the same impulse that motivated the Puritans. Bigotry is more a sin than a crime, but a sin that we subject to harsh moral judgment, and that we rightly see today as corrosive of society and a contributor to worse problems, like sudden explosions of violence. In other words, we see it in exactly the same terms that the Puritans saw adultery...

WERE WE OUT OF STARS?:

Alma Jacinto covered her eyes with her hands as tears streamed down her cheeks.

The 36-year-old from Guatemala was led out of the federal courtroom without an answer to the question that brought her to tears: When would she see her boys again?

Jacinto wore a yellow bracelet on her left wrist, which defense lawyers said identifies parents who are arrested with their children and prosecuted in Operation Streamline, a fast-track program for illegal border crossers.

WHAT MOTE?:

The Trump-Russia ties hiding in plain sight https://t.co/vWVfx8DdHc

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) May 25, 2018

WE ARE THE MONSTERS:

A top official with the Department of Health and Human Services told members of Congress on Thursday that the agency had lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children it placed with sponsors in the United States, raising concerns they could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.

The official, Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the agency's Administration for Children and Families, disclosed during testimony before a Senate homeland security subcommittee that the agency had learned of the missing children after placing calls to the people who took responsibility for them when they were released from government custody.

The children were taken into government care after they showed up alone at the Southwest border. Most of the children are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were fleeing drug cartels, gang violence and domestic abuse, government data shows.

From last October to the end of the year, officials at the agency's Office of Refugee Resettlement tried to reach 7,635 children and their sponsors, Mr. Wagner testified. From these calls, officials learned that 6,075 children remained with their sponsors. Twenty-eight had run away, five had been removed from the United States and 52 had relocated to live with a nonsponsor.

NO WONDER HE WINS THE PRESIDENT RACES AT NATS GAMES:

He did homework. The story of throwing a stone across the Rappahannock is possible, as we proved here: https://t.co/3zer8F8htb https://t.co/MyKOsX4BTF

— Richard Brookhiser (@RBrookhiser) May 25, 2018

WE ARE ALL PIGOVIAN NOW:

Automatic speed cameras on French roads are proving a healthy earner for the state with a record one billion euros pulled in over the past year. And the record will likely be broken next year.

There are some 4,600 speed cameras in France and they have never proved more lucrative.

While state accountants will be rubbing their hands with glee, drivers in France will be gnashing their teeth at the news that speed cameras handed out €1.01 billion of fines in 2017.

But the total sum paid out by motorists for all kinds driving offences was even more eye-watering with state coffers boosted by €1.97 in 2017. That's a nine percent rise on 2016.

That's a record haul for the state. But it looks like it won't stay in the record books too long, with 2018 set to bring in even more money.

WHAT ELSE WOULD DEVIN AND DONALD BE DOING?:

Carrie Cordero, formerly an attorney in the Justice Department's National Security Division, said Flood's attendance created the appearance of impropriety.

"It creates the appearance that the briefing was set up for the purpose of the defense team learning what was going on in the investigation," she told The Daily Beast. "That's the optics of it. Whether or not that is really what's happening, we don't exactly know. But I can't think of any positive reason for him having been there."

SPYGATE!:

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

I'm just back from eight days in Iran. Before my trip the United States withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear accords, and while I was in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, officially moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Inside Iran I spoke with fearful students, anxious Foreign Ministry officials, and clerics seemingly pleased that they'd been proven right--the Americans could not be trusted. It doesn't take long to conclude that we've empowered the wrong people, shouting at the very folks who might have helped lower the nuclear temperature.

Among students there is deep frustration at their nation's lack of participation in the world, and a desire to engage. The universities I visited had foreign students from China, but no one from the United States. One man who had never left Iran spoke English with a scarred Southern accent, admitting he got his start with a DVD of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof his father brought home from a now-ancient business trip. He loved America from afar and the Trump visa ban was a personal affront to him. The students I met were not about to take to the streets in favor of John Bolton's regime change schemes. Nowhere did I feel any sense of the panic, crisis, and disruption that American pundits speak of. These kids wanted to see L.A.

People from the Foreign Ministry expressed frustration over having no Americans to talk to, and were unsure why the U.S. still questions the legitimacy and stability of Iran's government. "The Americans everywhere seem to have quit trying," one said. There was much talk about Russia and China, little confidence the Europeans would fight the American sanctions, and a sad resignation that moderates would not be able to overrule the hardliners on foreign policy for a long time to come. "The door you came through to Iran is open," one said, "but it's Russians and Chinese who seem to want to come in."

DUH? THEIR PARTY NEVER WINS AN ELECTION:

TO BE FAIR...:

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

A hefty package of bank deregulation passed the House of Representatives earlier this week, after being passed by the Senate back in March. It now goes to Trump to be signed into law. The majority of votes were Republican, of course, but some 33 Democrats also joined -- some 17 percent of the House Democratic caucus, which is at least less than the 16 (or 34 percent of) Senate Democrats.

KIM GOT EVERYTHING HE WANTED:

[K]im doesn't need this summit. He has already, deceptively or not, cultivated the image of a peace-seeker, through a charm offensive that began with his New Year's Day message and continued through the Winter Olympics, his own summits in China and South Korea (the first meetings with those countries' leaders on their territory), his offer to meet with Trump, his suspension of nuclear and missile tests (though only after announcing that he now had a viable nuclear arsenal), and proposing "denuclearization" (though with a vague timetable and the usual caveats).

YEAH, BUT, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL...:

Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone privately sought information he considered damaging to Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The emails could raise new questions about Mr. Stone's testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in September, in which he said he "merely wanted confirmation" from an acquaintance that Mr. Assange had information about Mrs. Clinton, according to a portion of the transcript that was made public.

In a Sept. 18, 2016, message, Mr. Stone urged an acquaintance who knew Mr. Assange to ask the WikiLeaks founder for emails related to Mrs. Clinton's alleged role in disrupting a purported Libyan peace deal in 2011 when she was secretary of state, referring to her by her initials.

"Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30--particularly on August 20, 2011," Mr. Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had interviewed Mr. Assange several weeks earlier. Mr. Stone, a longtime confidant of Mr. Trump, had no formal role in his campaign at the time.

Mr. Credico initially responded to Mr. Stone that what he was requesting would be on WikiLeaks' website if it existed, according to an email reviewed by the Journal. Mr. Stone, the emails show, replied: "Why do we assume WikiLeaks has released everything they have ???"

In another email, Mr. Credico then asked Mr. Stone to give him a "little bit of time," saying he thought Mr. Assange might appear on his radio show the next day. A few hours later, Mr. Credico wrote: "That batch probably coming out in the next drop...I can't ask them favors every other day."

WHEN YOU'RE THE CHUM DURING SHARK WEEK:

If you're wondering why President Trump's mad-dog frenzy in the last 48 hours has surpassed even his typically manic tone, look no further than Michael Cohen's mounting legal troubles. Two new fronts were opened this week, pushing Cohen closer to the edge of a painful, existential choice: cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or an extended, unpleasant stay in federal prison. Trump can sense his friend edging closer to capitulation and his own legal peril mounting as Cohen begins to crack. As usual, he's having a very public, very loud meltdown.

First came the news that Gene Freidman, Cohen's associate in his taxi-medallion enterprise, has flipped. You'll be shocked (and by 'shocked' I mean, 'entirely unsurprised') to learn that Soviet émigré "Gene" Freidman, formerly "Evgeny" is tied to - wait for it - shady Russian and Ukrainian interests. For those of you in more civilised climes, New York's taxi business isn't the most genteel and ethical business niche; it's notoriously mobbed-up. Cohen comes from the same Russian wiseguy-inflected, criminal enterprise-adjacent circles as Freidman. Freidman has now pledged to assist Federal officials in their investigation of Cohen, and by extension, Trump.

The second source of new psychological and legal pressure on Trump and Cohen came from the BBC's Paul Wood. In an impeccably-sourced piece, Wood revealed yesterday that Cohen has engaged in illegal lobbying on behalf of Ukraine, serving in both of his usual roles as fixer for and conduit to Donald Trump.

By fWAR, Shohei Ohtani has provided the equivalent value of Christian Yelich as a position player plus Stephen Strasburg as a pitcher in 2018.

— Jeremy Frank (@MLBRandomStats) May 24, 2018

YOU CAN HARDLY BLAME HIM FOR BEING AFRAID OF SUNLIGHT:

In an interview with local paper, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, was asked if he planned to host any local forums or town hall meetings. "Your paper is a joke to even bring these issues up or raise these issues," Nunes responded. https://t.co/Q6Ya6g64PQ https://t.co/tPK0Wv8ksZ

— Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) May 24, 2018

YOU LOST THE TRUMPBOTS AT COMPETENT:

So let's review again:

Beginning in 2014, the Obama administration began receiving urgent warnings that Russia planned to interfere in U.S. politics. "You have no idea how extensive these networks are in Europe ... and in the U.S.," a Russian source told a U.S. official that year, according to an investigation by Politico's Ali Watkins. "Russia has penetrated media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, governments and militaries in all of these places."

As early as 2013, the F.B.I. had concerns about Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, regarding their "offshore consulting activities," and interviewed the pair repeatedly. At the time, Manafort was working for Ukrainian President (and Putin puppet) Viktor Yanukovych, from whom he allegedly received more than $12 million in secret payments.

The bureau also had long been interested in Carter Page, an obscure energy consultant whom it had first interviewed in 2013 in connection to his contacts with Victor Podobnyy, a Russian spy based in New York. Page's chief distinction was his willingness to recite Kremlin talking points on foreign policy.

Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. Page was named to Trump's foreign policy team that same month. So was George Papadopoulos, another nonentity with pro-Russian views. Within two months, Papadopoulos was getting word of Russia's hacking ops via a Kremlin-connected source, which he passed along to former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that May. The Australians later related this to the F.B.I.

Retired Gen. Mike Flynn, the future national security adviser, had his own financial ties to Russian companies and organizations that would stand to benefit from the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia. Flynn's sudden advocacy for lifting sanctions was especially odd given that he was previously on record as an anti-Russia hawk.

All of this is independent of Christopher Steele's notorious Russia dossier. Some pundits on the right are now breathlessly trying to claim that the bureau was spying on Page, and thus the campaign, via an informant before the formal investigation began, as if this is an outrage of the first order.

But the significant question is whether any competent counterintelligence officer would not have seen, in this constellation of facts, serious reason to believe that the Trump campaign was profoundly vulnerable to Russian manipulation, even (or especially) if the candidate himself didn't know about it.

YEAH, BUT THE PLAYERS ARE BLACK:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Those are the most famous words of West Virginia v. Barnette, one of the Supreme Court's greatest cases, but these words apply today:

Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.

In other words, the power of the salute lies with the choice to salute, and the most repugnant form of censorship is compelled speech -- the effort to force a person to state what they do not believe. Mandatory reverence isn't reverence at all.

The Supreme Court's words have a profound cultural meaning that resonates far beyond the letter of the law. The government cannot force a man to violate his conscience. Nor should it try to bully powerful, private entities into doing what the state cannot legally accomplish. Private corporations should think twice before using their own economic and cultural power to enforce conformity, even if they are legally empowered to censor their employees. Again, the cure for bad speech is better speech, and free speech cannot flourish in the midst of a culture of censorship.

Sadly, it is now clear that the freedom from compelled speech is under profound threat, from both the Left and the Right. Earlier this month I was honored to write an amicus brief on behalf of 33 family-policy organizations in a case called Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The Supreme Court will decide whether petty officials (state civil-rights bureaucrats) can compel a baker to use his artistic talents to celebrate an event he finds offensive. The court will determine whether the state can compel speech.

This week, a high official, the president of the United States, has repeatedly called for the punishment of American citizens for exercising the very right guaranteed by Barnette -- the right to refuse to salute the flag. Or, more precisely, the right to modify their salute to the flag.

Oddly enough, many members of the Right endorse this move -- including those who would be livid if a Democratic president called on the NFL to fire praying football players because that's "injecting religion into football."

IS THERE ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE SERVING OF DIGNITY IN THAT FAMILY?:

George Conway's Manhattan law firm sits near the corner of Sixth Avenue and 52nd Street, just three blocks from Trump Tower.

During the 2016 election, when he still supported Donald Trump, the corporate litigator would sometimes walk over to the campaign HQ after work, according to former campaign aides. He'd pop in around 8 p.m. and would sit and work in his wife Kellyanne Conway's office until she was ready to go. Then he'd drive her to New Jersey, or the couple would share a town car home.

Friends say he was proud of Kellyanne, the longtime Republican operative who was finally running the show, and the evening routine allowed him to grab some one-on-one time with his busier half. On election night, he cried, and noted to other campaign aides that as the first female campaign manager of a winning presidential bid, his wife had made history.

Over the past year, however, since Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed by the Justice Department, George Conway has become a man in turmoil. A serious, conservative attorney who believes in the rule of law, he has been torn, people who know him say, between the loyalty he feels toward his wife and an assault on his profession and his ideals that he did not anticipate when he cheered on election night--delivered by her boss.

During that period, he has walked away from a powerful job running the Justice Department's civil division, where he would have served as one of the administration's top lawyers. And he has become a Twitter phenom--tweeting and retweeting critiques of the president and support for the Mueller probe that his wife's employer calls a "witch hunt." Many in the White House have noticed, including Kellyanne and, according to multiple administration officials, the president himself.

The pushback coming from inside the house of Trump's lead cable-news defender has become one of Washington's favorite family dramas. In "Conway versus Conway," George attacks the president, or seems to defend the Mueller probe, while Kellyanne puts her own credibility on the line to defend Trump, who has escalated his verbal assaults on the Russia inquiry and this week even demanded an investigation of the investigation. [...]

[I]n conservative legal circles, his tweets are reverberating in a way that has not much at all to do with his wife. There, George Conway is seen as rebuking the silence of his fellow Federalist Society members--the elite, conservative lawyers who have generally chosen to give Trump a pass on his breaches of long-cherished legal norms and traditions in exchange for the gift of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

WHAT DEVIN IS TRYING TO GET FOR VLAD:

Mueller quietly reminded everyone that of all the leaking going on in Washington and New York, none of it is coming from his team -- and his team knows things you don't:

The special counsel's investigation is not a closed matter, but an ongoing criminal investigation with multiple lines of non-public inquiry. No right of public access exists to search warrant materials in an ongoing investigation. ... Search warrant materials regularly remain sealed while investigations are ongoing. And a right of public access risks jeopardizing open investigations. That remains true even though some aspects of the investigation have resulted in charges; the overall investigation is not complete, and the search warrant materials relate to that ongoing investigation. [Court filing, Robert Mueller]

"As of this date, the government has brought criminal charges against 22 individuals and entities arising from the investigation," Mueller added, listing the charges in an appendix, in case anyone in the White House forgot that his office has already turned up considerably more than nothing. The five news organizations -- The Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico -- will likely have to look elsewhere for their information. They could always try Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

Electric car skeptics cite relatively low current demand as evidence that battery-propelled vehicles are unlikely to break out of their niche any time soon. But the new forecast suggests why they can -- because they will fall neatly into the current of existing mobility fashion.

SUVs lead vehicle sales, accounting for 42% of all U.S. demand last year and 39% of China's.

The report forecasts an overall boom in EV demand through 2040, led by a surge in the number of electric models on offer, especially from the German automakers but also Tesla, said Salim Morsy, the report's main author. SUVs will be the main driver of that demand, Morsy tells Axios.

BUT...BUT...BUT...YOU GOT WHAT YOU WANTED...:

The fact that this meeting even took place remains a stubborn obstacle in President Donald Trump's "NO COLLUSION" narrative. His son enthusiastically took the meeting after a family acquaintance told him quite clearly that a "Russian government lawyer" would be able to share with the Trump campaign "some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."

According to everyone who attended the meeting and testified to Congress, that's not exactly what transpired on June 9, 2016. Instead, Veselnitskaya (and Akhmetshin, according to some attendees) discussed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses; the law's deleterious effect on U.S.-Russian relations, including the halting of U.S. adoptions of Russian children; and a complicated Russian tax evasion scheme where allegedly dirty money made its way into the Democratic National Committee's coffers.

Because no specific negative information about Hillary Clinton was offered, everyone said they considered the meeting to be a dud. 

IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

Quantum computing will enter the mainstream faster than most of us realize, a panel of experts told a San Francisco crowd earlier this week -- with some important real-world applications emerging within five years.

THE NORTH REMEMBERS:

The citizenry of New London held a deep grudge, and they never forgave Arnold. His name became synonymous with traitor, and among the people of New London, they even still evoke his name as a form of insult or as a means to convey a purposeful arson.

In 1782, one year after the infamous traitor led the burning of New London, the townspeople paraded an effigy of Arnold through the streets and burned it on the anniversary of the brutal attack. This tradition continued all the way up to the Civil War. Because of the horrors of the Civil War, the tradition faded away... until... a history-loving theater troupe decided to resurrect it.

In 2013 the troupe, with very little organization, marched an effigy of Benedict Arnold down to the pier, dressed in colonial garb, and burned it. As they paraded it through the streets of New London, curious bystanders started following the procession, and the tradition was revived.

The effigy, complete with a papier-mâché head with two faces, is dressed in a British red coat uniform. Once the parade reaches the pier, the traitor, complete with a wooden shame sign around his neck, is displayed in his wooden cart until 8 p.m., when he is rolled to an empty blocked-off area, doused with flammables, and set on fire for the crowds to watch.

Still going strong half a decade later, the event has grown and is now accompanied by live music, a police escort, and the mayor traditionally performing the ceremonial "lighting." The citizens of New London still rally around, with cries of "traitor" and "Burn him!"

A DONALD IN TRAINING:

In 2015, Alene Anase was asked by her employer Alpha Omega Winery to serve guests as part of a charity cruise on the San Francisco Bay.

But what she expected to be a routine shift serving wine turned into a nightmare, according to court documents.

The guests aboard the yacht that night -- described in her 2016 lawsuit as 25 of the Napa Valley-based winery's top investors, all men -- were openly using what appeared to be cocaine and "drawing straws" for which sex worker to hire, according to the lawsuit.

Alpha Omega, which boasts "world-class wines in a convivial setting," settled with Anase for an undisclosed amount in Napa County Superior Court the same year. The winery is owned by Robin Baggett, a major benefactor of Cal Poly, and its investors include his friend Rep. Devin Nunes. [...]

Nunes, whose back story often focuses on his time spent as a dairy farmer in the central San Joaquin Valley, sold his Tulare County farmland in 2006 and invested between $50,000 and $100,000 in Alpha Omega, which opened the same year.

The congressman, who represents Fresno and Tulare counties and is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, serves as a limited partner in the company, according to his latest financial disclosure forms.

Alpha Omega and Phase 2 Cellars, in San Luis Obispo, are listed as Nunes' only assets, aside from a Bank of America savings account and copyright royalties for WND Books, a conservative publishing company.

THE TRUTH VS. THE RIGHT'S VERSION OF THINGS:

Giuliani said he was concerned that the president would become a target or that the interview would be a perjury trap, because the "truth is relative." The president's legal team continues to try to set limitations on an interview, including the duration and questions posed, he said.

"They may have a different version of the truth than we do," Giuliani said.

IMAGINE IF EVERYONE WEREN'T MOVING OUT?:

Southern California home prices in April surged 7.2% from a year earlier to reach a new all-time high, a sharp increase at a time when rising mortgage rates are making an already pricey housing market even more so.

THE SHEER GENIUS OF THE UR...:

BROIDY BLOW:

After reports of the lavish payment and the affairs in April, Broidy, who was deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee and convicted of bribery in 2009, resigned and issued a public apology to his wife of several decades. But speculation is growing that this was just a cover-up. That it was Trump, not Broidy, who had the affair. 

Why would Broidy take such a blow for Trump? According to various reports, he was negotiating a deal in which he would use his influence to get the Justice Department to drop its investigation of a Malaysian company called 1MDB, for which Broidy and his wife would be paid £75 million. But the real prize was still to come in the Middle East. 

As the Associated Press has shown in a major story, the Middle East is where Broidy teamed up with a wealthy Lebanese American named George Nader. Nader, who served a six-month sentence in Virginia in the early 1990s for the possession of child pornography, was convicted in May 2003 on ten counts of sexually abusing boys and spent a year in prison in Prague. No -matter. He went on to set up shop in the United Arab Emirates, where he became chums with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

Broidy's and Nader's efforts centred around persuading the Trump administration to adopt a hostile stance toward Qatar, which it did. Broidy indicated in an email to Nader that he was a 'close friend' of the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and would push him to look favourably on sanctioning Qatar. But Broidy ended up landing an even bigger bauble: he met Trump in the Oval Office on 6 October last year to discuss Qatar. According to the AP, 'In return for pushing anti-Qatar policies at the highest levels of America's government, Broidy and Nader expected huge consulting contracts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, according to an Associated Press investigation based on interviews with more than two dozen people and hundreds of pages of leaked emails between the two men.' Huge indeed. They pitched plans to the princes that would have netted them more than $1 billion.

Perhaps the most piquant detail is that Nader was desperate for a photo with Trump. The Secret Service apparently put the kibosh on it. But Broidy donated a cool $189,000 to the Republican National Committee and any lingering reservations about Nader's background as a paedophile vanished.

NIKKI 2020:

"PLUG THE LEAKS," HE LEAKED:

President Donald Trump has demanded changes to his communications team -- long seen as one of the most internally divided offices in his White House -- in an effort to crack down on the leaks that have plagued his presidency since Day One.

White House chief of staff John Kelly signed off on a plan that would flush out some of the department's midlevel and junior aides, according to three people familiar with the situation. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other key senior officials are expected to remain, these people said.

DONALD IS THE PERP AND THE MOLE:

I would suggest a third take on the meeting: Wray and Rosenstein, with Mueller's full backing, might be setting up Trump. We know Mueller is already pursuing an obstruction-of-justice inquiry that might relate to acts such as Trump firing former FBI director James B. Comey, falsely accusing him of illegally leaking confidential material, pressuring Comey to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, helping draft a phony cover story to explain the June 9 Trump Tower meeting and conducting an extended campaign to smear, discredit and disrupt the work of the FBI and the special counsel. In that vein, wouldn't a meeting directly ordering Wray and Rosenstein to conduct what amounts to a wild goose chase and to put confidential material into the hands of congressional allies be part of the pattern of possible obstruction they are investigating?

Goodness knows what Trump said in the meeting and what he revealed about his intent with regard to outing the previously secret source. Moreover, Wray and Rosenstein already may have a very good idea who leaked the name of the source (initially to the right-wing Daily Caller, it appears) and may be keen to see whether the materials shared with congressional Republicans get leaked as well. (They, too, understand the finite protections of the Constitution's "speech or debate" clause.) [...]

But let's get back to reality. Going to the meeting, taking copious notes, analyzing the notes to determine the propriety of Trump's comments and referring that information over to Mueller is precisely what any responsible law-enforcement officials would do. It was, come to think of it, precisely what Comey did.

LET RUDY SPEAK!:

In a recent interview with HuffPost, Giuliani initially disputed the notion that Trump's daily citing, in the final month of his campaign, of Russian-aligned WikiLeaks and its release of Russian-stolen emails constituted "colluding" with Russia.

"It is not," Giuliani said.

Then he switched tacks.

"OK, and if it is, it isn't illegal... It was sort of like a gift," he said. "And you're not involved in the illegality of getting it."

CHEAPENING THE HOLOCAUST:

It is unclear yet whether the verbal clash between Netanyahu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the killing of Palestinians during violent demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel border changed the "situation" to such an extent that the government is at long last heeding calls for recognition of the Armenian genocide. But if it does so, the world in general and the Armenians in particular will see through the claims of morality and conscience and recognize the move for what it is: taking cynical advantage of a genocide to exact diplomatic retribution and score PR points.

It's true that joining the 29 other states, among them 11 members of the European Union, that have recognized the genocide would undermine the prospects of eventual reconciliation with Erdogan's regime. To resolve its previous contretemps with Turkey over the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla that sought to breach the Israeli siege of Gaza, Israel relented and paid compensation to Turkish victims of its commando raid on the vessel. It will not be able to go back on its recognition of the Armenian genocide.

IT WAS THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WHO WERE OWED A DEFENSIVE BRIEFING:

In his recent memoir, A Higher Loyalty, former FBI Director James Comey wrote about his decision to brief President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017 about the existence of the Steele dossier, which contained salacious allegations against him. Comey offered a reasonable explanation for why he briefed the president about the dossier's contents: It would prevent Trump from being blindsided by the document if it became public and insulate him from the threat of foreign blackmail.

"I could see no way out of it," Comey wrote. "The FBI was aware of the material. Two United States senators separately contacted me to alert me to its existence and the fact that many in Washington either had it or knew of it. CNN had informed the FBI press office that they were going to run with it as soon as the next day. Whether it was true or not, an important feature of disarming any effort to coerce a public official is to tell the official what the enemy might be doing or saying. The FBI calls that a 'defensive briefing.'"

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

The procedures for a witch hunt, and its relative brutality, varied quite a bit from place to place. In the 17th-century Lutheran kingdom of Denmark, for example, witches would be tried according to the more old-fashioned "accusatorial" system of justice. That meant an injured party--the alleged victim of some witchcraft--would choose to bring the case to local court. The accuser then would touch the suspect's head and say, "I hereby accuse you of being a true witch." Witnesses would testify, and if the suspect were found guilty, the case would be taken up again at the county level. Torture would be carried out only after the defendant had been found guilty, and just before her execution. She'd be tied to a ladder in preparation for burning at the stake. Then she'd be tortured via stretching, as a means of procuring her confession before God--along with the names of any fellow witches she might know.

Witch hunts happened very differently in other parts of Europe. In Catholic Italy (as in many other places), witches were tried in an "inquisitorial" system. A designated official--the inquisitor--would do the investigation for himself and decide which claims of witchcraft might be legitimate and thus deserving of the full legal process. Torture would be applied during the trial, not afterward, as a means of gathering evidence. But inquisitors had to follow rules specifying the sorts of torture they could use and the maximum duration. Suspects were not supposed to suffer any permanent harm from the process. In the end, the most extreme sentences applied to witches would not be execution but rather public flogging and exile from the community.

IF THE FEDS WEREN'T SPYING ON THESE GUYS IT WOULD BE A NATIONAL DISGRACE:

Consider what we know, now widely verified through bipartisan sources.

We know that at the very least the Russian government engaged in a disruption operation to sow discord and chaos in the 2016 election. The CIA, NSA, FBI, and the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee agree that this disruption operation morphed into an effort to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

At the same time that Russia was attempting to help Trump, the candidate had surrounded himself with a constellation of advisers who possessed problematic ties with the Putin regime. Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had long been on the payroll of Putin allies, receiving millions of dollars in compensation for his work on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. One of Trump's closest military advisers, Michael Flynn, had received tens of thousands of dollars in compensation from Kremlin-affiliated sources. One of the campaign's foreign-policy advisers, Carter Page, had been actively recruited by Russian intelligence (to his credit, he apparently rebuffed those advances) and had long sought business relationships in Russia.

And that's not all, not by a long shot. We also know that Kremlin-connected Russians reached out to the Trump campaign, and that key members of the campaign team were enthusiastic about receiving Russian help.

Donald Trump Jr. responded positively to a direct invitation to collude with Russia, taking a meeting with a Russian lawyer after being promised information that could hurt Hillary Clinton as part of an official Russian effort to help Trump. Trump brought Manafort and the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to the meeting.

Campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had contact with a Russian-affiliated professor who told him that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails." He received this information months before the first WikiLeaks releases rocked the Clinton campaign, and he later lied to the FBI about it.

Trump confidante Roger Stone apparently had advance knowledge that WikiLeaks had obtained damaging emails from John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.

THAT'S WHAT THE MUSLIM BAN WAS SUPPOSED TO DO:

President Trump's travel ban prevented Mohammed Al-Awadhi's Yemeni wife from joining him in Arkansas, but he was certain she would qualify for a waiver: She has a serious heart condition, she's married to a law-abiding U.S. citizen and the rejection of her visa would tear apart their marriage and leave her in a nation ravaged by war and famine.

But Al-Awadhi has become increasingly skeptical that the Trump administration is applying its waiver standards to those who qualify. Five months after the travel ban went into effect, immigration advocates say the waivers -- permission for certain citizens from the prohibited countries to travel to the U.S. based on special circumstances -- have been nearly impossible to get. [...]

The government has provided little guidance on how to get a waiver, they say, and many visa applicants are still unaware the waiver option exists.

The State Department says that it automatically considers whether a visa applicant from a banned country is eligible for a waiver.

But the department also acknowledged that a "cleared" or "granted" waiver does not mean the applicant actually has received a visa. A State Department official said many waiver recipients have received actual visas, but declined to give specifics.

The travel ban stipulates that waivers can be granted to certain visa applicants deemed not to pose a national security threat, including people seeking to reunite with spouses, children or parents in the United States and those in need of urgent medical care, among others.

Attorneys say hundreds or thousands of people who meet those descriptions are being denied. And during the Supreme Court hearing last month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether the waiver system is "window dressing" rather than an actual process.

"The waiver process is a sham," said Gadeir Abbas, a senior litigation attorney in Ohio for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that has fielded hundreds of requests for help from people affected by the ban. Abbas said he knew of just three people who have received waivers.

Queries to more than 30 immigration attorneys and major immigrant legal and advocacy groups across the country turned up fewer than 25 known waiver recipients from the Muslim-majority ban countries.

School shootings since 2009.

US: 288
Mexico: 8
South Africa: 6
India: 5
Pakistan: 4
Nigeria: 4
Afghanistan: 3
Brazil: 2
Canada: 2
France: 1
China: 1
Russia: 1
Germany: 1
Turkey: 1
Japan: 0
Spain: 0
Italy: 0
UK: 0
Netherlands: 0
Australia: 0

— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) May 22, 2018

DONALD'S CREW IS A MATRYOSHKA DOLL:

A significant business partner of Michael D. Cohen, President Trump's personal lawyer, has quietly agreed to cooperate with the government as a potential witness, a development that could be used as leverage to pressure Mr. Cohen to work with the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Under the agreement, the partner, Evgeny A. Freidman, a Russian immigrant who is known as the Taxi King, will avoid jail time, and will assist government prosecutors in state or federal investigations, according to a person briefed on the matter.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

JUST IN CASE ANYONE MISTOOK THIS FOR OVERSIGHT:

Sanders said Democrats weren't included in the meeting because they hadn't requested the records themselves, and suggested reporters ask them why they should be "randomly invited." She took questions for less than 13 minutes at her briefing on Tuesday.

Trump demanded in a tweet on Sunday that the Justice Department investigate whether the department or the FBI "infiltrated or surveilled" his campaign "for political purposes" and whether Obama administration officials were involved. There is no evidence the FBI planted an informant in his campaign.

NOT THAT HARD TO BE DECENT, IS IT:

In an otherwise good interview I made a terrible word choice, saying an impeachment "bullet" can only be "shot once" so one must "shoot to kill." I wasn't speaking literally, but as one who works hard to reduce gun violence this was just inexcusable. I'm very sorry. https://t.co/CIB0NtWiW7

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) May 22, 2018

AND NO FRED TO BAIL HIM OUT:

Pick any topic -- trade with China, NAFTA, North Korea, etc. Trump goes in with maximalist demands, as if it were just another licensing deal or casino, with no idea how he is going to accomplish the end result. Alas, the international stage is not a TV show, nor can he conceal failures, as he could running a family business and exaggerating his wealth. His demands are often premised on things that just aren't so (we "owe" someone the trade deficit, no one ever got a deal with North Korea, we are losing millions of jobs under NAFTA). He is either not educable, or his advisers are afraid to try. Together they run headlong into a wall (another silly promise, undeliverable!). He then is forced to blame others (usually Obama, sometimes Congress) or pretend he got what he wanted. (He keeps falsely telling crowds that he is building the wall.)

Rather than solve problems (expensive health-care premiums, theft of intellectual property) he creates new or bigger ones (even higher premiums, a trade war). His staff is forced to rush to rationalize and do damage control when he behaves impulsively, as he did in agreeing to a face-to-face summit with North Korea without understanding fully what he was doing. Trump acts rashly, and advisers rush to keep up and rationalize the outcome they didn't expect and may not have supported. (The Post reports, "The biggest problem comes, experts [in Seoul] say, from Trump's fundamental misunderstanding of North Korea's interests. The regime in Pyongyang has never said it was prepared to unilaterally give up its nuclear program but has instead repeatedly made clear that this would have to be part of a 'phased and synchronous' process that would involve rewards for North Korea along the way." Oops. That sounds like a rather large deal.)

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

This week I've been observing a sinkhole on the @WhiteHouse North Lawn, just outside the press briefing room, growing larger by the day. pic.twitter.com/BsFUtxFqpB

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) May 22, 2018

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

A new Russian nuclear-powered missile highly touted by Russia's leadership has so far been a dud, according to U.S. intelligence sources who say it has crashed in every test to date.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

THANKS, HERITAGE!:

Reminder from today's Natl Health Interview Survey results that the #ACA has improved coverage for middle class and poor alike. https://t.co/nBuuTlOEgS #ProtectOurCare. pic.twitter.com/gjK41nHUdY

— David B. Kendall (@DavidBKendall) May 22, 2018

TRY IMAGINING A PLACE WHERE IT'S ALWAYS SAFE AND WARM:

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

It does look like Trump's China hawks are getting rolled. But it's probably good old-fashioned Republican economic orthodoxy, not China, that's doing the rolling.

When Gary Cohn stepped down as head of the National Economic Council, it was supposed to be a sign that anti-trade and anti-globalization forces would lead the White House. But then long-time conservative commentator Larry Kudlow was tapped to replace him. "Kudlow is an extremely doctrinaire supply-sider, almost to the point of parody," Vox's Dylan Matthews said. "He's also an ardent free trader, a point of sharp contrast with the president, whose protectionist tendencies helped spur Cohn to leave." It looks like Kudlow thinks Trump's protectionist tendencies are malleable. He might be right.

MARKETS REQUIRE GOVERNMENT:

PANIC AT THE OVAL:

Neither Trump nor Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor who is now one of Trump's lawyers, provided any evidence of government infiltration into Trump's presidential campaign. Giuliani acknowledged in a CNN interview on Friday that neither he nor the president really knew if such action took place.

Giuliani was quoted by the New York Times later on Sunday as saying that Mueller had said the investigation would wrap up by Sept. 1.

A source familiar with the probe called the Sept. 1 deadline "entirely made-up" and "another apparent effort to pressure the special counsel to hasten the end of his work."

...AND CHEAPER...:

Personetics is starting by letting banks build AIs which analyze customer data for unusual spending patterns, identify spare money which could be saved or upcoming subscription payments which might leave someone overdrawn.

While some investment services like Betterment and Nutmeg have used algorithms to make investment decisions, this is the first time we've seen the same principles applied to current accounts.

"You can apply the same principles to a bank account as a driverless car--once we understand your goals, your obligations and your way of living, there's no reason why machines can't make the right decisions, or even better decisions than a person can," says Sosna.

Indeed there's a basic financial error that millions of us make every month, which AI could solve.

"You've got a credit card balance that you should pay off, but you also really want to have some savings--in that situation most people will make the wrong decision to save," Bud CEO and co-founder Edward Maslaveckas tells Forbes.

Indeed the instinct to put money away as a nest egg is usually the wrong one, especially while savings interest rates are at a historic low and any money sitting in your current account is essentially losing value every day.

THE POINT IS TO PUNISH THEM FOR BEING MUSLIM:

As for ordinary Iranians, "gloom" appears to be the word of the day.

In his May 8 deal withdrawal announcement, President Donald Trump addressed "the long suffering people of Iran," characterizing his policy toward the Islamic Republic as one that "benefits all of Iran." He concluded his remarks by saying that "the future of Iran belongs to its people." A similar sentiment was echoed in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's May 21 outlining of the new US strategy toward Iran.

Among ordinary Iranians, there now seems to be a shared sense of distress, frustration and anger. These sentiments are clear whether at friendly gatherings, family visits, chats during taxi rides or heated dialogues among colleagues.

Sepideh Pourakbar, a young mother who works from home in the city of Karaj, 20 miles west of the capital Tehran, bitterly laughed off Trump's remarks, telling Al-Monitor, "Future? What future? Does he really care about us? I cannot believe that. My heart sank the very night I heard Mr. Trump's speech. I knew nothing good would come of it."

Young Iranians do not disagree with the notion of being in charge of their fates. "I do believe that the people of Iran are in charge of their future and are assets to their country," said Amirhossein Andalibi, a software engineer who works at a startup in Tehran. "We need equipment, software and hardware to work on applications or sites, for the sake of the country's development. But much of what we are looking for cannot be found here due to the sanctions in place."

For some, the impact of the reimposition of US sanctions is even more imminent. Forough Mahmoudi Darvish speaks up about her worries of not being able to find the medicine she needs for her thalassemia blood disorder. The US embargo on Iran does not include medicine, medical devices, food and certain agricultural commodities. But Iranian markets, still reeling from the sanctions imposed prior to the implementation of the nuclear deal, appear frozen as businesses contemplate how to best proceed amid the uncertainty.

"I have to take mycophenolic acid pills sold under the brand name Suprimon. With the recent tensions and the surging exchange rate, pharmacies seem to be withholding the drugs because they don't know at what rate they should be sold," she told Al-Monitor.

Although Darvish sees mismanagement and corruption as the direct cause of her predicament, she told Al-Monitor that she also believes the situation is an indirect outcome of US sanctions and the fear of an upcoming war. "Only the salespeople might benefit from this situation."

But putting certain well-connected elites aside, small business owners do not appear to be beneficiaries of the present situation. Pouya Khajenasir, a 22-year-old who works in a clothing shop in the city of Qazvin, just over two hour's drive northwest of Tehran, said his sales have dropped dramatically. "I know things are about to get worse with this new fiasco," he told Al-Monitor.

THE UR WAS THE MOST FREE TRADE PRESIDENT EVER:

U.S. sanction power may be reaching its limit https://t.co/uJg3mFxRmk #tictocnews pic.twitter.com/iwE0rhIC0Q

— Zoe Schneeweiss (@ZSchneeweiss) May 22, 2018

NIKKI WILL CARRY A STAGGERING NUMBER OF REPUBLICANS IN WITH HER IN 2020:

After the latest round of changes, Inside Elections now has 68 Republican seats rated as vulnerable compared to just 10 vulnerable Democratic seats. And there are at least a couple dozen more GOP-held seats that could develop into competitive races in the months ahead.

That discrepancy in the playing field is reminiscent of previous "wave" elections. In April 2010, there were 68 vulnerable Democratic House seats and 11 vulnerable Republican seats. Republicans gained 63 seats later than year. And in May 2006, there were 42 vulnerable Republican seats and 11 vulnerable Democratic seats. Six months later, Democrats gained 30 seats.

Of course, just because a seat is vulnerable, it doesn't mean a race is lost. But the larger number of vulnerable seats means Democrats need to win a smaller proportion of the total competitive districts to gain the 23 seats necessary for the majority.

THE VAST-LAW ENFORCEMENT CONSPIRACY:

Mr. Giuliani's deference to Mr. Mueller has not been shared by Mr. Trump, who again accused the special counsel of running an office filled with partisan Democrats with conflicts of interest. But both Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani share a favorite target in James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, who was fired by the president last year and is now one of his most outspoken critics as well as a potential witness against him.

In some ways, that mirrors approaches taken by other politicians who came under fire, including Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton. During Watergate, Mr. Nixon's team dismissed accusations against him as trumped up by a hostile establishment, especially the news media. During the investigation into whether he lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton's team repeatedly assailed the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, and attributed the investigation to what Hillary Clinton called a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Mr. Trump, however, is willing to go further in public than either of those presidents in pressing the law enforcement agencies that report to him to start or end politically charged investigations. And he has more tools to define the narrative the way he sees it. Neither Mr. Nixon nor Mr. Clinton had Twitter to spread the word, nor did they have the same extent of ideologically sympathetic media to echo their viewpoints the way Mr. Trump has Fox News and Breitbart News, among others.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

The Trump administration is working to slash the number of visas granted to Canadian and Mexican professionals as part of ongoing NAFTA negotiations among the three countries.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is leading the push as part of President Donald Trump's "Buy American, Hire American" initiative promised during the 2016 campaign.

CULT OF PERSONALITY:

Bernie Sanders' top operatives formed "Our Revolution" after he lost the 2016 primaries to keep his army organized and motivated -- and potentially prepare for another presidential run in 2020.

But an extensive review of the Sanders-inspired group depicts an organization in disarray -- operating primarily as a promotional vehicle for its leader and sometimes even snubbing candidates aligned with Sanders. Our Revolution has shown no ability to tip a major Democratic election in its favor -- despite possessing Sanders' email list, the envy of the Democratic Party -- and can claim no major wins in 2018 as its own.

The result has left many Sanders supporters disillusioned, feeling that the group that was supposed to harness the senator's grass-roots movement is failing in its mission.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The president, who relies on cellphones to reach his friends and millions of Twitter followers, has rebuffed staff efforts to strengthen security around his phone use, according to the administration officials.

The president uses at least two iPhones, according to one of the officials. The phones -- one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites -- are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency, an office staffed by military personnel that oversees White House telecommunications.

While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was "too inconvenient," the same administration official said.

The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts.

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

At the heart of the on-demand economy is a user that wants choice. Customers today want to pay for the content they like and nothing else. As a result, they are dropping expensive cable packages with hundreds of channels they don't consume for "skinny bundles" with core channels that are much cheaper. (The average American cable package is roughly $92, while the average streaming package is roughly $40.)

They want to watch their favorite shows at any time, on any device. They are looking to technology companies to deliver their content through apps that they can access at any time on their phone, on their smart TV, or laptop. And they expect these apps to store their information, so that they can pick up on a show or series from the exact minute they left off.

This has made users so impatient and distracted, that an estimated 177.7 million U.S. adults --or  70.3% of the total population -- will regularly use another digital device while watching TV this year, up 5.1% from 2016, per eMarketer. A majority of people (58%) say also say they browse the internet while watching video programming, per Nielsen.

Distracted consumers no longer tolerate commercials, which is completely upending the advertising industry. They've become accustomed to on-demand viewing where there are no ads, or digital ads that are highly relevant.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Like many patients with chronic pain, Golson never got a concrete diagnosis. For a decade, the 38-year-old Californian went from doctor to doctor, trying all the standard treatments: opioids, hand splints, cortisone injections, epidural injections, exercises, even elective surgery.

Golson's pain was not caused by anything physically wrong with him. But it wasn't imagined. It was real.

After weaning himself off the opioid Vicodin and feeling like he had exhausted every medical option, Golson turned to a book that described how pain could be purely psychological in origin. That ultimately took a pain psychologist, a therapist who specializes in pain -- not a physician -- to treat the true source: his fearful thoughts. Realizing that psychological therapy could help "was one of the most profoundly surprising experiences of my life," Golson says. No doctor he ever saw "even hinted my pain might be psychogenic," meaning pain that's psychological in origin.

Golson was lucky; few chronic pain patients ever get the chance to understand the psychological dimensions of their pain or try psychological therapies.

There are 100 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain, and an unknown number of them are like Golson, with back pain, neck pain, fibromyalgia symptoms, or other forms of pain that have no diagnosed physical cause.

WINNING THE WAR ON WAGES:

In a case involving the rights of tens of millions of private-sector employees, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, delivered a major blow to workers, ruling for the first time that workers may not band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws. [...]

"The policy may be debatable but the law is clear: Congress has instructed that arbitration agreements like those before us must be enforced as written," Gorsuch writes. "While Congress is of course always free to amend this judgment, we see nothing suggesting it did so in the NLRA -- much less that it manifested a clear intention to displace the Arbitration Act. Because we can easily read Congress's statutes to work in harmony, that is where our duty lies."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

There's now a White House Military Office coin for the upcoming Trump Kim Jong Un summit. The North Korean dictator is referred to as "Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un." pic.twitter.com/tFAmE813Y1

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) May 21, 2018

CORRUPTER-IN-CHIEF:

Q: DO PRESIDENTS OVERSEE INVESTIGATIONS OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT?

A: Definitely not.

Long-standing protocol dictates that the FBI and Justice Department operate free of political influence or meddling from the White House. That's one reason that the FBI director serves a 10-year term and does not turn over the reins as presidential administrations come and go. It also means that presidents are not supposed to supervise, initiate or stop law enforcement investigations.

White House officials and Justice Department lawyers aren't even meant to talk with each other about ongoing criminal investigations or civil enforcement actions, though there is leeway granted for matters of national security, including terrorism.

A 2007 Justice Department memorandum says that though it's important for the Justice Department and White House to communicate freely on many matters, the department will advise the White House of criminal or civil-enforcement matters "only where it is important for the performance of the president's duties and where appropriate from a law enforcement perspective."

"This limitation recognizes the president's ability to perform his constitutional obligation to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed' while ensuring that there is public confidence that the laws of the United States are administered and enforced in an impartial manner," the memo states.

Trump said during the campaign that he would have his attorney general appoint a special prosecutor to look into Clinton, though such an appointment ultimately rests with the attorney general. On Tuesday, he said he was not inclined to continue with an investigation of Clinton "for whatever power I have on the matter."

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump's pick for attorney general, has expressed an appreciation for the independent nature of the job. He asked Loretta Lynch during her confirmation hearing as attorney general last year if she was "able and willing to tell the president of the United States no if he asks permission or a legal opinion that supports an action you believe is wrong?" Lynch said she was.

Q: WHY IS THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT'S INDEPENDENCE SO IMPORTANT?

A: Justice Department officials have long considered it imperative that their investigations not be politicized or tainted by suspicions of interference by the White House or other elected leaders.

Any hint of political meddling could undermine public faith in the legitimacy of an investigation. It could raise the prospect that a person is being investigated, or is being spared from investigation, on the whims of political considerations rather than evidence of guilt or innocence.

Past episodes that have blurred the line between politics and the administration of justice have been fairly disastrous for the government.

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

On May 4, the planned investment by the Chinese company CEFC China Energy into Russian state oil giant Rosneft fell apart, eight months after it was first announced. The tie-up's failure reveals the strict limits on the potential for energy cooperation between China -- which is in the process of taking ownership of CEFC -- and Russia, and with it a broader political alliance between the two countries.

Beijing has come to view Rosneft more as a tool of the Russian state than a traditional oil company, and to the extent the two countries don't share political priorities, China has little interest in any significant economic relationship. Although China is actively searching for new political and economic partners around the world, it seems to have decided the Russian government is too risky a political investment.

DONALD WHO?:

In March, as part of Scott Pruitt's aggressive campaign to roll back federal regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed relaxing standards for storing potentially toxic waste produced by coal-burning power plants.

EPA officials cited a study indicating that forcing utilities to get rid of unlined coal ash ponds too quickly could strain the electrical grid in several regions of the country.

But when environmental advocates scrutinized the specifics, they discovered a problem: The evidence cited was not established scientific research. Instead, the agency was relying on a four-page document by the utility industry's trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, which has acknowledged that its conclusions were not "part of or a summary of a larger study."

Lisa Evans, a lawyer for the group Earthjustice, was among the advocates who seized on that omission, as well as on gaps in technical data and other evidence, to argue that the agency's action was ill-advised and legally flimsy.

"The record does not support the proposal," Evans said, noting that the Obama administration's 2015 requirement on coal ash drew on years of public input and peer-reviewed scientific studies. "I've never seen a rule like this, in terms of the thinness of the evidence."

The coal ash proposal is among the more than half-dozen major EPA moves that have been snagged by procedural and legal problems. The delays threaten to tarnish Pruitt's image as an effective warrior in President Trump's battle against federal regulations, a reputation that has so far saved the EPA administrator his job amid an array of investigations into ethical and management lapses.

WHY DOESN'T DONALD JUST ASK HIS FORGIVENESS...:

[T]he largely social-media-based effort has, at times, put Flynn's advocates, and occasionally Flynn, at odds with his own legal team, which believes that any public attention to Flynn's case is not helpful as he awaits sentencing and has counseled that he and his family to remain quiet. [...]

Flynn was one of the first Trump associates to plead guilty in Mueller's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and he began cooperating with the ongoing investigation. He was initially fired from his top White House post in February 2017, after misleading Vice President Pence about his contacts with Kislyak. [...]

While Flynn's supporters have focused on his guilty plea regarding lying to the FBI, the special counsel's office made clear in a court filing at the time that he was also being investigated for other possible crimes before the deal was struck, including improperly lobbying for Turkey. [...]

But at one point late last year, when it looked as though Flynn might accuse Trump or people close to the president of possible wrongdoing, the president's own legal team readied an attack on his credibility. And many White House aides have privately expressed little sympathy for him, saying choosing Flynn for the top national security post was a mistake from the very beginning. The president, at times, has also called the general "very controversial," according to a senior administration official.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The classic example of a superposition involves firing photons at two parallel slits in a barrier. One fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics is that tiny particles can behave like waves, so that those passing through one slit "interfere" with those going through the other, their wavy ripples either boosting or canceling one another to create a characteristic pattern on a detector screen. The odd thing, though, is this interference occurs even if only one particle is fired at a time. The particle seems somehow to pass through both slits at once, interfering with itself. That's a superposition.

And it gets weirder: Measuring which slit such a particle goes through will invariably indicate it only goes through one--but then the wavelike interference (the "quantumness," if you will) vanishes. The very act of measurement seems to "collapse" the superposition. "We know something fishy is going on in a superposition," says physicist Avshalom Elitzur of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Research. "But you're not allowed to measure it. This is what makes quantum mechanics so diabolical."

WHICH PART OF THIS DEMONSTRATES THE MOST IGNORANCE?:

President Trump, increasingly concerned that his summit meeting in Singapore next month with North Korea's leader could turn into a political embarrassment, has begun pressing his aides and allies about whether he should take the risk of proceeding with a historic meeting that he had leapt into accepting, according to administration and foreign officials.

Mr. Trump was both surprised and angered by a statement issued on Wednesday by the North's chief nuclear negotiator, who declared that the country would never trade away its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for economic aid, administration officials said. The statement, while a highly familiar tactic by the North, represented a jarring shift in tone after weeks of conciliatory gestures.

On Thursday and Friday, Mr. Trump peppered aides with questions about the wisdom of proceeding, and on Saturday night he called President Moon Jae-in of South Korea to ask why the North's public statement seemed to contradict the private assurances that Mr. Moon had conveyed after he met Kim Jong-un, the 35-year-old dictator of the North, at the Demilitarized Zone in late April.

YANKEE THRIFT:

Which Food Does Your State Hate the Most? -- https://t.co/qR8Mf3Y0B3 pic.twitter.com/pzjz7mYAc2

— Mental Floss (@mental_floss) May 20, 2018

WAVING THE WHITE FLAG:

NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE...:

KEEP RUDY SPEAKING AND DONALD TWEETING:

Watergate happened in audio. Bless his patriotic soul, President Nixon generously bugged his own offices and tapped his own phones. It was Nixon's own unmistakable voice, conspiring on dirty tricks and putative obstruction of justice, that checkmated him.

President Trump is also his own wiretap, and he may yet checkmate himself. But he uses another medium, another form of speech and another genre to wreck himself. Trump's chronic self-incrimination -- most of it, anyway -- is not audio; it exists in tweets and on TV.

From his televised request for more Kremlin hacks -- "Russia, if you're listening" -- to his NBC confession that he fired the FBI director to snuff out the Russia investigation, Trump makes sure to get just about every micron of his venality on the record.

And nowhere does he do it more flagrantly than on Twitter. One example: The syntax and content of "No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back)," from last month, was read by the journalist Jonathan Chait and others as a tacit confession that Trump was saying that he did, under the rubric of fighting back, obstruct justice.

But there are also tweets that constitute a kind of trespass in themselves.

Trump had spent much of Sunday railing against the year-old special counsel probe into his campaign, when just after 1:30 p.m., he wrote, "I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes -- and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!"

YEAH, BUT HE'S BEING SPIED ON BY LAW ENFORCEMENT:

In March, the Washington Post reported that Stone had advance knowledge that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange had hacked emails from DNC members including Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta. Stone had publicly predicted that Podesta would face scrutiny before anyone else knew about the emails. He has repeatedly denied that he coordinated with Assange or the Russian hackers.

Mueller's investigators recently subpoenaed two of Stone's associates. Jason Sullivan, a consultant who worked for Stone's pro-Trump PAC and was his social media adviser for four months before the 2016 election, received subpoenas last week for his documents and testimony before a grand jury. John Kakanis, who worked as an accountant, driver, and operative for Stone, has also been served with a subpoena, and has already been questioned by the FBI as part of the Russia investigation.

WHAT'S LEFT TO NEGOTIATE?:

President Trump spoke late Saturday to South Korean President Moon Jae-in amid increasing concerns in the White House that North Korea is not serious about striking a deal on denuclearization, which has complicated planning for the upcoming Singapore summit.

A week in which giants perished. I doubt we shall look upon their likes again.
Tom Wolfe, March 2, 1930 - May 14, 2018.
Richard Pipes, July 11, 1923 - May 17, 2018.
Bernard Lewis, May 31, 1916 - May 19, 2018.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 19, 2018

IT'S IRONIC THIS APPEARED IN COMMENTARY...:

Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed to him only superficially religious phenomena. We find, for example, a great deal of attention given by Western scholarship to the investigation of such meaningless questions as "Was Muhammad Sincere?" or "Was Muhammad an Enthusiast or a Deceiver?" We find lengthy explanations by historians of the "real" underlying significance of the great religious conflicts within Islam between different sects and schools in the past, and a similar determination to penetrate to the "real" meaning of sectarian and communal struggles at the present time. To the modern Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die in such numbers over mere differences of religion; there have to be some other "genuine" reasons underneath the religious veil. We are prepared to allow religiously defined conflicts to accredited eccentrics like the Northern Irish, but to admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary loyalty is too much. Even to suggest such a thing is regarded as offensive by liberal opinion, always ready to take protective umbrage on behalf of those whom it regards as its wards. This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology, the use of which in explaining Muslim political phenomena is about as accurate and as enlightening as an account of a cricket match by a baseball correspondent.

If, then, we are to understand anything at all about what is happening in the Muslim world at the present time and what has happened in the past, there are two essential points which need to be grasped. One is the universality of religion as a factor in the lives of the Muslim peoples, and the other is its centrality.

"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things which are God's." That is, of course, Christian doctrine and practice. It is totally alien to Islam. The three major Middle Eastern religions are significantly different in their relations with the state and their attitudes to political power. Judaism was associated with the state and was then disentangled from it; its new encounter with the state at the present time raises problems which are still unresolved. Christianity, during the first formative centuries of its existence, was separate from and indeed antagonistic to the state with which it only later became involved. Islam from the lifetime of its founder was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience. The founder of Christianity died on the cross, and his followers endured as a persecuted minority for centuries, forming their own society, their own hierarchy, their own laws in an institution known as the Church--until, with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine, there began the parallel processes of the Christianization of Rome and the Romanization of Christ.

In Islam, the process were quite different. Muhammad did not die on the cross. As well as a Prophet, he was a soldier and a statesman, the head of a state and the founder of an empire, and his followers were sustained by a belief in the manifestation of divine approval through success and victory. Islam was associated with power from the very beginning, from the first formative years of the Prophet and his immediate successors. This association between religion and power, community and polity, can already be seen in the Qur'an itself and in the other early religious texts on which Muslims base their beliefs. One consequence is that in Islam religion is not, as it is in Christendom, one sector or segment of life, regulating some matters while others are excluded; it is concerned with the whole of life--not a limited but a total jurisdiction. In such a society the very idea of the separation of church and state is meaningless, since there are no two entities to be separated. Church and state, religious and political authority, are one and the same. In classical Arabic and in the other classical languages of Islam there are no pairs of terms corresponding to lay and ecclesiastical, spiritual and temporal, secular and religious, because these pairs of words express a Christian dichotomy which has no equivalent in the world of Islam.2 It is only in modern times, under Christian influence, that these concepts have begun to appear and that words have been coined to express them. Their meaning is still very imperfectly understood and their relevance to Muslim institutions dubious.

For the Muslim, religion traditionally was not only universal but also central in the sense that it constituted the essential basis and focus of identity and loyalty. It was religion which distinguished those who belonged to the group and marked them off from those outside the group. A Muslim Iraqi would feel far closer bonds with a non-Iraqi Muslim than with a non-Muslim Iraqi. Muslims of different countries, speaking different languages, share the same memories of a common and sacred past, the same awareness of corporate identity, the same sense of a common predicament and destiny. It is not nation or country which, as in the West, forms the historic basis of identity, but the religio-political community, and the imported Western idea of ethnic and territorial nationhood remains, like secularism, alien and incompletely assimilated. The point was made with remarkable force and clarity by a Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire who, in reply to the exponents of the new-style patriotism, replied: "The Fatherland of a Muslim is the place where the Holy Law of Islam prevails." And that was in 1917.

In the 18th century, when, under the impact of Austrian and Russian victories against Turkey and British successes in India, Muslims began to be aware that they were no longer the dominant group in the world but were, on the contrary, threatened in their heartlands by a Europe that was expanding at both ends, the only really vital responses were religious reform movements, such as the Wahhabis in Arabia and the reformed Naqshbandi order which spread from India to other Muslim countries. In the early 19th century, when the three major European empires ruling over Muslims, those of Britain, France, and Russia, were advancing in India, North Africa, and Central Asia, the most significant movements of resistance were again religious--the Indian Wahhabis led by Sayyid Ahmad Brelwi from 1826 to 1831, the struggle of Abd al-Qadir in North Africa from 1832 to 1847, the dogged resistance of Shamil to the Russians in Dagistan and the Northern Caucasus from 1830 to 1859. All of them were crushed, but made a considerable impact at the time.

Then, for a while, Muslims were sufficiently overawed by the power, wealth, and success of Europe to desire to emulate European ways. But from the middle of the 19th century onward came a further wave of European imperial expansion--the suppression of the Indian mutiny followed by the disappearance of the last remnants of the Mogul monarchy in India and the consolidation of the British Empire in that formerly Muslim realm, the rapid advance of the Russians in Central Asia, the expansion of the French into Tunisia and of the British into Egypt, and the growing threat to the Ottoman Empire itself, all of which brought a response in the form of a series of pan-Islamic movements.

The unification of Germany and Italy was a source of inspiration in Muslim lands, particularly in Turkey where many Turkish leaders thought that their country could play a role similar to that of Prussia or Savoy in the unification of Germany and of Italy by serving as the nucleus for the unification of a much larger entity. But what would that larger entity be? Not a pan--Turkish entity. Such ideas were still far away in the future and were not even discussed at that time. The basic political identity and aspiration were Islamic, and pan-Islamism was the first and natural response to pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism. It was not until much later that pan-Turkism and pan-Arabism appeared on the political horizon and, even then, there is some doubt as to what they really signified.

The end of World War I, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the strains and stresses that followed and the opportunities which seemed to be offered by the collapse of Czarism in revolution and civil war also gave rise to a series of religiously inspired movements--Enver Pasha in a last throw formed the ambitiously titled Army of Islam, the objective of which was to liberate the Muslim subject peoples of the fallen Russian Empire. Some of these movements were linked with the Communists or taken over by the Communists at a time when the fundamentally anti-Islamic nature of Communism was not yet understood. Almost all were expressed in religious rather than in national or even social terms. Most significant among these movements was that which has since come to be known as the Turkish Nationalist Movement. Yet the revolt of the Kemalists in Anatolia was in its first inspiration as much Islamic as Turkish. Islamic men of religion formed an impressive proportion of its early leaders and followers. The language used at the time, the rhetoric of the Kemalists in this early stage, speaks of Ottoman Muslims rather than of Turks, and the movement commanded a great deal of support in the Islamic world. It was not until after their victory and after the establishment of the republic that, as a result of many factors, they began to lay the main stress on nationalist and secular aims.

During the 20th century, at least in the earlier decades, such movements of resistance were more commonly expressed in the fashionable form of political parties and in the fashionable language of political, more or less secular, nationalism. But neither the party organization nor the nationalist ideology really corresponded to the deeper instincts of the Muslim masses, which found an outlet in programs and organizations of a different kind--led by religious leaders and formulated in religious language and aspiration.

CONSERVATISM IS PREACTIONARY:

Well researched and brilliantly argued though it was, Robin's thesis on conservatism presupposes a far-left conception of history that few people would feel comfortable endorsing. This is The Reactionary Mind's great shortcoming. To accept Robin's interpretation of conservatism requires one to accept his interpretation of history, which, as we will see, is morally questionable and inattentive to counter-evidence.

So what, exactly, does the Robin conception of history entail? Robin explains that ever since the Enlightenment, the Left has inaugurated great movements of "emancipatory politics." Leftist movements have struggled on behalf of the oppressed and the downtrodden against entrenched power structures and their rightist apologists. Modern history for Robin, then, is the tale of an unceasing leftist struggle to defeat the Right; presumably, once that defeat is accomplished, human societies can finally set themselves to the task of turning capitalist depravity into socialist utopia.

In theory, Robin's view of history might not sound so bad. In practice it is appalling: In his book we learn that his examples of leftist "movements for emancipation" include the French Revolution, "the nineteenth century's movements against slavery and on behalf of workers," the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the leftist activism of the 1930s.

Except for the case of abolition, which wasn't a cause of the Left but of the religious Right (more on this in a moment), those are some rather peculiar examples of liberationist movements. Indeed, who today but the most recalcitrant Marxist can take seriously the description of the French and Bolshevik revolutions as emancipatory movements? It is true that Russia and France saw ghoulish monarchs overthrown by popular uprisings; it is also true that both countries descended into dictatorships far more barbaric than the ones they replaced. To call the French and Russian revolutions emancipatory is to ignore Jacobin terror and Leninist tyranny.

And what is one to make of the suggestion that the Left was fighting for "emancipation" in the 1930s? One wonders which Left Robin is referencing. The 1930s were the peak of both Stalinist crimes and of all the leftist apologetics for them. As the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm chronicles in The Age of Extremes, leftist conduct in the 1930s and early '40s could hardly have been more unprincipled. Against the fascist threat, European and American Communists switched from supporting capitalist countries (the U.S. and the U.K.) to supporting Nazi Germany when it allied itself with Stalin's Russia in their joint mission to obliterate Poland. Then the Western Communists switched again, this time to oppose Germany . . . but only when and because it had invaded the Soviet Union!

Some politics of emancipation.

It is important to bear in mind not just that Robin's implicit approval of far-Left movements and governments is morally questionable but that it is indispensable to the arguments of The Reactionary Mind. His theory of conservatism is grounded in an interpretation of violent, revolutionary irruptions as "emancipatory" and of counterrevolutionary thought and practice as "oppressive." Remove that interpretation of history and his thesis collapses. 

THE MOST DIFFICULT SPORT JUST KEEPS GETTING HARDER:

Jordan Hicks, Ridiculous 103mph Sinker movement. 😳🔥 pic.twitter.com/Jc5J8kKTFw

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) May 19, 2018

A BUTTER KNIFE TO A GUN FIGHT:

After months of taking hits from the United States over North Korea policy and trade, Japan has decided that it will only be pushed so far, and is threatening to punch back.

On Friday, Japan notified the World Trade Organization that it was reserving the right to impose retaliatory tariffs against the United States in response to tariffs on steel and aluminum imports proposed by President Trump.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

THE WOGS START AT 1633:

His inability to see or feel the world as they do is shared by many Americans.

That includes some of my fellow Vietnamese-Americans, who, though they came to this country as refugees fleeing war, are saying that the United States should not take in any more refugees, especially those from places like Syria. Some, like the Vietnamese-American mayor of Westminster, Calif., home to the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam, even say the United States should not accept any undocumented immigrants, since they include "criminals."

We were the good refugees, the reasoning goes. These new ones are the bad refugees.

Having grown up in the Vietnamese refugee community in San Jose, Calif., in the 1970s and 1980s, I can testify that there were plenty of bad refugees among us. Welfare cheating. Insurance scams. Cash under the table. Gang violence, with home invasions being a Vietnamese specialty.

All that has been forgotten. Vietnamese-Americans are now part of the "model minority" who believe they earned their success, relying on little or no government assistance. They are not so different from Mr. Kelly, the descendant of Irish and Italian immigrants who included unskilled laborers speaking little English. Convenient amnesia about one's origins is an all-American trait, since we believe ourselves to be the country in which everyone gets a new beginning.

What some of us also forget is that at nearly every stage of our country's history, the people who were already established as American citizens found convenient targets to designate as unable to assimilate: the indigenous peoples; conquered Mexicans; slaves; or the newest immigrants, who were usually classified as nonwhite.

In 1751, even before the country was founded, Benjamin Franklin wrote that "perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country, for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind." He favored "the English" and "white people," and did not want Pennsylvania to become a "colony of aliens," who "will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion." He was speaking of the Germans.

German-Americans are now "white," which is partly a color, partly a state of mind and partly a matter of perception. The eventual whiteness of German-Americans saved them from being thrown en masse into internment camps during World War II, unlike Japanese-Americans. With historical lessons like that, it's no surprise that some Vietnamese-Americans desire to put their refugee past behind them, including the memory of how only 36 percent of Americans wanted to accept Vietnamese refugees in 1975.

IF ONLY THIS WERE THE BOTTOM:

"I know some have strong feelings about gun rights but I want you to know I've hit rock bottom and I am not interested in your views as it pertains to this issue," he wrote. "Please do not post anything about guns aren't the problem and there's little we can do. My feelings won't be hurt if you de-friend me and I hope yours won't be if you decide to post about your views and I de-friend you." [...]

In his Facebook post, which had elicited more than 16,000 reactions as of late Saturday, Chief Acevedo said the days after the shooting were a time for "the asking of God's forgiveness for our inaction." He specifically called out "the elected officials that ran to the cameras today, acted in a solemn manner, called for prayers, and will once again do absolutely nothing."

"I will continue to speak up and will stand up for what my heart and my God commands me to do, and I assure you he hasn't instructed me to believe that gun rights are bestowed by him," he wrote. "The hatred being spewed in our country and the new norms we, so-called people of faith, are accepting, is as much to blame for so much of the violence in our once pragmatic Nation."

Chief Acevedo, who took office in 2016, leads a department of more than 5,000 officers in the fourth-largest city in the United States. Under his direction, officers have rarely asked  detainees about their immigration status, despite a Texas immigration law that bans so-called sanctuary cities.

"Policing is all about relationships, and my job is, if these people are going to live in our city, is build those relationships," he said last year at The New York Times's Cities for Tomorrow conference. "We're taking the lead in the cities to try to make the best of really bad politics, really bad policy."

The pace of new voter registrations among young people in crucial states is accelerating, a signal that school shootings this year -- and the anger and political organizing in their wake -- may prove to be more than ephemeral displays of activism.

HE HAD TO DESTROY THE VILLAGE TO SAVOR IT:

U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear accord and re-impose sanctions on Tehran threatens to derail a project to help build Afghanistan's economy, endangering a key goal of the U.S. strategy to end America's longest war.

The Indian-backed Chabahar port complex in Iran is being developed as part of a new transportation corridor for land-locked Afghanistan that could potentially open the way for millions of dollars in trade and cut its dependence on Pakistan, its sometimes-hostile neighbor.

Building Afghanistan's economy would also slash Kabul's dependence on foreign aid and put a major dent in the illicit opium trade, the Taliban's main revenue source.

MANAGING SITUATIONS:

Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash's unconventional decision to use a back-of-the-bullpen reliever to start the team's game worked so well on Saturday that he plans to do it again Sunday.

According to Cash, righty Sergio Romo, who started Saturday's win over the Los Angeles Angels, will start again Sunday.

THE WILBERFORCE IS STRONG IN THIS ONE:

A thousand-year-old English castle echoed with the exhortations of an African-American bishop and a gospel choir on Saturday, as Prince Harry wed Meghan Markle, an American actress, nudging the British royal family into a new era.

Ms. Markle, who has long identified herself as a feminist, entered St. George's Chapel alone rather than being given away by her father or any other man, a departure from tradition that in itself sent a message to the world. She was met halfway by Prince Charles, her future father-in-law and presumably the future king of Britain.

Prince Harry, who is sixth in line for the throne, has long called on Britain's monarchy to draw closer to the daily life of its people. But the most extraordinary thing he has done is to marry Ms. Markle, an American actress who is three years his senior, biracial, divorced and vocal about her views. Their choices at the wedding, many of them heavily influenced by black culture, made clear they plan to project a more inclusive monarchy.

In a time of tribalism and separation, it was a clear move toward an integrated modern future from the oldest of houses. Seated directly opposite Queen Elizabeth II was Ms. Markle's mother, Doria Ragland, the descendant of slaves on plantations in the American South. [...]

A gospel choir sang the Ben E. King song "Stand By Me," and the couple exited to the rousing civil rights anthem "This Little Light of Mine."

In short, it was not your average royal wedding. Among the throngs who filled the streets of Windsor on Saturday were black women who had flown in from Houston and Atlanta, moved, sometimes to tears, to see a woman of color so publicly adored.

"One of the children of slaves is marrying a royal whose forerunners sanctioned slavery; the lion is lying down with the lamb," said Denise Crawford, a court stenographer from Brooklyn.

BRONZE!:

New poll from Germany: 14% of Germans consider the United States to be a reliable partner. In comparison, 36% of Germans think Russia is a reliable partner. Tough to overstate how bad this is. pic.twitter.com/zvZpz4CI4d

— Marcel Dirsus (@marceldirsus) May 18, 2018

EVEN DECENT COMMUNISTS QUIT AFTER THE MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT:

Some day, when the Trump administration is over and the true extent of its corruption has become part of the public record, the right-wing website The Federalist and its leading promoters and writers (especially Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway) will receive proper recognition for the significant and distinctive contribution they made to polluting the waters of American public life.

Along with Sean Hannity's prime time show on Fox News, the House Intelligence Committee under Devin Nunes, and the president's own lie-filled Twitter feed, The Federalist is a leading disseminator of pro-Trump conspiracies and up-is-down, funhouse-mirror distortions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and potential Trump involvement. [...]

The latest example of this inverted political reality occurred this week, in The Federalist's coverage of the long article published Wednesday in The New York Times about how the FBI concealed its early investigation of four affiliates of the Trump campaign (Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos) while being far more publicly transparent about its investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server practices during her time as secretary of state.

To most people reading this story, its point was plain: The FBI behaved in a way that was deeply unfair to the Clinton camp, which had to contend with a constant stream of stories about the email investigation, including it being briefly reopened (and then closed again) less than two weeks before Election Day. The Trump campaign, by contrast, not only faced no such bad press but even enjoyed a (now notorious, because false) front-page Times story in late October 2016 that actively denied it was under investigation at all.

It's hard to conclude anything other than that the FBI made things much harder for the Clinton campaign while simultaneously protecting the Trump campaign (out of a fear that the implications of the Trump-campaign investigation were so grave that publicizing them before the election could fatally damage it).

But for The Federalist, this isn't the takeaway from the Times story at all. 

HOW DISRUPTIVE ARE SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

This new paper explores how 3D printers will affect personal, national, and international security: https://t.co/Aolwn22wXl #Security2040

— RAND Corporation (@RANDCorporation) May 19, 2018

THE MAN WHO EXPLAINED...:

Dr. Lewis had no qualms about hard-edge policies toward the Middle East, once famously advising "get tough or get out," in what some have dubbed the Lewis Doctrine. He repeatedly denied that he backed the invasion of Iraq, saying he advocated for greater aid to Western-allied Kurds in northern Iraq as a counterweight to the Baghdad regime.

"For some, I'm the towering genius," Dr. Lewis told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2012. "For others, I'm the devil incarnate."

But what stood out for many, especially in an age of borderless violence, was Dr. Lewis's premise of inevitable friction and competition between the Islamic and Western worlds -- particularly as Islamist militants and other groups exert more influence. He revived his earlier phrase "clash of civilizations" in an article, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," in 1990, two years before it was popularized by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington.

Dr. Lewis further argued that the Middle East's troubles were mostly self-inflicted and were not simply inherited ills from colonialism or outside meddling. He praised Islam as a great faith but fretted that it was being hijacked by intolerance and anger.

"He provided intellectual scaffolding for the belief that something was very wrong with Arab societies" and that U.S. support should remain squarely behind Israel, Jacob Heilbrunn, author of "They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons," told the Jewish American magazine Moment in 2011.

Beyond the polarizing arguments in which he was swept up, Dr. Lewis was a man of expansive intellectual appetites.

He immersed himself in topics as varied as Sufi mystic poetry and intricacies of Islamic law. Step by step, he crafted a style that combined a professor's gravitas, a pundit's wit and a patrician's confidence, despite his upbringing outside England's upper crust as the son of a modestly successful Jewish real estate agent and a housewife.

And, like his subjects and prose, Dr. Lewis defied easy definition.

He was, at times, an academic sleuth, poring over ancient Arabic volumes or poking through lonely archives in Turkey. He could quickly shift to become a commentator on present-day issues such as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood ("dangerous"), aspects of Saudi Arabia's Salafist brand of Islam ("extreme and fanatical") and Iran's theocracy ("encourage resistance").

In his works -- including back-to-back bestsellers after the 9/11 attacks, "What Went Wrong?" (2002) and "The Crisis of Islam" (2003) -- Dr. Lewis increasingly courted a mass audience. He sought to explain Muslim views, but also scolded Western leaders for failing to grasp the reach of groups such as al-Qaeda.

"Osama bin Laden made me famous," he once quipped.

His tone grew more serious in subsequent years as he warned that the Middle East may increasingly breed radicalism and anti-Western fervor. "Either we bring them freedom or they destroy us," he wrote in a 2010 book, "Faith and Power."

B TEAM A LISTER:

Professor Pipes, who spent his entire academic career at Harvard, took his place in the front rank of Russian historians with the publication of "Russia Under the Old Regime" in 1974. But he achieved much wider renown as a public intellectual deeply skeptical about the American policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

In 1976, he led a group of military and foreign-policy experts, known as Team B, in an ultimately pessimistic analysis of the Soviet Union's military strategy and foreign policy and the threats they posed to the United States.

The group's report, commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency as a counterweight to an analysis that had been generated by the C.I.A.'s own experts -- Team A -- helped galvanize conservative opposition to arms-control talks and accommodation with the Soviet Union. And it set the stage for Ronald Reagan's policy of challenging Soviet foreign policy and seeking to undermine its hold over Eastern Europe.

While writing ambitious histories of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime, Professor Pipes continued his campaign for a tougher foreign policy toward the Soviet Union in the late 1970s as a member of the neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger and as director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs for President Reagan's National Security Council.

Despite this public role, he regarded himself, first and foremost, as a historian of Russian history, politics and culture -- a field in which he performed with great distinction. A forceful, stylish writer with a sweeping view of history, Professor Pipes covered nearly 600 years of the Russian past in "Russia Under the Old Regime," abandoning chronology and treating his subject by themes, such as the peasantry, the church, the machinery of state and the intelligentsia.

WE RECOGNIZE OUR MISTAKE:

[Y]es, we did fight a revolution to gain our independence from Britain; but our quarrel was with Parliament, not with the reigning monarch of the day. (Indeed, many Founders had hoped that King George III might be sympathetic to their grievances, and petitioned him to intervene with Parliament on their behalf.)

 

For that matter, if anyone doubts that Americans are susceptible to the lure of constitutional monarchy, they need only contemplate the status and trappings of the modern presidency. When Senator Mitch McConnell strides into a room, the Marine Band does not strike up "Hail to the Majority Leader." And so far as I am aware, no one outside the John Roberts household refers to the wife of the chief justice of the United States as "First Lady."

Something in and around Buckingham Palace fulfills a need still lurking in the American consciousness.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE...:

It wasn't that long ago that both the executive branch and the legislature in this country considered the protection of intelligence sources a matter of surpassing national importance.

During the 1970s, a renegade former CIA officer named Philip Agee went on a campaign of outing agency sources and covert operatives. Agee spent decades in exile, and an appalled Congress responded in 1982 by passing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which criminalized the knowing and intentional outing of U.S. covert operatives and intelligence sources whom the government is taking active steps to protect.

More recently, a lot of people, including one of the current authors, objected strenuously to the activities of Edward Snowden. Snowden didn't disclose the names of human sources--just programmatic intelligence information. Yet he has been camped out in Moscow since the leak, unable to return to the United States for fear of the prosecution that would surely await him. Similarly, Julian Assange does not leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London for fear of arrest over his own activities. While both men have their supporters, we have never considered their jeopardy an injustice.

But what happens when the intentional outing of U.S. intelligence assets is the province not of rogue insiders, not of foreign hackers or foreign agents, not of people who end up spending the rest of their lives as fugitives, but of senior officials in two branches of this country's government who are most responsible for protecting those assets? To wit, what happens when the Chairman of the House intelligence committee and the President of the United States team up to out an FBI informant over the strenuous objection of the bureau and the Department of Justice--and manage to get the job done? And what happens when they do so for frankly political reasons: to protect the president from a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation involving the activity of an adversary foreign power?

These questions should be the stuff of conspiratorial Hollywood movies. They are, in fact, the stuff of this week's news.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE (profanity alert):

A Mariachi band triumphantly played at a protest Friday outside the home of the Midtown lawyer caught on camera hurling racist insults at Spanish-speaking restaurant workers.

More than 100 people gathered in front of Aaron Schlossberg's abode on West 60th Street near 10th Avenue to wave signs, chant "Ole, Ole! Throw him out!" and feast on free tacos.

"We're basically clapping back at this fool," said Chris Thompson, 40, an electrical engineer from Manhattan, who believes the lawyer should be disbarred.

OPEN THE BORDERS, WE'LL TAKE MORE:

Bhutan native Tika Acharya came to the U.S. nine years ago with his parents and his wife after spending 17 years in a Nepal refugee camp. The 40-year-old father graduated from college in India and has a degree in business, but he was turned down by banks when he approached them about starting a company of his own.

Acharya, who launched an independent insurance agency last year in Manchester, was the first participant to be helped by the Regional Economic Development Center, a New Hampshire nonprofit that helps first-generation immigrants achieve their American Dream of becoming business owners by providing them with microloans and technical assistance.

"In just one year, we've been able to gain close to 1,000 customers," Acharya said.

The nonprofit on Friday unveiled a statewide economic program called the New Hampshire New Americans Loan Fund, which provides small-business loans for $50,000 or less. It also brings in experts to act as advisers to the businesses during their first two to three years, helping with website design, marketing and accounting.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

When 20-year-old Khamzat Azimov went on a deadly stabbing spree in Paris this month, a May 12 attack claimed by the Islamic State (IS) extremist group, details about his upbringing caught the attention of psychoanalyst and counterterrorism expert Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin. [...]

"The problem is that these terrorists are coming from shame-honor cultures, which are dysfunctional by definition," Kobrin explains.

"Their reservoir of rage arises from problems nested in early maternal attachment in shame-honor cultures -- the early mother-infant bonding attachment, the first relationship in life," Kobrin says. [...]

Infants in shame-honor cultures, she says, are also often treated like objects and learn to repress their feelings to the point that internal rage can boil within.

Making matters worse, Kobrin says, women in shame-honor cultures are also often devalued, objectified, or even physically abused.

"Women who are abused also become full of rage," Kobrin says, noting that subconscious reactions of young mothers to abuse seriously impact a child's early development.

The first four years of a child's life is a crucial time when most infants develop empathy for other human beings, she says, adding that the lack of empathy and concern for the pain that terrorists cause to others is "almost worse than the terrorist attacks themselves."

[I] have spent years researching a major field of psychology known as attachment theory for a book. According to the science of attachment--developed in the second half of the 20th century by British psychotherapist John Bowlby--we're hardwired at birth to attach to a competent and reliable caregiver for protection because we are born helpless. The success or failure of this attachment affects all our relationships throughout life--in the workplace, on the athletic field, with loved ones--and yes, even in politics. Children who bond successfully with a primary caregiver--usually this is the mom but it could also be the dad, grandparent, nanny or other adult--grow up with what is termed a "secure" attachment. As adults, they tend to be confident, trusting of others, resilient in the face of setbacks, and able to enjoy long, stable relationships. Children who fail to achieve a successful attachment, on the other hand, may as adults have a lack of comfort with intimacy, difficulty trusting others, a constant need for reassurance from relationship partners, and a lack of resilience when faced with illness, injury or loss.

The biographical record is fairly strong on Trump's failure to develop a healthy emotional attachment to either of his parents. It may have contributed to his tumultuous personal life, but it also endowed him with some traits that made him well-suited to his late-career entry in politics.

Donald Trump is the fourth of five children of Fred and Mary Trump. Because his father was busy building a real estate business, and it was the mid-20th century when dads didn't typically do a lot of early child care, his mother cared for the children (with the help of a live-in maid) and was their primary "attachment figure." What factors may have affected the quality of young Donald's early care--his own temperament as an infant; the role, if any, of the family's maid in child care; the demands on his mother's time and energy of three older children and a subsequent pregnancy--we don't know. The president's own writings are largely silent about his early childhood; journalists and biographers fill in only some of the blanks.

But we do know that Mary Trump became seriously ill from complications during labor with her last child. An emergency hysterectomy and subsequent infections and surgeries followed--four in two weeks, one of her oldest daughters once said. As a result, at just two years and two months of age, Trump endured the trauma of the prolonged absence and life-threatening illness of his mother. It's not clear how long she was incapacitated. Indeed, we don't know that she ever really re-engaged with her son. According to a Politico Magazine story on Mary Trump, there's evidence that Mary and her son didn't interact much during his childhood (more on this later).

Infants who fail to receive that kind of care usually fall into one of two categories as adults. Either they have what's called attachment anxiety--leading them as adults to crave intimacy but have difficulty trusting others and constantly seeking reassurance--or they have attachment avoidance, where as adults they generally distrust others and convince themselves they don't need close relationships. The relationships they do have are often unstable. They also tend to be excessively self-reliant and desire a high level of independence. These last two traits--self-reliance and independence--are not necessarily disadvantageous, of course. They might be just the right recipe, for example, for an entrepreneur.

IT CAN'T GO MUSLIM FAST ENOUGH:

ROZHDESTVENO, Russia -- Nazim Soliev is confident that he's good for Russia.

Or more specifically, the 35-year-old native of Tajikistan, the most impoverished of Central Asia's five former Soviet republics, says his presence here, 200 kilometers northwest of Moscow, is good for his adopted homeland.

"'Better you than the Chinese,' that's what my ex-boss told me," the small-framed Soliev says between double shifts as a stoker at the village school, earning him around $250 a month, nearly twice the average Tajik wage.

The "you" is a reference to Soliev, who speaks fluent Russian and also routinely quotes ancient Persian thinker Omar Khayyam's poems in Farsi, a linguistic sibling of his mother tongue, and 46 other families whose resettlement from Tajikistan over the past decade almost doubled Rozhdestveno's aging population of about 200.

Half of the students in Soliev's school are their raven-haired children, and their wives, in long skirts and head scarves, shop for groceries at a store next to the Orthodox church.

The arrival to urban centers and the countryside of Soliev and millions of other mostly Muslim labor migrants from Central Asia is at the center of what could emerge as Russia's most radical ethnic makeover in centuries.

THEY'RE ASSUMING HE MEANT THE FIRST LADY...:

YEAH, BUT HILLARY USED AN ANCIENT BLACKBERRY!:

Three months before the 2016 election, a small group gathered at Trump Tower to meet with Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son. One was an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation. Another was an emissary for two wealthy Arab princes. The third was a Republican donor with a controversial past in the Middle East as a private security contractor.

The meeting was convened primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over the coming months -- past the election and well into President Trump's first year in office, according to several people with knowledge of their encounters.

Erik Prince, the private security contractor and the former head of Blackwater, arranged the meeting, which took place on Aug. 3, 2016. The emissary, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. that the crown princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president. 

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

The European Commissioner for Energy and Climate, Miguel Arias Canete, delivered the message during a visit to Tehran and also said the 28-nation EU, once the biggest importer of Iranian oil, hoped to boost trade with Iran.

"We have sent a message to our Iranian friends that as long as they are sticking to the (nuclear) agreement the Europeans will... fulfill their commitment. And they said the same thing on the other side," Canete told a news conference.

"We will try to intensify our flows of trade that have been very positive for the Iranian economy."

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

When Hart asked the [focus group of 12 voters in a Milwaukee suburb, conducted for Emory University] for a word or phrase to describe Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, who is gravely ill in his Arizona home, it was not surprising that the answers included positives -- "war hero," "patriot," "strong," "very ethical" and "smart" -- reflecting the more than 3 in 5 Americans, according to impartial surveys, who view McCain favorably.

But committed Donald Trump voters in the group were harsh indeed when it came to McCain. To Betsy Novak, 55, who works in a greenhouse, he is "petty," which was the word also used by Randy Cera, 52, a self-employed insurance agent. To 66-year-old machinist Stephen Romanowski, McCain is a "turncoat," while to shipping and receiving manager Curt Hetzel, 48, McCain is, at 81, "too old."

As Hart, who has conducted hundreds of similar focus groups to find out how voters feel personally about political figures and the issues facing the country, noted afterward, "partisan America is alive and well in Wisconsin." He added: "If anybody has a doubt about how solid the Trump core is, come listen to this group. They couldn't even find a nice word to say about John McCain." [...]

Sadly, even an authentic American hero who is almost certainly on his deathbed is not given the benefit of the doubt and instead is the target of political invective from fellow Republicans.

MARX/DARWIN/FREUD:

Frederick Crews pioneered psychoanalytic literary criticism in the 1960s. By 1980 he had concluded that Sigmund Freud was a charlatan. Now professor emeritus at Berkeley, he has devoted much of his career to debunking Freud, taking shots along the way at the whole repertoire of postmodern literary fads. In Freud: The Making of an Illusion he has given us a summa contra psychoanalysis, digesting the enormous literature refuting Freud and adding some of his own discoveries and conjectures. So overwhelming is the evidence Crews assembles of Freud's professional charlatanry and personal turpitude that the reader finishes his book baffled that this prevaricating, mercenary, self-promoting lout ever managed to put one over on the whole educated world. [...]

Crews's lengthy book never lags. So depraved is Freud's villainy, so preposterous his assertions, so calamitous the human woe he left behind in his pursuit of status and money, that morbid curiosity commands the reader's attention until the end. It is an exemplary piece of polemical composition. No one who came of age in the West before the mid-1980s escaped Freud's baleful influence, and it is cathartic (pardon the word) to hear just how gullible we were.

Freud didn't heal his patients. He knew he didn't, but he didn't care:

Freud knew that his claims of healing power for psychoanalysis lacked any basis in fact. From time to time he even intimated, amid many claims to the contrary, that patients ought not to expect good results. Therapeutic success, he wrote in his "Little Hans" case history of 1909, "is not our primary aim. We endeavor rather to enable the patient to obtain a conscious grasp of his unconscious wishes." In a 1912 letter to a fellow analyst he observed, "The therapeutic point of view...is certainly not the only one for which psychoanalysis claims interest, nor is it the most important." Freud's pupil Abram Kardiner recalled his declaring, "I have no great interest in therapeutic problems.... I am much too occupied with theoretical problems all the time." Finally in 1932, when he felt himself to be generally revered, he admitted to the world that he had "never been a therapeutic enthusiast."

"Some of Freud's later patients did aver, vaguely, that they had benefited from their analyses," Crews allows. "Already by 1910, such was his shamanic aura that a stroll around the city of Leyden with Gustav Mahler was said to have permanently cured the composer of impotence. But this was faith healing, not psychoanalysis."

Freud's methods did no good. They sometimes did a great deal of harm. Especially repugnant was his treatment of "Anna O." (Bertha Pappenheim) in 1880-1882, presented in Freudian apologetics as "the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy," the first supposed cathartic cure reported in Freud's Studies on Hysteria (1895).

Freud's coauthor Josef Breuer, who treated Pappenheim, turned the unfortunate young woman into a morphine and chloral hydrate addict. Crews concludes that "her most serious debility, as of the summer of 1882, and for five years thereafter, wasn't hysteria but the horror of attempted and failed withdrawal." Freud and Breuer claimed in Studies on Hysteria that Pappenheim's symptoms were "permanently removed by being given utterance in hypnosis," yet Pappenheim was committed to a sanatorium only five weeks after Breuer stopped treating her.

* * *

The Pappenheim case was "the founding deception of psychoanalysis"--the breakthrough that supposedly unlocked the psyche's secrets. The final chapter of Studies on Hysteria, Crews reports, declared that

the resistance encountered in therapy was "no doubt" the same psychical force that had generated the patient's symptom. Again the intrusion of irrelevant matter into a patient's association "never occurs." When we search for a trauma with the pressure technique, "we shall find it infallibly." The procedure "never fails;" it has "invariably achieved its aim;" and in one instance Freud's confidence in it was "brilliantly justified."

Crews contrasts these bravado assertions with Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, his closest friend and collaborator during 1897 and 1898: "The cases of hysteria are proceeding especially poorly. I shall not finish a single one this year either; and as for the next one, I shall be completely without patient material." And: "My work now appears to me to have far less value, and my disorientation to be complete,...another entire year has gone by without any tangible progress in the theory."

Freud's crisis of confidence, though, inspired a great leap from the world of clinical documentation--where nothing ever went right--to the grand assertion of theories that could not be proven. He abandoned the molestation theory of neurosis, which required the identification of specific sexual acts perpetrated upon the patient during childhood, to a general theory of sexuality that framed all human relationships in terms of libido. The Oedipus complex was the cornerstone of this new theory.

WHO'S STILL SURPRISED AT DONALD/NUNES AIDING VLAD?:

If you follow right-wing media, he's basically already been named. In other words, he's blown, and I just hope the FBI was able to button things up before anyone was put in harm's way. This has been such outrageous conduct by Trump and his enablers. https://t.co/wtaqIzG7s9

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 19, 2018

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

Stunning: More American kids have been killed in shootings at their schools this year than U.S. military personnel while on duty https://t.co/5ZKfaqgbEX @pbump #SantaFe #Texas pic.twitter.com/23jyCVERTX

— David Beard (@dabeard) May 18, 2018

WELL REGULATED MILITIA?

This devastating map shows every school shooting since 1999--and it will just keep updating https://t.co/LnXgIEe1xk

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) May 18, 2018

WHAT DONALD MEANS BY ANIMALS:

About two-thirds of the nearly 80,000 immigrants arrested by ICE agents between October 2017 and March 2018 had no criminal convictions, HuffPost reported. The number of arrests has ticked up, but deportations decreased slightly.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

At the end of the eighteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck noted that life on earth had evolved over long periods of time into a striking variety of organisms. He sought to explain how they had become more and more complex. Living organisms not only evolved, Lamarck argued; they did so very slowly, "little by little and successively." In Lamarckian theory, animals became more diverse as each creature strove toward its own "perfection," hence the enormous variety of living things on earth. Man is the most complex life form, therefore the most perfect, and is even now evolving.

In Lamarck's view, the evolution of life depends on variation and the accumulation of small, gradual changes. These are also at the center of Darwin's theory of evolution, yet Darwin wrote that Lamarck's ideas were "veritable rubbish." Darwinian evolution is driven by genetic variation combined with natural selection--the process whereby some variations give their bearers better reproductive success in a given environment than other organisms have.1 Lamarckian evolution, on the other hand, depends on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Giraffes, for example, got their long necks by stretching to eat leaves from tall trees, and stretched necks were inherited by their offspring, though Lamarck did not explain how this might be possible.

When the molecular structure of DNA was discovered in 1953, it became dogma in the teaching of biology that DNA and its coded information could not be altered in any way by the environment or a person's way of life. The environment, it was known, could stimulate the expression of a gene. Having a light shone in one's eyes or suffering pain, for instance, stimulates the activity of neurons and in doing so changes the activity of genes those neurons contain, producing instructions for making proteins or other molecules that play a central part in our bodies.

The structure of the DNA neighboring the gene provides a list of instructions--a gene program--that determines under what circumstances the gene is expressed. And it was held that these instructions could not be altered by the environment. Only mutations, which are errors introduced at random, could change the instructions or the information encoded in the gene itself and drive evolution through natural selection. Scientists discredited any Lamarckian claims that the environment can make lasting, perhaps heritable alterations in gene structure or function.

But new ideas closely related to Lamarck's eighteenth-century views have become central to our understanding of genetics. [...]

Until the mid-1970s, no one suspected that the way in which the DNA was "read" could be altered by environmental factors, or that the nervous systems of people who grew up in stress-free environments would develop differently from those of people who did not. One's development, it was thought, was guided only by one's genetic makeup. As a result of epigenesis, a child deprived of nourishment may continue to crave and consume large amounts of food as an adult, even when he or she is being properly nourished, leading to obesity and diabetes. A child who loses a parent or is neglected or abused may have a genetic basis for experiencing anxiety and depression and possibly schizophrenia. Formerly, it had been widely believed that Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms--variation and natural selection--were the only means for introducing such long-lasting changes in brain function, a process that took place over generations. We now know that epigenetic mechanisms can do so as well, within the lifetime of a single person.

THANKS, JERRY:

California added 39,300 net new jobs in April, as the unemployment rate fell from 4.3% to a new record low of 4.2%, according to data released Friday by the state Employment Development Department. [...]

In April, the U.S. unemployment rate fell below 4% for the first time since 2000, but wages rose only slightly faster than inflation -- up 2.6% from a year earlier. In California, average hourly earnings climbed even slower, rising 2.3% from a year earlier to $30.65 in April.

JUST ANOTHER COMMODITY:

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

Israel has systematically deprived Palestinians of their human rights, with 1.9 million in Gaza "caged in a toxic slum from birth to death", U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said on Friday. [...]

"Nobody has been made safer by the horrific events of the past week," he said. "End the occupation, and the violence and insecurity will largely disappear."

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

There is a wide and growing disparity between rural and urban core voters, but the suburbs remain roughly evenly divided. They are also demographically ascendant, as both rural areas and urban cores stagnate. The majority of Americans even in the metropolitan areas of over a million, upwards of 85 percent, live in low to moderate density, overwhelmingly automobile oriented, compared to under 15 percent in and around the urban core. More importantly, the suburban share continues to increase, as evidenced in last year's Census estimates.

Suburban residents are more likely than urban core residents or aging rural residents to have children, nearly twice as likely to be homeowners and be part of the country's large, albeit beleaguered, middle class. They represent a far larger portion of the population in red-leaning metro areas, like Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and Kansas City than in the older "legacy" regions like New York, San Francisco, Boston or Chicago, where the urban core population represents a far larger share. People with suburban lifestyles, for example, account for more than 95 percent of people in the Atlanta area but slightly less than 50 percent in New York and 75 percent in Chicago. [...]

Given their diversity, suburban voters are hard to categorize. As property owners and families, they would tend to like maintaining their way of life; despite the Hollywood accounts, Pew finds, suburbanites are more satisfied with their place of residence than either country folk or city-dwellers. 

SHE'S NO IVANKA:

Gates explained that he first met Trump in December 2016, but Trump had met his and wife Melinda's daughter Jennifer, now 22, before at an equestrian event in Florida. "So when I first talked to him, it was actually kind of scary how well he knew -- how much he knew about my daughter's appearance," Gates said. "Melinda, didn't like that too well." A big advocate of vaccinations, Gates said he tried to talk Trump out of forming a commission to study the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, as proposed by Robert Kennedy Jr. Trump did not seem to well-versed on vaccines, or viruses, he added. "Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV, so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other."

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Fourteen years after Muqtada al-Sadr's militias fought American troops, the United States is preparing to work hand in hand with the charismatic Shiite cleric and his movement, hoping to find common cause in curtailing Iran's influence in the wake of an upset Iraqi election.

Like many Iraqis, Washington was caught off guard by the election, in which a coalition organized by al-Sadr took the largest share of the parliamentary vote.

HUMANISM IS ANTI-HUMAN:

Sam Harris, one of the original members of the group dubbed the "New Atheists" (by Wired!) 12 years ago, says he doesn't like tribalism. During his recent, much-discussed debate with Vox founder Ezra Klein about race and IQ, Harris declared that tribalism "is a problem we must outgrow."

But apparently Harris doesn't think he is part of that "we." After he accused Klein of fomenting a "really indissoluble kind of tribalism" in the form of identity politics, and Klein replied that Harris exhibits his own form of tribalism, Harris said coolly, "I know I'm not thinking tribally in this respect."

Not only is Harris capable of transcending tribalism--so is his tribe! Reflecting on his debate with Klein, Harris said that his own followers care "massively about following the logic of a conversation" and probe his arguments for signs of weakness, whereas Klein's followers have more primitive concerns: "Are you making political points that are massaging the outraged parts of our brains? Do you have your hands on our amygdala and are you pushing the right buttons?"

Of the various things that critics of the New Atheists find annoying about them--and here I speak from personal experience--this ranks near the top: the air of rationalist superiority they often exude. Whereas the great mass of humankind remains mired in pernicious forms of illogical thought--chief among them, of course, religion--people like Sam Harris beckon from above: All of us, if we will just transcend our raw emotions and rank superstitions, can be like him, even if precious few of us are now.

SCHROEDINGER'S SIX FEET UNDER BUT HE'S STILL GOT RHYTHM:

As debate in Washington heats up over climate change and transparency in science, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine held a quiet meeting last week to discuss just how consistent the results are across climate studies.

The verdict, for those who follow the science, wasn't too surprising. There's broad agreement among climate studies that global warming is happening and human-driven. But as scientists work to zero in on exact forecasts of future temperatures and precipitation under a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions, they are still seeing a wide range of results. "The spread has gotten tighter, but it hasn't gotten super tight," is how NASA climate researcher Gavin Schmidt puts it. [...]

The National Academies meeting comes at a time when scientists, critics, and the public alike are deep in discussions about reproducing findings in science. There's been vigorous debate among scientists about how well results in social science and clinical medicine hold up when others try to duplicate them. Distressing findings--one effort to reproduce 100 top psychology studies found less than half of them worked a second time--have led to calls for fixing the system.

SCRATCH A TERRORIST, FIND A TRUMPIE:

Less than a month before he killed 58 people and injured hundreds more at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock ranted to a new friend about a supposed government plot to confiscate guns from the American public. The man, whose statement is among many released by investigators this week, told authorities that he met Paddock just weeks before the massacre after the 58-year-old answered an online ad for "schematics to convert semi-automatic guns to fire automatically," the AP reports.

WHOLLY OWNED:

In a deal that would bail out the family of senior White House advisor Jared Kushner, Kushner Cos. is nearing a deal with a unit of Brookfield Asset Management Inc. to salvage its investment in an over-leveraged Manhattan office tower, according to two people familiar with the talks.

The Qatar Investment Authority, which invests on behalf of Qatar's government, is the largest owner of the the unit, Brookfield Property Partners LP, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

DONALD WHO?:

Juncker told reporters in Sofia that EU leaders decided Wednesday night to activate the so-called blocking statute, which bans European companies from complying with the U.S. sanctions against Iran.

"We have the duty, the Commission and the European Union, to protect our European businesses," said Juncker, adding: "We must act now and we will act now. That's why we are launching the process to use the 1996 'blocking statute' to neutralize the extraterritorial effects of U.S. sanctions on European companies ... We will do that tomorrow morning at 10:30."

The blocking statute would forbid EU companies, under threat of punishment, to cancel business ties with Iran because of the U.S. sanctions. 

WISE ADVICE:

You can crumble a small handful of chips into a scramble (I like sour cream and onion chips for this), stuff them into an omelette (try plain with some dollops of fresh goat cheese), or make a quick Spanish tortilla (instructions on how to do that here). My favorite, however, is to crack a couple of eggs over a bed of chips that have been tossed and cooked with a variety of meats and vegetables, then steam them until they are just set, but still runny in the yolk. It's a real hangover helper, and it's a great way to clean out your fridge. It's also a forgiving recipe, so you can just measure everything by the handful. To make it, you will need:

A big pat of butter or spoonful of bacon grease (omit if you are using a meat that needs to be rendered)

2 handfuls of vegetables, whatever's in your fridge (I used half a shallot and a couple of stalks of asparagus.)

1 handful of either cooked meat or about 4 ounces of breakfast sausage or bacon (I used some sous vide carnitas, and it was a great idea.)

3 handfuls of potato chips (The best choice here is the salt & pepper crinkle cut chips from Kettle. They have flavor without being flavored, you know?)

2 eggs

Chives or fried leek greens for topping

Parmesan cheese for topping (optional)

If you are starting out with a raw breakfast meat that needs to be rendered, go ahead and add that to a nonstick skillet, render out all the fat, and remove it once it's crispy. Add your vegetables and cook until they are nice and soft, seasoning them with salt and pepper to taste. If you are using a meat that's already cooked, melt your cooking fat over medium-high heat, cook your vegetables until they are nice and soft, then add the meat to warm.

Add your chips a handful at a time, crushing each handful slightly. If you need to add back in some rendered meat, toss it in now, and give everything a good stir to coat the chips in that lovely cooking oil. Make two little wells in the chip mixture, reduce the heat to low, and crack two eggs into the wells. Cover the pan with a lid, and let the eggs steam until they are just set. (They'll be all crispy on the bottom with runny yolks on top; it's really delightful.) Top with chives or fried leek greens, sprinkle on some salty Parmesan, and slide your creation onto a plate. Enjoy with hot sauce.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

The former son-in-law of Paul Manafort, the one-time chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign, has cut a plea deal with the Justice Department that requires him to cooperate with other criminal probes, two people with knowledge of the matter said.   

PAYING HIS DEBTS TO VLAD::

China, the world's biggest soybean importer, almost tripled purchases from Russia amid a trade dispute with the U.S., the biggest producer.

Russia sold about 850,000 metric tons of soybeans to China from the start of the 12-month season in July through mid-May, according to Russia's agriculture agency Rosselkhoznadzor. That's more than during any season before and compares with about 340,000 tons sold during all of the previous period, Chinese customs data show.

WAY TO TAR YOUR LEGACY:

Last September, Paul Ryan told Dreamers that they could "rest easy": Congress would take action to resolve the "serious humane issue" raised by President Trump's cancellation of Deferred Action for Early Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Eight months later, Congress has done no such thing; former DACA recipients are already getting deported; and the speaker is scrambling to prevent moderate Republicans from forcing him to allow a vote on a bipartisan DREAM Act (which he knows would likely pass).

NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

ICE arrested a dreamer, revoked his DACA status, placed him in detention, and attempted to deport him, claiming he was a gang member. A federal judge just ruled that ICE was lying--brazenly, intentionally, repeatedly, and illegally. https://t.co/U2u25mzUqQ @Slate

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) May 17, 2018

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

TARGET-RICH ENVIRONMENT:

POSTMODERNISM IS PREMODERN:

I believe that postmodern positions emerged in our current epoch due to a complex array of social forces. The authors in the second line of leftwing postmodern thinkers drew inspiration from these social forces to formulate interesting, but ultimately flawed philosophies which will not stand the test of time when evaluated from a purely intellectual standpoint. But this is not my major concern here. If postmodern positions emerge as a consequence of social forces, this presents a more general problem for critics of postmodernism. It is not simply the fact that a number of skeptical university professors are professing flawed philosophical positions, and thence inspiring individuals to take radical political positions on identity and power as a consequence. Rather, postmodern positions can emerge in a myriad of places when individuals are affected by the social forces of the epoch in the right way. This is what I believe accounts for the emergence of postmodern conservatism.

The association of conservatism with a strong commitment to epistemic and moral truth, both in general and regarding particular doctrines, is far more contingent and ahistorical than some partisans may expect. In fact, there is a long history in conservative and other rightwing circles of rejecting strong epistemic and moral truths. As highlighted by Leo Strauss in his seminal Natural Right and History, the modern origins of this rightwing rejection of epistemic and moral truths are in the work of Edmund Burke. Burke was staunchly critical of the abstract intellectualism of the French revolutionaries, and their desire to rationalize society. Against abstract and scientific approaches to knowledge and morality, Burke emphasized the need to pay close attention to history, tradition, and the identity of a particular people. As Strauss observed, much of this was sound advice and a dire warning to fundamentalists and fanatics of all stripes. But it also constituted a shift towards regarding knowledge and morality as contingent upon particular circumstances and histories. This tendency to associate revolutionary progressivism with abstract respect for reason continued in the thought of rightwing thinkers like Joseph De Maistre, identified by Isaiah Berlin as the intellectual forefather of fascism. De Maistre argued that the human capacity to reason towards true knowledge and morals was so fundamentally limited it needed to be massively supplemented by faith in traditional authorities and revealed religion. He was a reactionary of the highest pitch, damning the French Revolutionaries for their arrogant conceit of having figured the world out for themselves, and demanding a return to the values of throne and altar.

In the modern era, there have been plenty of conservative thinkers who have also condemned rationalism, upholding the value of tradition and history as a relative source of knowledge and morals. Michael Oakshott's famed essay "Rationalism in Politics" argued that what defines a conservative is respect for the epistemic and moral authority of tradition over abstract faith in the power of Utilitarian reason. In his debate with H. L. A. Hart, the conservative Lord Devlin justified restrictions on homosexuality by claiming that true morality is a matter of what the "man on the Clapham omnibus" believed. Justice Robert Bork, Reagan's favored pick for the Supreme Court, wrote in Coercing Virtue that what characterized the leftwing 'new class' was its belief in universal values and truths. In contradistinction, conservatives were defined by their veneration of "particularity--respect for difference, circumstance, (and) history..." He condemned this progressive 'new class' for attempting to push its pretentious universalistic ideas about knowledge and morals onto traditionally oriented societies which did not want them.

My point here is not to accuse any of these authors of holding to specifically postmodern doctrines. Nor do I want to accuse them of being responsible for the emergence of what I call postmodern conservatism. As I mentioned before, I believe postmodernism emerged as a result of social factors particular to our epoch. It was not driven primarily by intellectual shifts; intellectual shifts were driven by post-modern culture. My point is to observe that the association of conservatism with a strong commitment to truth is contingent rather than consistent throughout history. In a highly radicalized and even mutilated form, the ideas developed by these authors provided an intellectual backdrop for explaining why many conservatives increasingly look like their left postmodern 'adversaries,' right down to their commitment to identity politics.

What fundamentally characterizes postmodern conservatives is locating epistemic and moral authority in a given traditional identity. Postmodern conservatism a highly radicalized iteration of the intellectual movements indicated above, often emerging in periods of economic and social crisis and finding its initial expression in hyper-modern mediums such as the internet. Postmodern conservatives increasingly regard strong truth claims about knowledge and morality with active suspicion and even hostility. This is because they regard the intellectual and cultural 'elites' who produce knowledge and popularize moral norms as progressive, abstract, and unlikely to sympathize with their concerns. Rather than attempting to formulate alternative claims about knowledge and morality which might have some epistemic and meta-ethical tenability, postmodern conservatives reject even these standards. Instead, they largely appeal to identity as the locus for epistemic and moral validity.

THE rIGHT IS NOT CONSERVATIVE:

The Koch brothers are going rogue.

For years the political network funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch funded politicians on the right, laying the foundation for the libertarian causes the two support. Their support has gone almost exclusively to Republican candidates, with rare exception.

But in the era of Trump, what it means to be on the 'right' is changing, and the Koch network's tactics are changing to reflect new realities.

For the first time, the LIBRE Initiative -- the Hispanic outreach arm of the Koch network -- is putting money behind efforts to praise Democrats on the federal level, and doing so with control of Congress on the line in the midterm elections.

MORE COVERAGE, MORE COMPETITION:

Since efforts to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have failed, and bipartisan attempts to improve the law have stalled, some policymakers are now looking beyond incremental fixes. In this paper, Urban Institute researchers present a set of policy ideas that would provide universal access to comprehensive coverage but would also allow people to keep their employer-sponsored coverage, would offer a range of insurer options and ensure broad pooling of health care risk, would not have an employer mandate, would provide income-related federal assistance, and would create a more flexible individual incentive to remain insured than that under the ACA.

The proposal builds on components of the Medicare program and the ACA Marketplaces. However, it simplifies the current health insurance system by integrating Medicaid acute care for nonelderly people and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)--while preserving access to their benefits--with coverage for people enrolled in private nongroup insurance and people currently uninsured. This large new Medicare-style marketplace, featuring a public plan and private insurer options, would contain costs by fostering competition among many insurers, capping provider payment rates, and addressing prescription drug pricing. This proposal is less ambitious than a single-payer system (i.e., Medicare for All), but it would get close to universal coverage with much lower increases in federal spending and less disruption for people currently enrolled in employer coverage or Medicare.

They estimate that the plan would result in 15.9 million fewer uninsured people and reduce total health care spending by $28.9 billion in its first full year of implementation.

WEDNESDAY:

"KEEP 'EM ORBITING":

On Feb. 18, 2016, I woke up in my crew quarters on the International Space Station for the 328th day of a yearlong mission, the longest ever flown by a NASA astronaut. After breakfast and a conference call with the ground, I got into my work for the day: conducting a physics experiment, taking a sample of my own blood for a NASA study, performing routine maintenance on life support equipment, and answering questions for an elementary school in Arizona via live video uplink.

When I finally had a few free moments to myself, I opened up a laptop and typed out an email. I spent longer writing that email, and proofread it more carefully, than anything I had written in a long time.

I had decided to reach out to the author of a book that had meant a lot to me, something I had never done before. I was writing to Tom Wolfe, and I wanted to tell him that the reason I was spending a year in space, the reason I had flown three earlier missions to space and had flown high-performance aircraft in the Navy before that, was all because I had come across "The Right Stuff" as an 18-year-old college freshman.

LET RUDY SPEAK:

"They can't indict," Mr. Giuliani said. "They can't indict. Because if they did, it would be dismissed quickly. There's no precedent for a president being indicted."

OUR NAKBA:

The elder John Marshall Harlan is correctly described by Robert Cushman as "a Southern gentleman and a slave-holder, and at heart a conservative." A Kentuckian of the Whig persuasion, Harlan had opposed secession and fought in the Union Army, but at the same time he opposed both the emancipation of the slaves and the passage of civil rights laws to protect the rights of the freedmen. Shocked by Ku Klux excesses, he experienced a sudden conversion, renounced his former views, became a Republican in 1868, and was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Hayes in 1877.

After his conversion Harlan became one of the most outspoken champions of Negro rights of his time, and during his thirty-four years on the bench he lifted his voice repeatedly against denial of those rights by the dominant opinion of the Court. His famous dissent in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 had denounced the "subtle and ingenious verbal criticism" by which "the substance and spirit of the recent amendments of the Constitution have been sacrificed." And in 1896 he was ready to strike another blow for his adopted cause.

Harlan held the Louisiana segregation law in clear conflict with both the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth amendments. The former "not only struck down the institution of slavery," but also "any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude," and segregation was just such a burden or badge. Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment "added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship, and to the security of personal liberty," and segregation denied to Negroes the equal protection of both dignity and liberty. "The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway," he said, "is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."

Harlan was as scornful as Tourgée had been of the claim that the separate-car law did not discriminate against the Negro. "Every one knows," he declared, that its purpose was "to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons." This was simply a poorly disguised means of asserting the supremacy of one class of citizens over another. The Justice continued:

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings, or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved....We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens,--our equals before the law. The thin disguise of "equal" accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.

"The present decision, it may well be apprehended," predicted Harlan, "will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the constitution...." For if the state may so regulate the railroads, "why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street, and black citizens to keep on the other," or, for that matter, apply the same regulations to streetcars and other vehicles, or to courtroom, the jury box, the legislative hall, or to any other place of public assembly?

"In my opinion," the Kentuckian concluded, "the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case."

But Harlan was without allies on the Court, and the country as a whole received the news of its momentous decision upholding the "separate but equal" doctrine in relative silence and apparent indifference. Thirteen years earlier the Civil Rights Cases had precipitated pages of news reports, hundreds of editorials, indignant rallies, congressional bills, a Senate report, and much general debate. In striking contrast, the Plessy decision was accorded only short, inconspicuous news reports and virtually no editorial comment outside the Negro press. A great change had taken place, and the Court evidently now gave voice to the dominant mood of the country. Justice Harlan had spoken for the forgotten convictions of a bygone era.

The racial aggressions he foresaw came in a flood after the decision of 1896. Even Harlan indicated by his opinion of 1899 in Cummings v. Board of Education that he saw nothing unconstitutional in segregated public schools. Virginia was the last state in the South to adopt the separate-car law, and she resisted it only until 1900. Up to that year this was the only law of the type adopted by a majority of the southern states. But on January 12, 1900, the editor of the Richmond Times was in full accord with the new spirit when he asserted: "It is necessary that this principle be applied in every relation of Southern life. God Almighty drew the color line and it cannot be obliterated. The negro must stay on his side of the line and the white man must stay on his side, and the sooner both races recognize this fact and accept it, the better it will be for both."

AN EASILY AVOIDABLE MISTAKE:

The Declaration of Independence is technically a letter to the King. When the Declaration was being drafted, the colonists felt that it was important that the exact reasons for their unhappiness were made clear. The largest section of the Declaration - after the lines that we all memorized in elementary school - is that list of grievances. Of course, taxes were included:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

...

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

The word "Consent" was important. Under the British Constitution, no British subjects could be taxed without the consent of their representatives in Parliament. But the colonies didn't elect representatives to Parliament. They were, however, clearly being taxed. The colonists considered the constant imposition of taxes without a vote to be unconstitutional. It was, they felt, "taxation without representation."

THE ANTI-HILLARY ZEAL OF THE PRESS:

COPS HATE CROOKS:

Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump's personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department's inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen's financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a "suspicious-activity report" filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen's shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen's account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions--triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or fincen. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, "I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It's a stockpile of information. When something's not there that should be, I immediately became concerned." The official added, "That's why I came forward."

MAN OF LETTERS:

INTERVIEWER

When did the breakthrough come?

WOLFE

Well, this happened really in two stages. While I was in graduate school at Yale I came upon a group of early Soviet writers called the Brothers Serapion. These were people like Boris Pilnyak who wrote a book called The Naked Year, and especially Eugene Zamiatin, probably best known for his novel We, upon which George Orwell's 1984 is based. He is a brilliant writer who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1927, I believe. These were Russian writers writing about the Soviet revolution; they were heavily influenced by French Symbolism, so you had all the preciousness and aestheticism of the Symbolists converging upon a very raw subject, namely the Revolution. I began imitating the Brothers Serapion in the short pieces I was writing for myself. I even tried to sneak these things into my newspaper work. I never got very far with it.

INTERVIEWER

What sort of thing?

WOLFE

For example, one of the things they did was experiment with punctuation. In We, Zamiatin constantly breaks off a thought in mid-sentence with a dash. He's trying to imitate the habits of actual thought, assuming, quite correctly, that we don't think in whole sentences. We think emotionally. He also used a lot of exclamation points, a habit I picked up and which I still have. Someone counted them in The Bonfire of the Vanities--some enormous number of exclamation points, up in the thousands. I think it's quite justified, though I've been ridiculed for it. Dwight Macdonald once wrote that reading me, with all these exclamation points, was like reading Queen Victoria's diaries. He was so eminent at the time, I felt crushed. But then out of curiosity I looked up Queen Victoria's diaries. They're childhood diaries. They're full of exclamation points. They are so much more readable than the official prose she inflicted on prime ministers and the English people in the years thereafter. Her diaries aren't bad at all. I also made a lot of use of the historical present (getting back to Emil Ludwig) in my early magazine work, along with eccentric images and metaphors. These were things that I began to use as soon as I had a truly free hand. That was when I began to do magazine work in 1963 for Esquire--which was that rarest of things: an experimental mass-circulation magazine.

INTERVIEWER

Presumably there was an editor at Esquire who supported what you were up to . . .

WOLFE

Well, Byron Dobell was the first editor I had at Esquire. I've written about this in the introduction to The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The piece about car customizers in Los Angeles was the first magazine piece I ever wrote. I was totally blocked. I now know what writer's block is. It's the fear you cannot do what you've announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn't worth doing. That's a rarer form. In this case I suddenly realized I'd never written a magazine article before and I just felt I couldn't do it. Well, Dobell somehow shamed me into writing down the notes that I had taken in my reporting on the car customizers so that some competent writer could convert them into a magazine piece. I sat down one night and started writing a memorandum to him as fast as I could, just to get the ordeal over with. It became very much like a letter that you would write to a friend in which you're not thinking about style, you're just pouring it all out, and I churned it out all night long, forty typewritten, triple-spaced pages. I turned it in in the morning to Byron at Esquire, and then I went home to sleep. About four that afternoon I got a call from him telling me, Well, we're knocking the "Dear Byron" off the top of your memo, and we're running the piece. That was a tremendous release for me. 

SUMUD PEOPLE:

From my earliest interviews in the late 1990s of first intifada youth -- the adults present at the current Gaza protests, and the parents of the youth who are there -- to last month in Gaza when a late teen told me that Gazans can handle the awful water, electricity and health situation, the theme of dehumanization has been deep-seated and constant. "The real effect of the occupation and siege is to make us feel 'subhuman,'" he said.

To understand the sense of being dehumanized, a 2011 study I conducted with colleagues of several hundred middle-aged Gazans showed that, at the hands of Israeli forces, over the course of their lives: 80% have had their homes raided (which, according to the nearly 2,000 Palestinians my colleagues and I have interviewed over the years, typically occur in the early morning hours with squadrons of soldiers crashing down their doors and often very harshly treating family members); over 70% have witnessed someone close to them being humiliated; and over 60% have themselves been verbally abused. Our research, which shows similar findings for other Palestinian territories, also reveals that many have experienced all these events multiple times. (Given the numerous major points of conflict since 2011, the incidence of these would have only increased.) A quarter of men have been imprisoned at least once, with its incumbent severe treatment.

Behind this sense of dehumanization is a related, prevailing sense of being marginalized. [...]

The steady cascade of ruinous economic and political developments since then -- whether sourced in actions and policy from Israel, Egypt or Palestinian interfactional divisions within Gaza -- have only increased this sense of marginalization, with Gaza now completely set off from the West Bank and Jerusalem.

So, how to reconcile these deep-seated, deadening states of mind with the tenacity Gazans display to keep resisting?

A core Palestinian concept is sumud (steadfastness), or the determination to keep their land and build their country. It goes some distance in explaining Gazan's persistence and long suffering, but not necessarily the intense, active resistance in the face of extreme risk, injury and death as is playing out in Gaza now.

It is better explained by what the forces that marginalize and dehumanize specifically target: identity and dignity. We've learned that all forms of adversity experienced by the dominated don't have the same impact. Gazans and all Palestinians can handle much, obviously. But it is the assault on their worthiness -- as human beings -- that inspires such defiance, as if there is a sacred boundary of humanity that cannot be crossed without instinctive rebellion.

That instinct will not be killed away.

WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE AN APPARATCHIK WRITE YOUR REPORT:

Say, what's the difference between the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee?

The Senate Intelligence Committee isn't burdened with Devin Nunes.

Other than that, in delivering a statement on Wednesday, Senate Intel leadership backed up the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community.

"We see no reason to dispute the conclusions," Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said in a statement.

"There is no doubt that Russia undertook an unprecedented effort to interfere with our 2016 elections."

The Senate Intel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is still ongoing, but for the past few months, they've been going over the January 2017 assessment put together by top intelligence community officials.

So what were the exact points of that particular assessment:

The assessment found that Russia sought to interfere in the election for three reasons: to undermine U.S. democracy, to damage Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and to help Trump win the White House.

WELL, THE FBI IS MOSTLY REPUBLICANS...

COLLUDING & COVERING:

what
(email from Scaramucci to Goldstone in July 2017) pic.twitter.com/zqDH8payYu

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) May 16, 2018

RACISM IS AS RACISM DOES:

President Trump during California #SanctuaryCities Roundtable: "These aren't people. These are animals."

Full video here: https://t.co/alyS47LI5V pic.twitter.com/ifXicTHHP0

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 16, 2018

MAYBE THE DARK IS FROM YOUR EYES:

ISN'T THE POINT THAT RACISM IS SO RARE NOW IT REALLY STANDS OUT?:

[W]hile psychological biases may sufficiently explain progressophobia on most other topics, our denialism about racial progress calls for a deeper explanation--an explanation in terms of widely-held beliefs about race and inequality.

One such belief is the notion that disparities between blacks and whites--in income, housing, employment, etc.--are caused by systemic racism. The award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, summed up the state of racial progress like so: "I could see that some fifty years after the civil rights movement black people could still be found at the bottom of virtually every socioeconomic metric of note."2 Ibram X. Kendi, another celebrated race writer, put it bluntly: "As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism."

But the premise built into the thinking of Coates and Kendi is false. I call it the disparity fallacy. The disparity fallacy holds that unequal outcomes between two groups must be caused primarily by discrimination, whether overt or systemic. What's puzzling about believers in the disparity fallacy is not that they apply the belief too broadly, but that they apply it too narrowly. Any instance of whites outperforming blacks is adduced as evidence of discrimination. But when a disparity runs the other way--that is, blacks outperforming whites--discrimination is never invoked as a causal factor.

Here's a clear example of the disparity fallacy: a recent study by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau found that, "[a]mong those who grow up in families with comparable incomes, black men grow up to earn substantially less than the white men." A New York Times article attributed this disparity to "the punishing reach of racism for black boys." But the study also found that black women have higher college attendance rates than white men, and higher incomes than white women, conditional on parental income. The fact that black women outperformed their white counterparts on these measures, however, was not attributed to the punishing reach of racism against whites.

Economic disparities that favor blacks have been reported for decades, yet they have rarely if ever been attributed to anti-white systemic bias. A 1994 New York Times article reported that, among college graduates, black women earned slightly more money than white women did. In addition, the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out that, as early as 1980, U.S. census data show black college-educated couples out-earning their white counterparts.3

The black/white unemployment gap provides an even older illustration of the disparity fallacy. Many commentators have reflexively attributed the modern unemployment gap to systemic racism. But in historical eras with far more racism, the gap was reversed. According to Sowell, "[b]lack unemployment rates were lower than that of whites in 1890 and, for the last time, in 1930."4 Facts like these, however, are never explained in terms of discrimination in favor of blacks. Indeed, why progressives only commit the disparity fallacy in one direction is never explained. What the writer Shelby Steele has said about progressives and racist events is equally true of statistical disparities that disadvantage blacks: When they learn of one, "they rent a jet plane and fly to it!"

It's a sign of the poverty of our discourse on racial progress and inequality that the rarest findings are thought to be normal, and the most common findings are thought to require special explanation.

Indeed, it is rare to find any two ethnic groups achieving identical outcomes, even when they belong to the same race. A cursory glance at the mean incomes of census-tracked ethnic groups shows Americans of Russian descent out-earning those of Swiss descent, who out-earn those of British descent, who out-earn those of Polish descent, who out-earn those of French descent in turn. If the disparity fallacy were true, then we ought to posit an elaborate system that is biased towards ethnic Russians, then the Swiss, followed by the Brits, the Poles and the French. Yet one never hears progressives make such claims. Moreover, one never hears progressives say, "French-Americans make 79 cents for every Russian-American dollar," although the facts could easily be framed that way. Similar disparities between blacks and whites are regularly presented in such invidious terms. Rather than defaulting to systemic bias to explain disparities, we should understand that, even in the absence of discrimination, groups still differ in innumerable ways that affect their respective outcomes.

One crucial way in which groups differ is culture. Culture matters enormously. The importance of culture is, ironically, a value often expressed by progressives. When presented with arguments that point to genetic influences on human behavior, many on the Left respond by emphasizing the importance of culture over genetics, that is, nurture over nature (see Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate for more.) Moreover, cultures differ from one another. This is true by definition. It's unclear what the "multi" in "multi-culturalism" could possibly mean if cultures were all the same. Put these two premises together, and you arrive at what should be an equally banal conclusion: if culture matters enormously, and cultures differ from one another, then differences between cultures matter enormously.

But, together with the disparity fallacy, the denial of cultural explanations for disparity has become the received view among progressives. 

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING:

DUDES, YOU VOTED FOR RACIAL HYGIENE:

HOOPERS ISLAND, Md. -- This community voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. But now his immigration changes are killing its livelihood -- legendary crabs that are a mainstay of the local economy and a regional delicacy.

For decades, Hoopers Island, known for its crabbing industry, has relied on a federal seasonal work program -- known as H-2B visas -- to keep its businesses humming. This has allowed employers to hire foreigners, mostly Mexican women, to come temporarily to pick crab meat.

But this year, the cap on H-2B visas -- and a shift from the first-come, first-served based model to a lottery system that has disadvantaged Hoopers Island seasonal workers -- has left the island without 40 percent of the visas they have needed in the past.

Tom Wolfe's Yale Ph.D. thesis about communist writers was rejected for being too harsh on them. pic.twitter.com/6VsLn38VIW

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) May 15, 2018

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Conservative groups often say "private companies should be free to conduct their operations as they see fit, without undue governmental interference." This is, of course, a fundamental tenet of conservative principles -- as is limited government. Those principles and the first amendment protect our free speech both publicly and privately.

Under these principles, Fox News can be a conservative organization, while MSNBC can cover the other end of the political spectrum. Both rightly operate without the government dictating what political views they favor. Likewise, core conservative principles would oppose Congress holding hearings and passing laws to ensure that the Drudge Report doesn't favor conservative views over liberal ones.

Unfortunately, it seems that some conservatives have forgotten their principles when it comes to social media.

Recently, several conservative groups surprisingly called for government action over what a private businesses allows on its website -- in this case, the business is Facebook.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) inspector general said it is investigating EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's use of nonpublic email accounts, the latest in a series of federal investigations into the agency chief.

THE SHI'A-CHRISTIAN ALLIANCE:

FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE BROTHERS JUDD LIBERAL HUMOR CHALLENGE :

AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER THE NATION HAS been the journalistic lodestar of the American left. Now, in its 137th year, the magazine is on a commercial roll. Its subscriptions have risen steadily in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. Its finances may actually break even (a miracle in the world of political magazines). And its publishing adjunct, Nation Books, is raking in money from two hot titles: Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Forbidden Truth by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume DasquiÈ. Indeed, everything's going so well that I feel kind of churlish in pointing out what most on the left are unwilling to say: The Nation is a profoundly dreary magazine.

Just compare it to another thin, ideologically driven rag, The Weekly Standard, a right-wing publication currently approaching its measly seventh anniversary. A few months ago, I began putting new issues of each side by side on an end table and, to my surprise, discovered that while unread copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing stacks, I always read The Weekly Standard right away. Why? Because seen purely as a magazine, The Standard is incomparably more alluring. As gray and unappetizing as homework, The Nation makes you approach it in the same spirit that Democrats might vote for Gray Davis -- where else can you go? In contrast, The Standard woos you by saying, "We're having big fun over here on the right."

And in some undeniable sense that's true. Back in the '60s, the left was the home of humor, iconoclasm, pleasure. But over the last two decades, the joy has gone out of the left -- it now feels hedged in by shibboleths and defeatism -- while the right has been having a gas, be it Lee Atwater grooving to the blues, Rush Limbaugh chortling about Feminazis or grimly gleeful Ann Coulter serving up bile as if it were chocolate mousse, even dubbing Katie Couric "the affable Eva Braun of morning television." (Get your political allegiances straight, babe. Katie's the Madame Mao of morning television. You're Eva Braun.)

While the right seeks converts, trying both to persuade and entertain, the left spends its journalistic energy policing the movement. Imagine The Nation running a weekly column about nothing, called "Casual," as the Standard does. Also, conservative journalists are more likely to allow readers to enjoy a magazine article without strong-arming them into signing the ideology oath that seems to come packed with most lefty journalism. For instance, when the Standard's David Brooks profiled "Patio Man," the acquisitive consumer who haunts Home Depot looking for things to buy, he both laughed at its subject and exalted him without fear of contradiction.

Of course, lefty journalism needn't turn right to improve itself. But Powers hints that the source of The Nation's illness is the Stalinist impulse to prescribe proper attitudes toward culture, art, and journalism. A Nation writer who, say, wants to use humor or wit to make his point mustn't abuse gays, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Ralph Nader, foreigners, women, the infirm, working stiffs, Indians, Mohammed (but Jesus is fair game), whales, or any cultural stereotype. This leaves him just one angle from which to compose his point: Stupid White Men. Such is the state of left journalism that Michael Moore has made a career out of painting and repainting this mono-mural.

How the anything-goes drug-and-sex party that the cultural left threw in the '60s segued into an Amish wake featuring stern readings from the joyless work of Barbara Ehrenreich, the scoldings of Todd Gitlin, and the catechisms of Richard Goldstein is anybody's guess. Would Emma Goldman dance with these folks? Or would she make a beeline for the house on the right, which looks like a brothel in comparison to the one on the left? I await the Powers sequel.

The former is likely to wash its hands of the modern world, lament how things have gone to hell since the Brits stopped shoving civilization down the ululating maws of Wogland, and announce that you're all welcome to your polyglot mishmash - I'll be over here getting smashed on port and reading Patrick O'Brien novels. But at least they seem dedicated to enjoying life on their own terms; if they're cultural conservatives, they retire to their version of Heston's apartment in "The Omega Man," surrounded by the remnants of Western glory, keeping to themselves, and venting their spleen now and then by burping off a few rounds at the moaning zombies outside in the darkened park.

The hard left, on the other hand, demonstrates all the symptoms of anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure - there's a rancid bitterness, a pissy miserablism that makes you feel very, very sorry for them.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: MUD BROTHERS:

From the beginning it was pointless to argue about the sincerity of Radical Chic. Unquestionably the basic impulse, "red diaper" or otherwise, was sincere. But, as in most human endeavors focused upon an ideal, there seemed to be some double-track thinking going on. On the first track--well, one does have a sincere concern for the poor and the underprivileged and an honest outrage against discrimination. One's heart does cry out--quite spontaneously!--upon hearing how the police have dealt with the Panthers, dragging an epileptic like Lee Berry out of his hospital bed and throwing him into the Tombs. When one thinks of Mitchell and Agnew and Nixon and all of their Captain Beef-heart Maggie & Jiggs New York Athletic Club troglodyte crypto-Horst Wessel Irish Oyster Bar Construction Worker followers, then one understands why poor blacks like the Panthers might feel driven to drastic solutions, and--well, anyway, one truly feels for them. One really does. On the other hand--on the second track in one's mind, that is--one also has a sincere concern for maintaining a proper East Side lifestyle in New York Society. And this concern is just as sincere as the first, and just as deep. It really is. It really does become part of one's psyche. For example, one must have a weekend place, in the country or by the shore, all year round preferably, but certainly from the middle of May to the middle of September. It is hard to get across to outsiders an understanding of how absolute such apparently trivial needs are. One feels them in his solar plexus. When one thinks of being trapped in New York Saturday after Saturday in July or August, doomed to be a part of those fantastically dowdy herds roaming past Bonwit's and Tiffany's at dead noon in the sandstone sun-broil, 92 degrees, daddies from Long Island in balloon-seat Bermuda shorts bought at the Times Square Store in Oceanside and fat mommies with white belled pants stretching over their lower bellies and crinkling up in the crotch like some kind of Dacron-polyester labia--well, anyway, then one truly feels the need to obey at least the minimal rules of New York Society. One really does.

One rule is that nostalgie de la boue--i.e., the styles of romantic, raw-vital, Low Rent primitives--are good; and middle class, whether black or white, is bad. Therefore, Radical Chic invariably favors radicals who seem primitive, exotic and romantic, such as the grape workers, who are not merely radical and "of the soil," but also Latin; the Panthers, with their leather pieces, Afros, shades, and shoot-outs; and the Red Indians, who, of course, had always seemed primitive, exotic and romantic. At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: they were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan, in places like Delano (the grape workers), Oakland (the Panthers) and Arizona and New Mexico (the Indians). They weren't likely to become too much . . . underfoot, as it were. Exotic, Romantic, Far Off . . . as we shall soon see, other favorite creatures of Radical Chic had the same attractive qualities; namely, the ocelots, jaguars, cheetahs and Somali leopards.

Rule No. 2 was that no matter what, one should always maintain a proper address, a proper scale of interior decoration, and servants. Servants, especially, were one of the last absolute dividing lines between those truly "in Society," New or Old, and the great scuffling mass of middle-class strivers paying up to $1,250-a-month rent or buying expensive co-ops all over the East Side. There are no two ways about it. One must have servants. Having servants becomes such a psychological necessity that there are many women in Society today who may be heard to complain in all honesty about how hard it is to find a nurse for the children to fill in on the regular nurse's day off. There is the famous Mrs. C--------, one of New York's richest widows, who has a 10-room duplex on Sutton Place, the good part of Sutton Place as opposed to the Miami Beach-looking part, one understands, but who is somehow absolute poison with servants and can't keep anything but day help and is constantly heard to lament: "What good is all the money in the world if you can't come home at night and know there will be someone there to take your coat and fix you a drink?" There is true anguish behind that remark!

In the era of Radical Chic, then, what a collision course was set between the absolute need for servants--and the fact that the servant was the absolute symbol of what the new movements, black or brown, were struggling against! How absolutely urgent, then, became the search for the only way out: white servants!

FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE WOLF AT THE INTELLECTUALS' DOOR:

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born on March 2, 1930, and grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the son of a conservative, God-respectful southern editor of an agricultural trade magazine. Home was never something he was looking to get away from; it was never even something he was looking to pretend he was looking to get away from. He was accepted at Princeton but chose to attend Washington and Lee, to remain close to home. Every now and then one of his teachers would note that he had a way with words, and some artistic talent, but artistic ambition, for a conservative southern male in the 1950s or really any other time, was too vague and impractical to indulge. After college, he took the advice of his professor and went to Yale, for a doctorate in American studies--and right up to this point in his life there isn't a trace of institutional rebellion in him. He pitches for the baseball team, pleases his teachers, has an ordinary, not artistic, group of pals, and is devoted to his mother and father.

The moment he leaves the South, something comes over him. Whatever it is, the feeling seems to be heightened by the sight of a blank sheet of paper. For instance, he creates (while he's meant to be writing a Yale dissertation) an elaborate parody of a Beat poet, "Jocko Thor," complete with a small book of poems and a short biography. Jocko Thor has given birth to a "new poetic genre called Bonkism." In his preface he explains: "Most of these poems were composed beneath a Coca-Cola sign in the town of Accident, Maryland, in February of 1956. They are dedicated to my childe bride whom I first met on that very spot." There follows what is essentially a book of short poems written, it seems, purely for Wolfe's own amusement--he never mentions them to anyone.

"Regular Fellows 

We walk the sidewalk brick by brick 

We climb the brass-clapped stairs 

We spit into each other's faces 

And never put on airs."

"The Martyr 

... A Freudian Poem 

In a moment I'll resume my martyrdom 

In a moment, ready to trick myself, 

Goad myself, to vex myself 

With expert taunts, 

I'll exhale and open my eyes. 

Small designs will writhe 

Behind my eyelids 

Like bullwhips."

And so on. For the first time in his life, it appears, Tom Wolfe has been provoked. He has left home and found, on the East Coast, the perpetual revolt of High Culture against God, Country, and Tradition. He happens to have landed in a time and place in which art--like the economy that supports it--is essentially patricidal. It's all about tearing up and replacing what came before. The young Tom Wolfe is intellectually equipped to join some fashionable creative movement and set himself in opposition to God, Country, and Tradition; emotionally, not so much. He doesn't use his new experience of East Coast sophisticates to distance himself from his southern conservative upbringing; instead he uses his upbringing to distance himself from the new experience. He picks for his Ph.D. dissertation topic the Communist influences on American writers, 1928-1942. From their response to it, the Yale professors, who would have approved the topic in advance, had no idea of the spirit in which Wolfe intended to approach it:

"Dear Mr. Wolfe:

I am personally acutely sorry to have to write you this letter but I want to inform you in advance that all of your readers reports have come in, and ... I am sorry to say I anticipate that the thesis will not be recommended for the degree.... The tone was not objective but was consistently slanted to disparage the writers under consideration and to present them in a bad light even when the evidence did not warrant this." [Letter from Yale dean to T.W., May 19, 1956.]

To this comes appended the genuinely shocked reviews of three Yale professors. It's as if they can't quite believe this seemingly sweet-natured and well-mannered southern boy has gone off half cocked and ridiculed some of the biggest names in American literature. The Yale grad student had treated the deeply held political conviction of these great American artists as--well, as a ploy in a game of status seeking. This student seemed to have gone out of his way to turn these serious American intellectuals into figures of fun. "The result is more journalistically tendentious than scholarly.... Wolfe's polemical rhetoric is ... a chief consideration of my decision to fail the dissertation." To top it all off ... he'd taken some license with the details. One outraged reviewer compared Wolfe's text with his cited sources and attached the comparison. Sample Wolfe passage: "At one point 'the Cuban delegation' tramped in. It was led by a fierce young woman named Lola de la Torriente. With her bobbed hair, leather jacket, and flat-heeled shoes, she looked as though she had just left the barricades. Apparently she had. 'This is where our literature is being built,' exclaimed she, 'on the barricades!' " Huffed the reviewer: "There is no description of her in the source, and the quotations do not appear in the reference."

Which is to say that, as a 26-year-old graduate student, just as a 12-year-old letter writer, Tom Wolfe was already recognizably himself. He'd also found a lens through which he might view, freshly, all human behavior. He'd gone to Yale with the thought he would study his country by reading its literature and history and economics. He wound up discovering sociology--and especially Max Weber's writings about the power of status seeking. The lust for status, it seemed to him, explained why otherwise intelligent American writers lost their minds and competed with one another to see just how devoted to the Communist cause they could be. In a funny way, Yale served him extremely well: it gave him a chance to roam and read and bump into new ideas. But he didn't immediately see that:

"These stupid fucks have turned down namely my dissertation, meaning I will have to stay here about a month longer to delete all the offensive passages and retype the sumitch. They called my brilliant manuscript 'journalistic' and 'reactionary,' which means I must go through with a blue pencil and strike out all the laughs and anti-Red passages and slip in a little liberal merde, so to speak, just to sweeten it. I'll discuss with you how stupid all these stupid fucks are when I see you." [T.W., aged 26, letter to a friend, June 9, 1956.]

He re-writes his thesis. He lards it up with academic jargon and creates a phony emotional distance from his material (he refers to "an American writer E. Hemingway"), and it is accepted. Then he flees Yale as fast as he can. He's entering his late 20s with only the faintest idea of what he might do to earn a living. But he's ambitious, eager to find his place in the world. His father introduces him to business associates. Wolfe writes to the head of a sales institute and sends "excerpts from work I have done on the subject of Communist activity among American writers and other 'intellectuals.' " He applies for jobs in public relations. He writes to American Airlines to inquire about a post. He even considers, briefly, a position teaching economics.

In short, he doesn't have any clear idea of what to do, although he has long liked the notion of being a writer or an artist. In May of 1955 he had written to the dean of Washington and Lee University, "I am thinking very seriously of going into journalism or a related field," but he was slow to pursue it, as he was sure it would disappoint his parents. He writes to one of his father's friends and confesses what he really wants to be is a sportswriter. Finally, he sends letters and curricula vitae to newspapers, offering his services as either a journalist or a graphic artist. (As a child he had enjoyed drawing and still seems at this point in his life as interested in drawing as in writing.) Only one newspaper writes back to express interest: the Springfield Union, in eastern Massachusetts. In 1956, at the age of 26, he takes the job.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHAT I COULD HAVE READ DURING MY SUMMER VACATION :

These are the rough guidelines for the choices :

(1) It should be big. Five-hundred-pages-or-better big. You should be able to only take two books from the list and still have enough reading to get you through a week.

(2) It should be readable. No note-taking needed. Not a whole lot of names to remember. You should be able to pick it up and put it down again without having to reorient yourself. Most of all, you should enjoy it.

(3) Ideally it should be a book that you've been meaning to read but you've put off, probably because of its size. But now, when it's the only one, or one of the only ones, you have with you, you'll be "forced" to read it. At the same time, it should be good enough that you won't regret having brought it. No experiments.

So here are a few suggestions (with links to our reviews where applicable)(please add your own suggestions in the comments section) :

What it Takes : The Way to the White House (1992) (Richard Ben Cramer)
[A whopping 1051 pages, but you won't even notice. Available in a nice paperback edition.]
Mr. Cramer's account of the 1988 presidential campaign is an amalgam of both The Right Stuff and Moby Dick. It may be the quintessential book about America.

The Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) (Robert Caro)
[1246 pages. Available in hardcover]
Mr. Caro writes biography in order to understand political power. He's in the middle of his acclaimed four volume Lyndon Johnson series, but for a
one volume masterpiece this one can't be bettered. Along with Mr. Cramer's book and All the King's Men it forms my personal triumvirate of great American political books.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) (Albert Jay Nock  1872-1945)
[Not 500 pages, but I never miss a chance to plug it. Hard to find, but looks to be available in paperback.]
An idiosyncratic thoroughly charming book by a conservative writing at a time when conservatism appeared dead.

The Last Hero (1990) (Peter Forbath)
[729 pages. Hard to find (though I have four copies and might be convinced to
send you one.)]
Maybe the best historical novel ever written, based on Henry Morton Stanley's expedition up the Congo to relieve the embattled Emin Pasha.

Sweet Soul Music : Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom () (Peter Guralnick)
[448 pages (Close enough). Available in paperback.]
There's no better music writer in America and no better book about American music. If you take this one, you'd better bring some Solomon Burke cds too. His Elvis bio is excellent too.

All the King's Men (1946) (Robert Penn Warren 1905-1989)
[531 pages. Available in a fairly cheap hardcover.]
You might have had to read it for a class and thus ended up hating it. But it is an amazing political fable of good intentions corrupted by political power.

The Pity of War : Explaining World War I (1998) (Niall Ferguson) (Grade: A+)
[608 pages. Available in Paperback.]
I'm especially partial to authors who argue against the conventional wisdom. Mr. Ferguson takes on nearly everything you think you know about WWI.

Falls the Shadow (1989) (Sharon Kay Penman)
[580 pages. Available in paperback.]
Churchill mentions Simon de Montfort as an early hero of democracy in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Ms Penman takes the ball and runs with it. Went to Spring Training one year with married friends. Players went on strike. The couple fought over who got to read the book all week.

The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (Michael R. Beschloss)
[Looks to be out of print.]
Though Mr. Beschloss is more impressed by the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis than I, this is a terrific, nearly novelistic, account of the utter hash that a drug-addled and sexually compromised JFK made of American Soviet relations.

The Conservative Mind : from Burke to Eliot (1953) (Russell Kirk 1918-94)
[Clocks in at 535 pages. Nice paperback edition available.]
Kirk is such a good writer that though the topic may appear dry you'll be captivated. Written in sections so if you find you're not particularly interested in one of the authors he's discussing, you can easily skip without losing anything.

Witness (1952) (Whittaker Chambers 1901-61)
[Roughly 800 pages. I'm not familiar with the edition that's available.]
Lost in the controversy between Hiss and Chambers, an understanding of which is central to comprehending mid-Century America, is the fact that Mr. Chambers was a great writer. This book is a psychodrama, a spy thriller, a courtroom story, and a testimony of faith all rolled into one.

Parting the Waters : America in the King Years (1989) (Taylor Branch)
[1064 pages. Available in paperback.]
America has no greater tale to tell than that of the successful and largely peaceful struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. Mr. Branch tells it well.

A Man In Full (1998) (Tom Wolfe 1931-)
[727 pages. Available in Hardcover.]
One assumes everyone has read The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities, but the mixed reviews on this one seem to have turned many folks off. Don't be one of them. It's a terrific satirical social novel that offers a sweeping panorama of America in the 90s.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988) (Timothy Ferris)
[495 pages (so sue me). Available in a nice paperback.]
Mr. Ferris is one of the best popular science writers going--take it from someone who hates science. His history of Cosmology is a thrilling intellectual adventure.

Tai-Pan (James Clavell)
[730 pages. Available in a mass market paperback that might not be ideal for older eyes.
King Rat, Shogun and Noble House are excellent also, but Tai-pan is my favorite. A great anti-anti-colonial novel.

The Russian Revolution (1991) (Richard Pipes)
[944 pages. Available in paperback.]
As Daniel Pipes is to the war on terror, so his Dad was to the Cold War. He was the scourge of fuzzy thinking about the Soviet Union and this great history of the Revolution--from showing why it was not necessary to showing Lenin to be the father of the Terror--is unparalleled.

How Green Was My Valley (1939)(Richard Llewellyn 1906-1983)
[512 pages. Available in paperback.]
Heartbreaking look back at life in a dying Welsh mining village. You won't want it to end and won't ever forget it.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) (Rick Perlstein 1969-)
[671 pages. Available in Hardcover]
The book's worth buying just for the cover. Mr. Perlstein, though a self described "European-style Social Democrat", gives a fair and wonderfully readable account of the rise of grassroots conservatism, culminating in the 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater.

Lindbergh (1998) (A. Scott Berg)
[628 pages. Available in paperback.]
All any of us remember is that he flew, he lost a child and he was a Nazi. The last is untrue. The first is far more remarkable than we realize any more. The second is heartbreaking.

And the Band Played On (1987) (Randy Shilts)
[672 pages. Available in paperback.]
Fairly even-handed history of the early years of the AIDs crisis, by one of its victims.

Modern Times : The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Paul Johnson)
[880 pages. Available in paperback.]
Takes on the convential wisdom decade by decade.

Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (1992)(Joseph Mitchell  1908-96)
[716 pages. Available in paperback.]
Mr. Mitchell was later to become a staple of fiction himself, as the writer's-blocked old fellow wandering the halls of the New Yorker, but before his pen went dry he wrote some of the best essays--mostly about New York City and its characters--that you'll ever read.

A Better War : The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999) (Lewis Sorley 1934-)
[528 pages. Available in Hardcover.]
It's a major rethinking of whether even if we weren't going to "win the Vietnam War we might have at least salvaged South Vietnam and our honor.

The Great Bridge : The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (1972)(David McCullough 1933-)  (Grade: A+)
[640 pages. Available in a very nice Hardcover edition.]
Remarkable story about the building of an engineering marvel that the rest of the skyline eventually dwarfed, but never diminished.

Dune  (1965)(Frank Herbert  1920-1986)   (Grade: A+)
[528 pages. Available in Hardcover.]
An intensely political science fiction novel. I never liked any of the sequels, but this first is terrific and stands alone quite nicely.

Ulysses S. Grant : Soldier & President (1997) (Geoffrey Perret)
[560 pages. Available in paperback.]
Mr. Perret, who writes wonderfully, challenges the caricatures of Grant and refurbishes his tarnished reputation.

Independent People (1946)(Halldor Laxness 1902-98) (Grade: A+)
[480 pages. Available in Hardcover in an excellent translation.]
If you pick this one, take two more. But if you're willing to trust me, it's just an amazing book, in which an Icelandic sheepherder becomes an "epic" hero.

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1994) (Gerald Posner)
[600 pages. Available in paperback.]
One of the great feats of debunking as Mr. Posner just shreds every last bit of the JFK conspiracy theories.

Don Quijote (Part 1--1605, Part 2--1615)(Miquel de Cervantes 1547-1616)(translated by Burton Raffel)  (Grade: A+)
[Available in a Norton Critical edition paperback.]
For years, you'd start this book with every intention of reading it but be defeated by the translation. That all changed with Burton Raffel's masterful work. It's now very accessible and quite wonderful.

Possession: A Romance (1990)(A.S. [Antonia Susan] Byatt  1936-) (Grade: A+)
[608 pages. Available in a nice Modern Library hardcover.]
A seeming chick book that none of the women I've recommended it to have much liked--just a good literary mystery.

With Fire and Sword (1899) (Henryk Sienkiewicz 1846-1916)
[1135 pages. Hard to find and it's imperative to get the Kuniczak translation (not Curtin)]
The Polish names can make for tough sledding, but once you get into it you'll fly. Sienkiewicz won the Nobel prize and richly deserved it. You might want to start with Quo Vadis?  (1896)(Grade: A+) instead.

And, for teens, see :
Mr. Doggett's Suggested Summer Reading for Students

N.B. : Wild Weasel says he's had uniformly good experiences shopping for used copies of books at ABE.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHAT IF DIGNITY RESIDES IN WHO YOU ARE, RATHER THAN WHAT YOU DO?:

As we remember our friend Peter Augustine Lawler (1951-2017), we are proud to publish this selection from his insightful book Modern and American Dignity (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010). [...]

It was with such Greek reflections in mind that the Roman word dignitas took on a basically aristocratic connotation. Dignity is a worthiness or virtue that must be earned, and the dignified man is someone exceptional who attains distinction by his inner strength of character. Dignitas is a self-contained serenity, a kind of solid immobility that cannot be affected by worldly fortunes. For the Stoics, and especially for Cicero, dignity is democratic in the sense that it does not depend on social status; it is within reach of everyone from the slave (Epictetus) to the emperor (Marcus Aurelius). Dignity refers to the rational life possible for us all, but it is really characteristic only of the rare human being who is genuinely devoted to living according to reason.

Dignity, the contemporary Stoic novelist Tom Wolfe shows in A Man in Full, can shine through even in the life of a maximum-security prisoner who seems to have been deprived of every human good. Mr. Wolfe's novel shows both that the Stoic way of thinking is almost completely alien to American life today and that it still has powerful explanatory power. He shows us that our sociobiologists and neuroscientists have something to learn from what we might call Stoic science. The Council's book would have been more comprehensive had a genuine Stoic contributed a chapter, but no critic has yet registered that complaint. The early modern philosophers--following, in a certain way, St. Augustine's Christian critique of Stoic vanity--denied that human beings could ever achieve a rational, inward insulation from the effects of fortune. They contended instead that it is undignified to allow oneself be a plaything of fortune--of forces and people beyond your control.

There is nothing genuinely dignified in Stoic self-deception about our real bodily dependence. Human beings are stuck with being concerned, most of all, with keeping their fragile bodies alive. So there is something dignified in facing up to that truth and doing something about it--acting with freedom and intelligence to make yourself more secure. In Hobbes's view, your own life is infinitely valuable and irreplaceable to you, but it cannot seem that way to anyone else. Therefore, Hobbes reasons, your dignity is nothing more than your "public worth." And that is nothing more than the price your powers can bring: Your dignity is your productivity.

Others recognize your worth only insofar as they can use--and are willing to pay for--what you can do. We have every right to work to become as dignified as we can be, but we do not have an equal right to dignity. Hobbes is for equal rights, but equal dignity is impossible.

There is a lot to be said for ranking people--determining their excellence or importance--according to their productivity. Vain illusions which generate the idleness that comes with inward serenity are dispelled. There is, we learn, no invisible realm of freedom, no impregnable Stoic fortress, into which we can securely retreat. It is undeniable progress to stop ranking people according to their social class, gender, race, religion, and so forth. Productivity is the most visible and surest foundation for a meritocracy--which is why Americans today are having more trouble than ever finding a higher standard than productivity to determine their dignity. Even with the economic downturn, Americans are wealthier and freer than ever, but their dignity seems to depend more than ever on being useful and pleasing to others. They increasingly lack the inward self-confidence that comes with having a personal standard higher than "success." We might want to say that Americans are both more and less free than ever--and in a way that would earn a Stoic's cold contempt.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE CLASSIC PLIGHT OF THE NOUVEAU RICHE...:

The Pirate Pose: Twenty years after Bonfire of the Vanities, the author checks in on the new masters of the universe and finds them even coarser and ruder than their predecessors could have ever imagined being. (Tom Wolfe, May 2007, Conde Nast Portfolio)

Somehow the members of the Knickerbocker, the Brook, the Union, and the Leash, for that matter, do not seem too keen on recruiting people infinitely richer than they are who pride themselves on their aggressive nature and will happily see to it you enjoy doing things their way; even less so, the three clubs that count, socially, in Greenwich, the Round Hill Club, the Field Club, and the Greenwich Country Club. The country club is bigger and doesn't seem as picky as the others, but it is not eager to welcome these people.

So what? We will build our own clubs! Our own sports emporia! Our own resorts! We will outdo the wobbly too-tall old elite with their scrubbed-wood aesthetic left over from the early days of the 20th century. Have you -ever actually been inside that Round Hill Club they're so proud of? The worn wood, the rickety sashes, the tired paint, the failing fabrics, the cracked leather--the place is falling apart, the way we see it. (We're capital-M Modern.) Imagine how it would look if it were set beside Stevie Cohen's own 32,000-square-foot clubhouse and 14 acres of grounds! Next to Stevie's art collection--which is nothing less than a world-class museum!--Stevie's indoor basketball court, year-round swimming pool under glass, his gym, his spa facility, his theater for movies and every other electronic medium, his hair salon, two putting greens complete with sand traps and a fairway in between, and, as the pièce de résistance, an ice rink the size of Rockefeller Center's with a 30-by-24-foot rink house for the Zamboni! Clubhouses? We'll show you clubhouses!

The only thing missing is an entire 18-hole golf course. There is always the Burning Tree Country Club, whose membership is largely Jewish, nearby, but who has to bother with "nearby"? When we want to play golf, we just go over to the Westchester County Airport, where our Gulfstreams, Falcons, and full crews fly us anywhere in the world to play on courses that make the Greenwich Country Club look like miniature golf. Every weekend? Anytime we want!

As for the co-op buildings in New York, their residents having felt already burned by the fabulous new money, some are now considering new screening devices. The "good buildings" have traditionally required full financial--disclosure statements, certified by C.P.A.'s, to make sure applicants have enough money. The board of a building on Park Avenue is now considering rejecting applicants who have too much money. These days, when a personal net worth punches a hole in the earth's atmosphere, it invariably signals one of these people.

In Greenwich, the two charities with old-money cachet, namely the Boys and Girls Club and Greenwich Hospital, will gladly accept these people's money but don't seem to have them on their boards. So these people's money goes mainly to the Bruce Museum, which has no such scruples. The Bruce Museum's Renaissance Ball is perhaps the most lavish party of the year in Greenwich.

In New York there are now, as there have been for 125 years, two cracks in the "walled city," as Theodore Dreiser called it in Sister Carrie, through which new money can slip: charity and the arts.

But these people keep getting stuck halfway. On the art front, they soon realize they have a problem. New York's great cultural repositories, the museums, libraries, and performing arts centers, have a social hierarchy. To use an N.C.A.A. analogy, there is Division I, consisting of (1) the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (2) the New York Public Library, (3) the Museum of Modern Art, and (4) the Frick Collection. From that elevation it is a terrifying plunge in status to Division III: the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center, the Museum of Natural History, the Morgan Library, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New-York Historical Society. There is no Division II.

All these institutions are dying to get their hands on the stupendous palletloads of money that socially ambitious hedge fund managers have amassed. The Division III institutions can't resist. For example, 43-year-old David Ganek of Level Global Investors is not only on the board of the Guggenheim, he is treated as a star. He is touted as having assembled a breathtaking art collection of his own, of the Richard Prince, Jeff Koons hot-now variety. He was co-chairman of the museum's annual benefit extravaganza in November and appeared onstage with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and celebrity lure Dennis Hopper. The party brought in $4 million, which made the museum's director ecstatic.

On the other hand, it was anemic compared with the Robin Hood Foundation's $48 million. That may explain why another Division III board, Lincoln Center's, has made Bruce Kovner of Caxton Associates vice chairman and featured star. Kovner has donated $20 million (as well as $25 million to Juilliard). He is also head recruiter of other hedge fund managers. Last year, he convened a breakfast meeting in his office with six of them, including Steven Mnuchin of Dune Capital and Eric Mindich of Eton Park, both of whom are also on the Division III Whitney's board.

Lincoln Center's gratitude to Kovner knows no boundaries--except possibly for a single tiny leg up he accomplished in all innocence. There were old-money sorts on the board who rolled their eyes in a northerly orbit the time he sat down at a meeting and slung one leg over the arm of his chair.

Only halfway, halfway, halfway ... These people have yet to actually make it into the walled city and onto the boards of the Big Four. Steve Cohen has a $3 billion fortune, according to Forbes, and a huge collection of Modern and contemporary art reportedly worth $500 million one day and $750 million the next. That may be so, and the Museum of Modern Art would no doubt like to have some of both, but Cohen has gotten no further at the museum than its paintings-and-sculpture-acquisition committee. Ganek, likewise, has made it to the Metropolitan Museum's photography committee, and that's it for him.

Edith Wharton's New York new money, embodied by Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, wanted nothing so much as to replicate the status symbols and customs of old money--the architecture, the art collections, the country estates, the dress, manners, politesse, sophistication, worldly wisdom--in order to achieve certified respectability. But we can assume no such thing about our new hedge fund money. Getting in socially in the Edith Wharton sense may be part of their ambition, but it crashes head-on into their most cherished values, their very status fixation. The animal spirits that have brought them their astounding fortunes and, equally important, honor in the eyes of one another practically guarantee that they will be shut out of places like the Knickerbocker, the Brook, the Union. For that matter, even a much younger, hipper club, such as Soho House, hasn't welcomed them either--and these people thought they would fit right in.

So in the spring of 2005, they opened their own club, the Core Club, in midtown Manhattan, a club to beat all clubs, a billionaires club. No amenity would be regarded as too over-the-top. Every member working out in the club's fitness center would have a butler at his elbow. To do what, was not immediately evident. Nevertheless, the prospects of the ultimate club seemed so swell, 100 people ponied up $100,000 each as "elite founding members," reported a wide-eyed Time magazine. Each of the 400 other members--500 was the limit--agreed to pay an initiation fee of $55,000, staggeringly high for an in-town, indoor club, plus $1,000 a month in dues, meaning the club would take in $6 million a year in dues alone. The membership was a royal assortment of hedge fund managers and suchlike: David Ganek, Richard Perry, Stephen Schwarzman, Barry Rosenstein, Teddy Forstmann, Bruce Wasserstein, plus a few female celebrities such as Patty Smyth and Fergie, Duchess of York, plus--ahhhh, the poetry of status justice!--the bitterest and most poetic mocker of private clubs in our time ... Daniel Loeb! Daniel Loeb ... club man at last! The club remains flush with cash and Croesuses. Some have been saying, however, that there are reports that the members are not exactly wild about going to the club to beat all clubs anymore.

If so, the reason is not hard to find. At the Soho House, and wherever else the younger smart set convenes, the Core Club is now known as the "club for people who can't get into clubs."

[originally posted: 4/30/07]

FROM THE ARCHIVES: MUPPETMANIA:

Naturally, being so manly, so fast-acting, so... well... so masterful, the Masters of the Universe couldn't help but feel superior to the common people they had to deal with every day. They tried not to show it... but when the warriors were among themselves, out on the trading floor, let's say, how could they help but poke a little fun at all the simple souls they ran into in the course of their work? It was like the way New York City police officers called the clueless citizens they ran into "hooples."

The Masters of the Universe had the same sort of terminology for referring to clueless citizens in their world--but who were they? According to Michael Lewis, a onetime salesman for Salomon Brothers, there was a running joke at Salomon that went:

"What's the second-lowest form of human being?"

"I don't know, what?"

"An equities dealer in Dallas." This was the sub-punchline. At the time, the 1980s, the action, the big money, was not in equities, i.e., stocks, but in the bond market and certainly not in Texas.

"So what's the lowest form of human being?"

"A customer."

That was Salomon Brothers. At Goldman Sachs they called customers "muppets." Other investment banks called their customers "guppies," "suckers," "marks," "sheep," "chumps," "lambs," "baby seals"... Words like suckers, marks, and lambs had considerably more bite than hooples. After all, where do lambs go? To the slaughter.

The Masters of the Universe had always thought of their customers as people who should never have been let out of the house with money in their pockets. But here they were and somebody was going to take advantage of them. To turn your palms up and shrug and just watch them walk by, you'd have to be as lame as they were. They were lame; they weren't stupid. They had money and IQs above 98. So you had to ask yourself, Why would they ever invest in an investment bank? In a hedge fund you at least had a fighting chance. The manager was investing his own money the same way you were. Well... let's be fair. Not every investment bank would lead its customers to the slaughter. On the other hand what was wrong with shearing the fleece every so often?

Our manly Masters, still gorged with so much testosterone and dopamine, just didn't get it in 2009 even when the most unlikely thing in the world happened: a bunch of weaklings, a bunch of nerds known as quants, shut the golden door flat in their faces.

Nerds... the nerd has never been precisely defined, thanks to the psychological complexity of the creature. The word has connotations of some level of intelligence. The typical nerd is a male with intelligence but no sense of giving it a manly face. He doesn't play sports, doesn't automatically crack up over jokes about slutty girls, doesn't shore up his masculinity with frequent drops of the f-bomb, doesn't realize how bad it looks when he shoots his arm into the air and flaps his hand like a flag in his eagerness for the teacher to call on him first to answer the question, doesn't retaliate against insults from his fellow males in the schoolyard--oh, the schoolyard... the schoolyard... It is there that he learns he is not a Master of the Universe and never will be... not in his whole lifetime... and so he develops interests that are neither male nor not male--just obsessive, such as capturing bugs at night and pinning them up on a push-pin board, studiously arranging them by genus, species, and subspecies. There's nothing wrong with it... it's just a little weird and brainy--in short, nerdy. If a nerd was a little weird and not brainy at all, he was known as a dork. There was no connotation of deviant sexual behavior. The Master of the Universe assumed all varieties of nerds--quants, dorks, and plain nerds--were asexual.

Quant was what a nerd could move up in rank to, if he turned out to be a mathematical genius. It was the manly traders' and salesmen's condescending contraction of the actual term, quantitative analyst. Quants started showing up on trading floors in the late 1980s to set up computers that could retrieve information and sort it out faster than a trader, thereby freeing the Master of the Universe from a lot of tedious clerk work. At the outset, the traders looked down upon the quants as nerds who didn't have, in real-manly MasterSpeak, "the balls" it took to go out on the floor and take the big risks required if you wanted to make real money. It was in the early 1990s that the Masters actually coined the word quant, possibly because that was what it sounded like when you squashed a blood-ballooned tick with your thumb. They had no suspicion, none at all, of what these ball-less, sofa-bottomed weaklings were up to.

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that stocks and bonds are "evaporated property." Everybody thought of that as such a witty aphorism, but Schumpeter meant it as a lament. "Substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls and the machines in a factory," he said, "takes the life out of the idea of property." The new owners, i.e., the stockholders, lose the entrepreneur's, the founder's, will "to fight, economically, physically, politically, for, 'his' factory and his control over it and to die if necessary on its steps." Instead, at the first whiff of a problem the shareholders bail out and sell their share of the ownership to whoever will buy it on the stock market... and couldn't care less who it is.

That was how stocks and bonds evaporated property. What the quants had in mind was a quantum leap (so to speak) forward to the next stage: evaporating the stocks and bonds... not the property--that was long gone--but the very stocks and bonds themselves and making some real real money.

It was not a new idea, but even among quants few knew where it came from. Back in 1962 a young (30) mathematics professor at MIT, Edward O. Thorp, had published a mathematically foolproof way of winning at blackjack by counting the numbers of the cards already played. He proved it in live action by playing in a series of Nevada casinos... with a professional gambler's money. The book--and Thorp himself--infuriated the gambling industry. Now any clueless hoople could walk into a casino and wipe out the house. The casinos had to change the rules of a grand (and lucrative) old game. Naturally, the public ate it all up, and Beat the Dealer became a bestseller. To most mathematicians it was ingenious--they devoutly wished they had thought it up themselves--but pretty simple stuff, when you got right down to it. Five years later however, in 1967, Thorp caught their unqualified attention with a second book, Beat the Market. It described a foolproof way of winning big on the stock and bond markets. His fellow mathematicians had been spellbound at the time... 45 years ago. This one baffled ordinary citizens, however. It had to do with the mispricing of stocks and bonds as compared to their derivatives--futures, warrants, debentures, forwards, options, swaps, convertibles... and selling the stocks and bonds short and buying the derivatives long, or vice versa. It didn't matter what stocks or bonds, either. Their names, histories, reputations, prospects--irrelevant. All that mattered were the spreads, the lags, and they didn't have to be large. In fact, a difference of 2 cents was--

Hold on! Hold on!... Did you say derivatives?! and debentures or something?! and selling short?! or vice versa?! It made a hoople's head hurt.  [...]

The robo-monster accounted for 10 percent of all trades in 2000. Thereafter, the number rose in a steep, steady climb to a peak of 73 percent in 2009, close to three of every four trades--and nobody in the outside world, not even the press, had ever heard of it! The first mention of it in the press was not until July 23, 2009, in the New York Times.

The majority of men working full-time right here on Wall Street didn't know much more. They were as innocent as the suckers, the guppies, the muppets. They learned in such tiny steps, they didn't get the whole picture until very late in the game. Their first inkling came when the investment banks' trading floors began to calm down... fewer and fewer traders yelling at each other or into the telephone or at Fate. Before long they were sitting at desks behind banks of computer screens and communicating with each other by text message.

The robots cost some old traders and salesmen their jobs but, again, gradually, and intermittently, somebody still had to attend to the muppets and marks who continued to come to Wall Street to invest--to the quants the word seemed so archaic--to "invest" their money. What the Masters didn't realize was that their muppets, marks, guppies, and chumps provided only the liquidity--i.e., ready money... useful mainly to provide the quants' robo-diddlers with numbers to play with, discrepancies the robot battle machinery could game and exploit. The Masters didn't begin to sense that something was up until the heads of the various desks began giving them odd assignments such as taking big customers or potential customers out to lunch. Out to lunch? Assigned to leave the trading floor in the middle of the trading day? No more you... yes, you... if you must have something to eat, wimp, order in from the deli?... What was this? But even then it never became blatant enough to make them realize the new name of the game.

Today the same sort of top Ivy League students who wanted so badly to work on Wall Street even six years ago... now head for the Silicon Valley, because that is now where things are happening. And what is happening there is part of an older, more typical America. A Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook, and Facebook's industry, IT, for information technology... and, hoodie or no hoodie, are perfectly traditional in the lustrous economic annals of the United States.

Two things showed quite concretely how lowly the traders and salesmen had fallen. For a hot quant prospect, employers would pay up to five times as much as for a Master of the Universe. Or as a New York Post headline put it recently: "Slick 'Wall Street' guys ousted by $1M geeks." And a quant's rogue algorithm for a single stock could bring down the entire market, as in the "flash crash" of 2010 and the 1,000-point nosedive of 2012. The dive cost the Knight Capital Group $440 million. They never recovered.

SALAFI VS. DEMOCRATS:

FROM THE ARCHIVES: EVOLUTION FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME:

The Human Beast (Tom Wolfe, 2006 Jefferson Lecture)

Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening it is my modest intention to tell you in the short time we have together . . . everything you will ever need to know about the human beast.

I take that term, the human beast, from my idol, Emile Zola, who published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens--or Homo loquax, as I call him--was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes with fangs or orangutangs . . . or kangaroos. . . or the fang-proof mongoose. Darwin's doctrine, Evolution, leapt from the pages of a scientific monograph into every level of society in Europe and America with sensational suddenness. It created a sheerly dividing line between the God-fearing bourgeoisie who were appalled, and those people of sweetness and light whose business it was to look down at the bourgeosie from a great height. Today, of course, we call these superior people intellectuals, but intellectual didn't exist as a noun until Clemenceau applied it to Zola and Anatole France in 1896 during the Dreyfus Case. Zola's intellect was as sweetly enlightened as they made them. He was in with the in-crowd. Evenings he spent where the in-crowd went, namely, the Café Guerbois, along with Manet, Cezanne, Whistler, Nadar, and le tout Paris boheme. He took his cues from the in-crowd's views, namely, Academic art was bad, Impressionism was good, and Homo sapiens had descended from the monkeys in the trees. Human beasts? I'll give you human beasts! Zola's aforementioned novel of that name, La Bete Humaine in French, is a story of four murderers, a woman and three men, who work down at track level on the Paris-Le Havre railroad line, each closing in on a different victim, each with a different motive, including the case of a handsome young passenger train engineer with a compulsion . . . to make love to women and then kill them. With that, Zola crowned himself as the first scientific novelist, a "naturalist," to use his term, studying the human fauna.

I love my man Zola. He's my idol. But the whole business exudes irony so rich, you can taste it. It tastes like marzipan. Here we have Darwin and his doctrine that in 1859 rocks Western man's very conception of himself . . . We have the most popular writer in the world in 1888, Zola, who can't wait to bring the doctrine alive on the page . . . We have the next five generations of educated people who have believed and believe to this day that, at bottom, evolution's primal animal urges rule our lives . . . to the point where the fourth greatest pop music hit of 2001, "You and Me, Baby" by the Bloodhound Gang, proclaims, "You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals. / So let's do it like they do on the Dis-cov-ery Channel"--it's rich! rich! rich beyond belief!

O. I love you, Emile, but by the time you and Darwin got hold of it, evolution had been irrelevant for 11,000 years. Why couldn't you two see it? Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, "man reasoning," but Homo loquax, "man talking"! Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon! It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals! Our animal friends--we're very sentimental about predators these days, aren't we--the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars--they're "endangered," meaning hanging on for dear life. Today the so-called animal kingdom exists only at the human beast's sufferance. The beast has dealt crippling blows even to the unseen empire of the microbes. Stunted adults from Third World countries with abysmal sanitation come to the United States and their offspring grow six or more inches taller, thanks to the wonders of hygiene. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys would be extinct by now had not the human beasts hit upon the idea of animal husbandry. So far the human beast enjoys the luxury of crying sentimental tears over the deer because she's so pretty. But the day the human beast discovers deer in his cellar, fawns in his bedroom closet, bucks tangling horns in the attic at night above his very bedroom . . . those filthy oversized vermin, the deer, will be added to that big long list above. We're sentimental about the dolphins, because they're so smart. What about the tuna? It's okay to kill tunas by the ton because they're dimwits? It would take an evolutionary mystic (and there are such) to believe these animals will ever evolve their way out of the hole they're in thanks to man's power of speech.

[originally posted: 11/13/07]

FROM THE ARCHIVES: OKAY, WE PROVED WE HAD THE SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY....THEN WHAT?:

One Giant Leap to Nowhere (TOM WOLFE, 7/19/09, NY Times)

How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

From the moment the Soviets launched Sputnik I into orbit around the Earth in 1957, everybody from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson on down looked upon the so-called space race as just one thing: a military contest. At first there was alarm over the Soviets' seizure of the "strategic high ground" of space. They were already up there -- right above us! They could now hurl thunderbolts down whenever and wherever they wanted. And what could we do about it? Nothing. Ka-boom! There goes Bangor ... Ka-boom! There goes Boston ... Ka-boom! There goes New York ... Baltimore ... Washington ... St. Louis ... Denver ... San Jose -- blown away! -- just like that.

Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, the Earth itself, plus the Earth's own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes. You would run into the notorious "three body problem" and then some. You'd have to be crazy. The target would be untouched and you would wind up on the floor in a fetal ball, twitching and gibbering. On the other hand, the rockets that had lifted the Soviets' five-ton manned ships into orbit were worth thinking about. They were clearly powerful enough to reach any place on Earth with nuclear warheads.

But that wasn't what was on President Kennedy's mind when he summoned NASA's administrator, James Webb, and Webb's deputy, Hugh Dryden, to the White House in April 1961. The president was in a terrible funk. He kept muttering: "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let's find somebody -- anybody ... There's nothing more important." He kept saying, "We've got to catch up." Catching up had become his obsession. He never so much as mentioned the rockets.

Dryden said that, frankly, there was no way we could catch up with the Soviets when it came to orbital flights. A better idea would be to announce a crash program on the scale of the Manhattan Project, which had produced the atomic bomb. Only the aim this time would be to put a man on the Moon within the next 10 years.

Barely a month later Kennedy made his famous oration before Congress: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." He neglected to mention Dryden.

INTUITIVELY, not consciously, Kennedy had chosen another form of military contest, an oddly ancient and archaic one. It was called "single combat."

The best known of all single combats was David versus Goliath. Before opposing armies clashed in all-out combat, each would send forth its "champion," and the two would fight to the death, usually with swords. The victor would cut off the head of the loser and brandish it aloft by its hair.

The deadly duel didn't take the place of the all-out battle. It was regarded as a sign of which way the gods were leaning. The two armies then had it out on the battlefield ... unless one army fled in terror upon seeing its champion slaughtered. There you have the Philistines when Little David killed their giant, Goliath ... and cut his head off and brandished it aloft by its hair (1 Samuel 17:1-58). They were overcome by a mad desire to be somewhere else. (The Israelites pursued and destroyed them.)

More than two millenniums later, the mental atmosphere of the space race was precisely that.

Between 1962 and 1972, the U.S. space program spent $176 billion (inflation-adjusted in 2009 dollars). In magnitude, that comes close to the mammoth federal expenditures on building the interstate highway system over the same period (outlays from the Federal Highway Trust Fund totalled $220 billion in 2009 dollars from 1962-72).

We know what we got from the interstate highway system--fast, easy transportation, the creation of the suburbs, an entire transformation of our way of life. What did we get economically from the space program, especially the manned portion? Much, much less. Government investment in space, rather than opening up new opportunities, turned out to be a one-off. Lots of communication satellites, yes, but what else? There's no manufacturing in space, and unless I'm wrong, there's been little research done in space which has had great practical applications (please let me know if I'm wrong about this).

I'm sorry to be a grump about this. I don't think the expenditures on space were a bad idea. I don't think the moon landing was a bad idea. To the contrary--I'm glad we did it.

I'm just making the economic point that we used large amounts of scarce scientific and technical labor and money for one activity which at least up to now, has not produced big economic payoffs.

[originally posted: 7/19/09]

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Richard Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right" to describe a loosely connected band of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists, suspended a college tour after violent clashes overshadowed one of his campus speeches in March. He and other leading alt-right figures are fighting lawsuits without help from lawyers. Many also are struggling to raise money or spread their messages after losing access to mainstream internet platforms. A few have even dropped out of the movement altogether.

And then there's Heimbach, whose Traditionalist Worker Party was rocked by his arrest in March on charges he assaulted his wife's stepfather, David Matthew Parrott, who also was the group's spokesman. The men had argued over Heimbach's alleged affair with Parrott's wife, according to court documents. The alleged assault was a violation of Heimbach's probation for a case in which he was accused of physically harassing a protester at a 2016 Trump campaign rally in Kentucky.

The Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi website, has struggled to stay online since its founder, Andrew Anglin, published a post mocking the woman who was killed by a car that plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters at a "Unite the Right" white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer.

Anglin complained of being "banned from the internet" after domain-name registration companies Google and GoDaddy yanked the site's web address, effectively making it unreachable. Other technology companies cracked down on far-right extremists in the rally's aftermath. Twitter, for instance, banned accounts belonging to alt-right troll Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet and white nationalist Jared Taylor.

Christopher Cantwell, a white nationalist who hosts a live-streamed talk show called "Radical Agenda," was jailed on felony charges stemming from a torch-lit march through the University of Virginia's campus on the eve of the rally. Cantwell, Spencer and other "Unite the Right" participants are named in a federal lawsuit that blames them for the Charlottesville violence.

White nationalists rejoiced when Trump seemed to spread the blame for the violence.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: SPEAKING OF MANLINESS, I WAS THE VICTIM OF A MICROAGRESSION YESTERDAY (self-reference alert)

America's two most astute social commentators, the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield and the novelist Tom Wolfe, have weighed in on the debate over the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. They agree that the real controversy in our country is not between rationalists who preach evolutionism and fundamentalists who live in Darwin-denial, but between those who still believe that evolution can account for the whole of human behavior and those who see with their own eyes that it does not. The Darwinians, they observe, cannot properly account for the natural human quality that Mansfield calls "manliness" and that Wolfe, following the sociologists, describes as each individual's concern for his own status or ranking. The Darwinians do not recognize what genuinely distinguishes the human individual from everything else in nature, so they cannot account for such admirable phenomena as Carson Holloway's defense of transcendent human nobility against Darwinian reductionism.

Mansfield's Manliness is an ambitious and profound attempt to account for the human individual in terms of his need for--and his dramatic assertion of--singular, indispensable importance. The individual he describes is not the sovereign or utterly free (but also fearfully miserable) modern individual invented by Hobbes. Nor is he the Christian person whose dignity is graciously guaranteed by the Creator who made and loves him.

The manly individual is not the contemporary individual who understands his freedom as the replacement of social virtue by selfish calculation whom I criticize in Stuck with Virtue. Nor, finally, is he the Freudian individual who distinguishes himself by the uniqueness of his unconscious desires. The manly individual, the real human being, asserts that he is more than--essentially or qualitatively different from--his slavish fears, obsessions, and bodily desires. Wolfe shows in all his essays and novels that the truth of this assertion is still evident everywhere in our country today. In his most recent novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, he describes life at an elite contemporary university in terms of manly struggles for status. He focuses on a brilliant young woman, Charlotte Simmons, who enters the university convinced that she will distinguish herself through the life of the mind, and a young man, Jojo Johanssen, proud of his physical prowess as one of the country's most talented basketball players. Both Charlotte and Jojo think of themselves, not without reason, as natural aristocrats, distinguished from almost all of humanity by their mental or physical excellence.

Charlotte and Jojo certainly do not think of themselves--as the evolutionists do--merely as members of their species, or of a kin group. And they are right not to do so. Wolfe's and Mansfield's observations on the singular importance of the human individual are nobly supplemented by Carson Holloway's excellent The Right Darwin. Holloway (who writes as a real man, contemptuous of anyone who cannot see how important human beings can be) develops an Aristotelian-Tocquevillian critique of the view that Darwinian materialism could ever provide an adequate account of the goodness or greatness of the virtue alone practiced by human individuals. More insistently than Wolfe or Mansfield, Holloway defends the transcendent heights in which manliness surpasses itself in the direction of genuine human perfection.

Reflecting seriously on the individual defined by manliness can transform our understanding of who we are. And there is a great deal of empirical evidence for the truth of this view: Making the case against Darwin and on behalf of human dignity need not depend on revelation or the distinctive insights of Christian psychology. This is made plain in the fine anti-Darwinian scientific observations found in Tom Wolfe's 2006 Jefferson Lecture on "The Human Beast."

There, Wolfe claims to cover "everything you will need to know about the human beast." The phrase "human beast" he borrows from the title of Emile Zola's famous novel, the first literary presentation of Darwin's alleged discovery that human beasts are not really different from all the others. The sudden and sensational popularization of that "breakthrough" in the nineteenth century divided the intellectual world into two classes. The "God-fearing bourgeoisie" were "appalled by the suggestion that they were not created in the Creator's image." So they have raged against the scientific denial of individual human dignity or importance. The intellectuals-- "whose business it was to look down on the bourgeois from a great height"--embraced the new enlightenment that elevated each of them by reducing everyone else to beasts. In effect, they took pride in knowing that pride had no natural foundation. They incoherently believed that by seeing themselves and everyone else as beasts they had achieved a sort of divine wisdom about all things. Now the persistence of this class struggle over dignity or status--for five generations--is undeniable evidence of the distinctiveness of the human beast.

JUST IN: A DC judge slaps down MANAFORT's effort to have charges dismissed. And underscores that special counsel guidelines aren't as restrictive as Trump allies argue. pic.twitter.com/5MjEM54fAL

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) May 15, 2018

FROM THE ARCHIVES: 100%:

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ANYONE ELSE...:

The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening: ". . . The new alchemical dream is: changing one's personality--remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one's very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) . . ." (Tom Wolfe, August 23, 1976, New York Magazine)

Every major religious wave that has developed in America has started out the same way: with a flood of ecstatic experiences. The First Great Awakening, as it is known to historians, came in the 1740s and was led by preachers of "the New Light" such as Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, and George Whitefield. They and their followers were known as "enthusiasts" and "come-outers," terms of derision that referred to the frenzied, holy-rolling, pentecostal shout tempo of their services and to their visions, trances, shrieks, and agonies, which are preserved in great Rabelaisian detail in the writings of their detractors.

The Second Great Awakening came in the period from 1825 to 1850 and took the form of a still wilder hoe-down camp-meeting revivalism, of ceremonies in which people barked, bayed, fell down in fits and swoons, rolled on the ground, talked in tongues, and even added a touch of orgy. The Second Awakening originated in western New York State, where so many evangelical movements caught fire it became known as "the Burned-Over District." Many new seets, such as Oneida and the Shakers, were involved. But so were older ones, such as the evangelical Baptists. The fervor spread throughout the American frontier (and elsewhere) before the Civil War. The most famous sect of the Second Great Awakening was the Mormon movement, founded by a 24-year-old. Joseph Smith, and a small group of youthful comrades. This bunch was regarded as wilder, crazier, more obscene, more of a threat, than the entire lot of hippie communes of the 1960s put together. Smith was shot to death by a lynch mob in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844, which was why the Mormons, now with Brigham Young at the helm, emigrated to Utah. A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power. Once the Mormons settled, built, and ruled Utah, Mormonism became a religion sure enough . . . and eventually wound down to the slow, firm beat of respectability. . . .

We are now--in the Me Decade--seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of "psi phenomena" and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?

The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies' religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O'Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as "bleak" on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as "fascist." The hippie movement was often attacked as "fascist" in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and "the Moonies" (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.

Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with . . . "Let's talk about Me." They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize--but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It's exhilarating!--to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark . . . and to talk about Me.

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff's slogan--"If I've only one life, let me live it as a blonde!"--seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of "If I've only one life" challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name--they are simply lived by. In this case: man's age-old belief in serial immortality.

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide "a better future" for their children . . . the soldier who risks his life, or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle . . . the man who devotes his life to some struggle for "his people" that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime . . . people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills . . . and, for that matter, most women upon becoming pregnant for the first time . . . are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children . . . or in their people, their race, their community--for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, "I have only one life to live." Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors' lives and their offspring's lives and perhaps their neighbors' lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshiped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of Nature. Hence the wicked feeling--the excitement!--of "If I've only one life, let me live it as a ------!" Fill in the blank, if you dare.

And now many dare it! In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called "time's pattern": "Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart." A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.--but what did he know about . . . Let's talk about Me!

Tocqueville's idea of modern man lost "in the solitude of his own heart" has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn't know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts--in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing--they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do--they discovered and started doting on Me! They've created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead--who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me . . . Me . . . . Me . . . Me . . .

[originally posted: 12/27/10]

SCUT FARKUS FLINCHED:

As the Journal story noted, "The Trump administration worries that a backlash among U.S. farmers to tariffs could endanger Republican efforts to keep control of the House and Senate in midterm elections." The Post story notes:

Talks with China had bogged down in recent days, a potential problem for Trump because he needs Chinese help with the upcoming North Korea summit.

The president has asked several White House advisers recently what the Chinese want and what must be done to advance the trade talks, according to two people briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive matters.

Trump is determined to make a deal with China and has been told in recent days that relaxing restrictions on ZTE was a "prerequisite" to get the Chinese to engage in substantive discussions.

As the Financial Times editorializes, this is a heckuva way to run a railroad:

Mr Trump's remarkable conversion -- he not only lifted the restrictions on ZTE but actively wished for the company's revival -- appears to be entirely due to exchanges with Xi Jinping, China's president, ahead of a visit from a Chinese delegation to Washington for talks about trade.

In this context, the move fits in all too well with two of Mr Trump's huge weaknesses as a president. First, he is addicted to making deals with other powerful leaders on the spur of the moment and with barely any thought of the consequences either to the goal he is pursuing, or indeed other interests of the US. Second, he has contempt for the normal functioning of government, and particularly the interagency process that painstakingly works out policy in the US's complex and multifaceted administration.

All of this is consistent with Monday's observation that this administration is shorthanded and scrambling when it comes to trade issues.

THE LAST AMERICAN NOVELIST:

Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, "Neo-pretentious."

It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which -- like "Radical Chic" and "the Me Decade" -- became American idioms.

His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.

"As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world," Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. "His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word 'hernia' 57 times."

William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: "He is probably the most skillful writer in America -- I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else."

From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, "still the best account -- fictional or non, in print or on film -- of the genesis of the sixties hipster subculture," the press critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book's 40th anniversary.

Even more impressive, to many critics, was "The Right Stuff," his exhaustively reported narrative about the first American astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983 with Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made the test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to the English language.

At the same time, Mr. Wolfe continued to turn out a stream of essays and magazine pieces for New York, Harper's and Esquire. His theory of literature, which he preached in print and in person and to anyone who would listen was that journalism and non-fiction had "wiped out the novel as American literature's main event."

After "The Right Stuff," published in 1979, he confronted what he called "the question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding ten or fifteen years: Are you merely ducking the big challenge -- The Novel?"

DONALD WHO?:

Republican officials now see Mr. Pence as seeking to exercise expansive control over a political party ostensibly helmed by Mr. Trump, tending to his own allies and interests even when the president's instincts lean in another direction. Even as he laces his public remarks with praise for the president, Mr. Pence and his influential chief of staff, Nick Ayers, are unsettling a group of Mr. Trump's fierce loyalists who fear they are forging a separate power base. [...]

Word of the internal tensions is getting out beyond the walls of the White House: one prominent lawmaker said the complaints of high-ranking Trump officials were starting to circulate on Capitol Hill.

"They're looking for people to stay on the team, not break away from the team," Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said of the Trump side of the West Wing. [...]

"I don't know if he can get the nomination or not," said Lyle Campbell, a retiree living in Scottsdale. "I like Pence very much, but I'd rather have a woman run -- I'd rather have the ambassador to the U.N."

IT'S A RICO CASE:

APPROACHING 100% VERIFICATION:

The founder of a three-on-three basketball league who claims he was offered a bribe by a one-time Qatari diplomat to arrange access to Steve Bannon said on Monday that the former diplomat is the same person photographed with Michael Cohen at Trump Tower in December 2016.

BIG3 basketball league co-founder Jeff Kwatinetz told Slate that he recognized Ahmed Al-Rumaihi in photos with Cohen that were tweeted Sunday by attorney Michael Avenatti.

"Yes, 100 percent," Kwatinetz said when asked if he thought the videos and photos were of Ahmed Al-Rumaihi. Last week, Kwatinetz, who is a co-founder of BIG3 with Ice Cube, accused Al-Rumaihi in a sworn court declaration of making an attempted bribe and of suggestively boasting that Flynn had not refused "our money." [...]

The photos were posted on Twitter on Sunday by Avenatti, who is representing the adult film actor Stormy Daniels in a lawsuit against Cohen that seeks to nullify her confidentiality agreement over an alleged affair with Donald Trump. Avenatti tweeted the images that appeared to show Al-Rumaihi entering an elevator in Trump Tower on Dec. 12, 2016, five days after news broke of the multibillion-dollar sale of 19.5 percent of the Russian fossil fuel giant Rosneft to Swiss trading firm Glencore and Qatar's sovereign investment fund. (Glencore and Qatar sold off a major stake of Rosneft to China last year, but earlier this month Qatar bought back in to the Russian company for a total stake of 19 percent.)

The Rosneft deal features prominently in an investigative dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. A central claim of the Steele dossier was that Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, during an alleged meeting with Rosneft officials in summer 2016, promised that a Trump administration would undo sanctions against Russia, in part, in exchange for brokerage of the Rosneft deal. In May 2016, Al-Rumaihi reportedly took over as head of a major division of the wealth fund ultimately involved in the Rosneft deal.

The allegations in the Steele dossier, made in October 2016, suggested a future quid-pro-quo deal between Russia and the Trump campaign. 

IT'S ALMOST AS IF THE VOTERS ARE PATRIOTS:

Moktada al-Sadr, a firebrand militia leader whose forces once battled American troops in Iraq and were implicated in widespread atrocities against civilians, has emerged as the surprise front-runner in the Iraqi national elections, according to Iraqi election officials.

After American forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, Mr. Sadr remained vocally anti-American, though he has also been strongly critical of Iran, the other foreign power with widespread influence here.

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

My grandparents and their grandparents were born and raised in the town of Ramla, in the center of what is now Israel. On my walks, I imagined my family's ancestral land.

But I also have experienced the destructive impact of borders more personally. I was born in 1984, two years after Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, dividing my city, Rafah, between Gaza and Egypt. The core of the city was razed by Israel and Egypt to create a buffer zone, separating families, including mine, with barbed wire. My mother's family lived on the Egyptian side and Rafah's division ended in the separation of my parents. Although my mother lived a stone's throw away, it was 19 years before I saw her again.

On that day in December, as I watched the birds fly over the border I could not cross, I found myself thinking how much smarter birds and animals are than people; they harmonize with nature instead of erecting walls. Later that day, I wondered on Facebook what would happen if a man acted like a bird and crossed that fence. "Why would Israeli soldiers shoot at him as if he is committing a crime?" I wrote. My only thought was to reach the trees, sit there and then come back.

I couldn't let go of that thought. A month later, I wrote another post. "Thank you, Israel, for opening our eyes. If the occupation opened the crossing points, and allowed people to live a normal life and created jobs for young people, we could wait for a few generations," I wrote. "We are forced to choose between confrontations or between life." I ended the post with the hashtag GreatReturnMarch.

2007 Year Israel imposed a land, air and sea blockade on Gaza

76% Reduction in Gazan imports after the blockade

 

151 Import items, including cement and pipes, prohibited because of "dual use" for military purposes

 

84% Portion of supplies for water, health and sanitation infrastructure denied by Israel, according to Oxfam

 

97% Portion of drinking water in Gaza that is unsafe

 

6-8 Daily hours of electricity Israel supplies to Gaza

 

61:1 Ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed in Gaza since 2009

 

181 Times between January and March that ISF shot at Gazan fishers and farmers who strayed into "access restricted areas," killing two and wounding 13 [...]

​

101 Protesters killed in Gaza by Israeli security forces since March 30, as of May 14

 

8,400 Gazans wounded in the protests since March 30, as of May 14

DON'T TAX WHAT YOU DO WANT:

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

New York-based Lemonade Insurance Company, founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Shai Wininger and Daniel Schreiber, is seeking to revolutionize the way we insure our homes.

The startup, which began its activities with homeowner and renters insurance, is a licensed insurer in 11 US states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas, allowing users to insure their homes by doing away with agents and replacing them with bots and artificial intelligence. Customers answer a set of simple questions through a chat with the company's bot, Maya, and, in seconds, can get their home insured. It takes 90 seconds to get insured, the company's website says, and three minutes to get paid, if and when a claim is made.

WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE CORRUPTION WITHOUT THE RACISM?:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

The simulations allowed the researchers to adjust the amount of dark energy in the universe and watch what happened.

The results were a surprise. The research revealed that the amount of dark energy could be increased a couple of hundred times - or reduced equally drastically - without substantially affecting anything else.

"For many physicists, the unexplained but seemingly special amount of dark energy in our universe is a frustrating puzzle," says Salcido.

"Our simulations show that even if there was much more dark energy or even very little in the universe then it would only have a minimal effect on star and planet formation."

And this, he suggests, implies that life could potentially exist in many multiverse universes - ironically enough, an uncomfortable conclusion.

"The multiverse was previously thought to explain the observed value of dark energy as a lottery - we have a lucky ticket and live in the universe that forms beautiful galaxies which permit life as we know it," says Barnes.

"Our work shows that our ticket seems a little too lucky, so to speak. It's more special than it needs to be for life. This is a problem for the multiverse; a puzzle remains."

It is a puzzle that goes right to the heart of the matter: if the dark energy assumptions are flawed, does a multiverse even exist? The researchers acknowledge that their results do not preclude it - but they do diminish the likelihood.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

1. Iran is the Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism

The State Department has been regurgitating this mindless drivel for decades and now President Trump is echoing it. Mr. Trump was more lucid and forthright before becoming President when he bluntly wrote that Saudi Arabia is the "biggest funder" of terrorism. But now that Israel and Saudi Arabia have formed a temporary alliance of convenience against Iran, President Trump is willing to ignore his better instinct about our ally Saudi Arabia. Iran has never attacked the American homeland and was among the first countries to condemn the attacks of September 11. Without exception, every Islamic terrorist attack in the United States has been perpetrated by Sunni extremists who have been indoctrinated by the intolerant, anti-Western Wahhabi sect funded by the Saudi regime. From well before 9/11 and up to the present day, Saudi-taught and Saudi-inspired terrorists have remained the greatest threat to the United States.

As with any myth, there is always a kernel of truth and it is undeniable that Iran has sponsored attacks on U.S. interests overseas--but only when it perceived them as legitimate responses to military aggression. The most obvious example of this was the 1983 suicide bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon in which 241 of our Marines lost their lives. While that attack was deplorable, what is usually left out of the narrative about that attack was that the United States was initially viewed by all sides as neutral, but eventually the White House chose sides in the ongoing civil war in Lebanon--never a good idea in any civil war--and started shelling Shi'a villages. Moreover, if we consider which state sponsor of terrorism is responsible for the most American deaths overseas, again Iran falls short. That label is more appropriately awarded to our other longtime ally Pakistan, which has funded and protected the Taliban and the Haqqani network who have killed or wounded thousands of Americans in Afghanistan.

THE PATH OF LOVE IS SELDOM STRAIGHT:

These Western interventionists don't grasp why Iran came very late to decolonization, and then with a volcanic anti-Western eruption. For decades Iranians were victims of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. inflicted puppet regimes on many nation-states in Asia and Africa. Iran did have its own nationalist upsurge, which built up throughout Western and Soviet occupation of the country during World War II. But it was brutally suppressed by a CIA-backed coup in 1953 that deposed the country's democratically elected leader and empowered the despotic Shah of Iran.

The tens of thousands of Americans who once lived in Tehran -- some as advisers to the Shah's notorious executioners and torturers in the secret police -- may have occasionally felt the visceral hostility in the country to the Shah and his American enablers.

But they were not helped by "obtusely establishment editors," as Kennett Love, the New York Times correspondent in Tehran, called his bosses, who like most American newspaper editors couldn't look past the Shah's pharaonic modernization projects to his brutality and foolishness.

Such naivete and ignorance explains why, when they finally erupted in 1979, anti-American passions shocked policymakers and opinion-formers in the U.S.

Frustrated "real men" then took to assisting Saddam Hussein in his vicious assault on Iran, which entrenched the Islamic revolutionaries in power in Tehran. They trampled upon the few shoots of liberal reform in Iran in the early 2000s, insisting on the country's inclusion in President George W. Bush's "axis of evil." It is no surprise that their stampede into Baghdad helped turn Iraq into an Iranian client state.

Needless to add, during all these years of unrelentingly belligerent and incompetent American policy, Iranian nationalism osmotically grew, along with Iran's sphere of influence in the region.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

During Trump's presidential run, reporters noticed a curious thing about Cohen. Questions about Trump's business or his taxes went to his chief legal officer or another staffer, but Cohen handled questions about Russia. "One of the things that we learned that caught my interest," Simpson testified to Congress in November 2017, "serious questions about Donald Trump's activities in Russia and the former Soviet Union went to Michael Cohen, and that he was the only person who had information on that subject or was in a position to answer those questions."

In the 1990s, there was an informal group of federal and local law enforcement agents investigating the Russian Mafiya in New York that called themselves "Red Star." They shared information they learned from informants. It was well known among the members of Red Star that Cohen's father-in-law was funneling money into Trump ventures. Several sources have told me that Cohen was one of several attorneys who helped money launderers purchase apartments in a development in Sunny Isles Beach, a seaside Florida town just north of Miami. This was an informal arrangement passed word-of-mouth: "We have heard from Russian sources that ... in Florida, Cohen and other lawyers acted as a conduit for money."

A year after Trump World Tower opened in 2002, Trump had agreed to let Miami father-and-son developers Gil and Michael Dezer use his name on what ultimately became six Sunny Isles Beach condominium towers, which drew in new moneyed Russians all too eager to pay millions. "Russians love the Trump brand," said Gil Dezer, who added that Russians and Russian-Americans bought some 200 of the 2,000 or so units in Trump buildings he built. A seventh Trump-branded hotel tower built up Sunny Isles into what ostensibly has become a South Florida Brighton Beach.

An investigation by Reuters found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in the seven Trump-branded luxury towers. And that was a conservative estimate. At least 703 - or about one-third - of the 2044 units were owned by limited liability companies, or LLCs, which could conceal the property's true owner. Executives from Gazprom and other Russian natural resource giants also owned units in Trump's Sunny Isles towers. In an observation that several people I spoke with echoed, Kenneth McCallion, a former prosecutor who tracked the flows of Russian criminal money into Trump's properties, told me, "Trump's genius - or evil genius - was, instead of Russian criminal money being passive, incidental income, it became a central part of his business plan." McCallion continued, "It's not called 'Little Moscow' for nothing. The street signs are in Russian. But his towers there were built specifically for the Russian middle-class criminal."

Cohen joined the Trump Organization around the time that the second Sunny Isles tower was being built. A few years earlier, he had invested $1.5 million in a short-lived Miami-based casino boat venture run by his two Ukrainian business partners, Arkady Vaygensberg and Leonid Tatarchuk. Only three months after its maiden voyage, it would become the subject of a large fraud investigation. But Cohen was saved from his bad investment by none other than Trump himself, who hired Cohen as an attorney just before his casino ship sank. A source who investigated Cohen's connections to Russia told me, "Say you want to get money into the country and maybe you're a bit suspect. The Trump organization used lawyers to allow people to get money into the country." 

Residents at Sunny Isles included people like Vladimir Popovyan, who paid $1.17 million for a three-bedroom condo in 2013. Forbes Russia described Popovyan as a friend and associate of Rafael Samurgashev, a former championship wrestler who ran a criminal group in Rostov-on-Don in southeastern Russia. Peter Kiritchenko, a Ukrainian businessman arrested on fraud charges in San Francisco in 1999, and his daughter owned two units at Trump Towers in Sunny Isles Beach worth $2.56 million. (Kiritchenko testified against a corrupt former Ukrainian prime minister who was convicted in 2004 of money laundering.) Other owners of Trump condos in Sunny Isles include members of a Russian-American organized crime group that ran a sports betting ring out of Trump Tower, which catered to wealthy oligarchs from the former Soviet Union. Michael Barukhin, who was convicted in a massive scheme to defraud auto insurers with phony claims, lived out of a Trump condo that was registered to a limited liability corporation.

Selling units from the lobby of the Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles was Baronoff Realty. Elena Baronoff, who died of cancer in 2015, was the exclusive sales agent for three Trump-branded towers. Glenn Simpson, who spent a year investigating Trump's background during the campaign, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that Baronoff was a "suspected organized crime figure."

An Uzbek immigrant who arrived in the United States as a cultural attaché in public diplomacy from the Soviet Union, Baronoff became such a well-known figure in Sunny Isles Beach that she was named the international ambassador for the community. Baronoff accompanied Trump's children on a trip to Russia in the winter of 2007-2008, posing for a photo in Moscow with Ivanka and Eric Trump and developer Michael Dezer. Also in the photo, curiously, was a man named Michael Babel, a former senior executive of a property firm owned by Oleg Deripaska, the Russian metals tycoon Paul Manafort allegedly offered personal updates on Trump's presidential campaign. Babel later fled Russia to evade fraud charges.

POLITICAL SPEECH SHOULD NOT BE TAXED THOUGH:

The record shows that there was no "targeting" of right wing groups and the "hassling" Smith writes about was against all dubious applicants.

Likewise, there was no favoritism for liberal or centrist or establishment or any other C4 organizations. Indeed, the only C4s who had their status revoked were two liberal organizations.

The record shows that the number of conservative groups whose applications were given extra scrutiny was larger than the number of centrist and liberal groups. That, however, tells us nothing about IRS bias, only about the competency and propriety of the applicants. I expect drunks in bars to misunderstand such issues, but not professors.

The record shows that the C4 applications set aside for scrutiny stated or indicated plans to engaged in prohibited activity. Among applications declaring such intent, the facts show, more were in the Tea Party zone of politics than centrist or liberal zones.

One obvious question this raises is whether there are lawyers and other advisers to conservative groups who simply did not understand the C4 law and, logically, saw nothing amiss in the applications they prepared. Was there bad advice circulating among conservative groups? That issue has, as best I can tell, never been investigated.

The Be On the Lookout (BOLO) directive for applications was even handed. It included "Tea Party" because many questionable applications used those two words, making it like some other terms shorthand for identifying which applications were most likely to be problematic.

The BOLO memo also cited "progressive," "blue" and "medical marijuana." Only the last of those might be affiliated with conservative groups, likely libertarian.

The BOLO directive came from a mid-level manager, a self-described conservative Republican who testified that he acted on hown authority. The record shows he did so with good reason.

Many C4 applications -- on their face -- stated or indicated the organization would engage in prohibited activity or strongly suggested that. The facts show that more of these flawed applications, came from right wing groups that the center or left. Had the IRS approved any or all of them without scrutiny THAT would have been a scandal.

ABJECT SURRENDER:

The U.S. is prepared to quickly lift sanctions on North Korea and promise its leader, Kim Jong Un, that it would not seek to oust him from power, senior officials said Sunday, sketching out the terms of a possible deal if Kim agrees to give up his nuclear weapons.

"We will have to provide security assurances" to Kim as part of a nuclear deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Fox News Sunday. 

THE LOSING OF WWII:

It is often taken for granted that all European nations involved in the early Cold War, save Germany, fell naturally onto one side of the Iron Curtain or the other. Yet Czechoslovakia was not pre-ordained to become part of the Soviet sphere. There were multiple opportunities for the United States to influence its position on the political map of Europe.

Czechoslovakia emerged from the Second World War unaligned. Hitler and Stalin had not allocated it in the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin and Churchill had not included it in their secret 1944 'percentages' deal, which designated spheres of influence in eastern and southern Europe. The victorious Allies had not discussed its orientation at Yalta or Potsdam. Both the Soviets and the Americans had liberated it. But whatever cards Washington had to play, diplomatically and militarily, it gave most of them up in 1945.

'I believe that Russia wants to and will cooperate' in Czechoslovakia, President Roosevelt told the Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, a democrat unaffiliated with any party, in February 1944. Red Army officials, however, made clear to their Czech counterparts that the country would be brought within the Soviet sphere. What capacity the US Army had to countervail was circumscribed by the fateful decision of Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower to stop its own advance 50 miles west of Prague.

The Red Army, which had been 150 miles further from the Czech capital than General George Patton just before the war's end, marched into Prague on 9 May 1945. It was one of its easier victories, but also one that had great subsequent historical significance. 'We could have liberated Prague', lamented one bitter US embassy official. [...]

President Truman decided to write to Stalin on 2 November proposing a simultaneous US and Soviet withdrawal by 1 December. Given that such a deal would tip the military balance of power in the country overwhelmingly to the Soviets, who would have hundreds of thousands of soldiers available near its borders to smother the country as necessary, Stalin agreed.

SIEVE, SIEVE, SIEVE....:

On Sunday Axios caught up with some of the administration's most prolific leakers to ask them why they do it. Some said it's about doing what's right for America ... and annoying their enemies:

"The most common substantive leaks are the result of someone losing an internal policy debate," a current senior administration official told me. "By leaking the decision, the loser gets one last chance to kill it with blowback from the public, Congress or even the President."

"To be honest, it probably falls into a couple of categories," one current White House official tells me. "The first is personal vendettas. And two is to make sure there's an accurate record of what's really going on in the White House."

Another said the atmosphere in the White House is basically leak or be leaked about:

"Otherwise," the official added, "you have to realize that working here is kind of like being in a never-ending 'Mexican Standoff.' Everyone has guns (leaks) pointed at each other and it's only a matter of time before someone shoots. There's rarely a peaceful conclusion so you might as well shoot first."

But the most interesting response concerned how they go about spilling anonymous quotes to reporters:

"To cover my tracks, I usually pay attention to other staffers' idioms and use that in my background quotes. That throws the scent off me," the current White House official added.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Even in an administration that has gotten us used to reversals and back-and-forths, President Donald Trump performed an impressive U-Turn on policy Sunday, when he wrote a tweet vowing to help Chinese telecom giant ZTE get back in business following devastating U.S. sanctions. Days earlier, ZTE had said it would cease "major operating activities" because of trade sanctions imposed by the United States. The Commerce Department had last month banned American companies from supplying to ZTE for seven years as a result of findings that it had illegally sold goods to Iran and North Korea.

In a tweet on Sunday, Trump suggested he told the Commerce Department to get ZTE back in business. "Too many jobs in China lost," Trump wrote. "Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!" Trump also said he was working with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to give ZTE "a way to get back into business, fast."

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

To many Democratic leaders, the path to power in Washington looks like Clarke Tucker.

He supports the Affordable Care Act, but not a single-payer system. He signals misgivings about Nancy Pelosi as the next House speaker. And even when addressing an audience of Democratic Party regulars, he does not attack President Trump by name.

In short, he comes across as a moderate -- and exactly the kind of candidate who leading Democrats believe the party should field in Republican-leaning districts to bolster the majority they hope to win in the House in November.

But that strategy frustrates the party's liberal supporters, who feel the wind at the Democrats' back and worry about using it to crowd their House caucus with members who may feel inclined to buck the party leadership and stray from its policy agenda.

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY:

In a speech before law-enforcement officials in Arizona on Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the federal government seeks to separate parents from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to discourage more crossings.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the policy officially went into effect last week, though hundreds of children have already been taken from their parents in recent months.

THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE wOt IS TO DESTABILIZE THE MIDDLE EAST:

French President Emmanuel Macron told U.S. President Donald Trump in a phone conversation on Saturday that he was extremely worried about stability in the Middle East, Macron's office said.

WHY DOES THE NEW YORK TIMES HATE THE LEFT?

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

THERE ARE NO THINGS:

To write a slim, serious book that provides thought-provoking reasons for believing in God is a difficult task today. Many books are written from a Christian perspective and some notorious ones ridicule religious belief. Shortt, journalist, biographer and religious editor of the Times Literary Supplement, brings thoughtfulness and intellectual rigour to his defence of the opening statement: "Christianity - at its centre, the story of love's mending of wounded hearts - forms a potent resource for making sense of our existence."

He makes it clear that atheism and agnosticism are "reasonable" worldviews which Christians must respect, yet he also argues that the Christian faith is dismissed too quickly in the West (but not, he notes, in almost all other countries.) By using the word "reasonable" Shortt indicates that debate over God's existence can and should be debated by reasonable people on both sides; religious fundamentalism on the one hand and the routine abuse and contempt for faith common to (Western) internet users on the other, do a disservice to the perennial question at the heart of human existence: who are we? Are we merely the product of random evolutionary development - or do human beings have a divine destiny?

Shortt concedes that although the numbers of people "who come to faith as a result of intellectual exchanges alone" is small, an intellectually robust case for Christianity can be made. For those who think that all statements must be "provable in a test tube", he offers the reasonable rebuttal that it means rejecting "ethics, aesthetics and much culture, as well as spirituality." And to those who think that civilised, enlightened behaviour can be upheld without benefit of religious belief (the position of intellectual elites in the UK) he adds a warning that is obvious to those who regard human nature as deeply flawed: "Principles such as human rights and human dignity may not automatically survive, once commitment to the infinite value of every life has faded away." Some would say we have already entered this dangerous territory.

REACHING THE TRUMPBOTS:

The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America's rawest political division: race.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.

BRIDEDOOM:

All that remains of Hiribiya, the village where Saber and Huda Deeb were born in 1940s colonial-era Palestine, are two old Arab buildings in an area that is now an Israeli kibbutz, Zikim.

Now grandparents living in Sheikh Radwan, the couple were only six and eight years old when they were forced to flee Hiribiya and make the short but lifelong journey south to Gaza to escape the fighting between Jewish and Arab forces that marked the birth of the State of Israel 70 years ago.

Like two thirds of Gaza's two million Palestinians, they are refugees, and may well remain so until they die.

But still they talk of the village as home.

"I dream of Hiribiya all the time, sometimes even while I am awake. I imagine the places where I used to hang around," said 78-year-old Huda Deeb.

Her 76-year-old husband, a retired taxi driver, is no less effusive.

"Hiribiya is the bride of the north -- vineyards, apples, grapes, guava, farms that you can't describe," he recalls.

Records show that more than 2,000 people lived in Hiribiya before 1945. There were also about 60 Jewish residents who lived in a cluster of houses on the edge of the village, said the father of 11, adding that they would come to his family's farm to buy fruit.

As a long-running Gaza border protest builds to a climax in the coming days, it is the passing down of memories such as these that fuel the demonstrations.

May 14 is the 70th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel in the western calendar. The following day is when Palestinians traditionally commemorate the events of 1948 as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed.

The protest campaign, dubbed The Great March of Return, began on March 30 and has revived a longstanding demand for the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their former towns and villages.

Successive Israeli government have ruled out any right of return, fearing the country would lose its Jewish majority.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

"I am sure this conversation is going to leak, too," a visibly upset and furious Sanders told attendees during Friday's meeting, Axios reported, citing five staffers who were in the room. 

SO MUCH DONE, SO MUCH YET TO DO:

GORBY WAS NO KIM:

[I]t would be in the 1950s that Reagan would craft the policies that would one day cause the Soviet collapse. As a spokesperson for General Electric he witnessed first-hand the economic strength of the country by touring factories. This strength would be instrumental to Reagan's belief that the Cold War could be won.

Appalled by a nuclear exchange, Reagan saw America's robust economy as a weapon. He believed that by involving the Soviets in a costly arms race they would not be able to keep up and would implode.

This message reached national audiences and won him political backing when he gave a speech for the doomed Goldwater campaign in 1964. Enunciating his criticism of the "welfare state" and those who refused to fight Soviet aggression, Reagan advocated for not only "peace through strength" but also taking the Soviets on economically.

During his first term in office Reagan put these views into practice. Rather than taking the Soviets on directly, Reagan funded their opponents in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and behind the Iron Curtain in Poland. Most of all Reagan upped the nuclear ante, placing nuclear missiles in Western Europe.

Still, this supposed "hard-liner" did reach out to Brezhnev early in his term advocating for a reduction in nuclear weapons by the two powers.

Baier takes us through the famous speeches: "the Evil Empire" and "Tear Down This Wall." Again and again, he shows how the détente-minded in the White House, namely George H.W. Bush, sought and failed to rein him in. Baier dispenses with the perception that Reagan was a non-intellectual. He shows that Reagan was a closet writer, revising and even rewriting speeches that did not reflect his uncompromising anticommunist views.

By the time of the Gorbachev summits, Reagan had his strategy intact. These meetings did not occur because Reagan had turned "soft" on communism (an accusation made against him by conservatives outside the White House loop at the time), but was in reality using the strategies developed in the 1950s to win the Cold War.

The summits were Reagan's greatest hour. While he believed Gorbachev to be a more reasonable type of Soviet leader, Reagan refused to back down. To an enraged Gorbachev he refused to use the term "peaceful coexistence" to describe their relations.

ENDING THE COMMODITY CURSE:

Sierra Leone's new President Julius Maada Bio on Saturday called on the public to help him transform the West African nation, which is struggling to recover from an economic downturn and a deadly Ebola epidemic.

Tens of thousands of supporters packed into a municipal stadium in the capital Freetown alongside regional dignitaries participating in the inauguration ceremony for Maada Bio, who won a presidential run-off April. [...]

Dressed in flowing white robes, the former army officer, who briefly ruled Sierra Leone as head of a military junta in 1996, said he would wage a three-front war against indiscipline, corruption and poverty.

"The strategic objective of the policies and programs is to transform Sierra Leone into a country we can all be proud of," he said.

"I cannot do it alone. So today I ask all of you to believe in your capacity as citizens that together we can change Sierra Leone," he added.

The largely peaceful election process that brought Maada Bio to power came as a relief to Sierra Leone's 7 million people, who in the 1990s endured a brutal civil war fueled by the diamond trade and notorious for its drug-addled child soldiers and punitive amputations.

WELCOME TO THE OCCUPATION:

Upon arrival at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport, I was taken to a waiting room and spent the next three hours being interrogated by eight different officials, each playing either good cop or bad cop with the same set of questions.

I was made to write the names of every family member, including my grandparents, before being allowed to leave.

Wherever you travel, here's a relief that comes with passing through airport security, picking up your luggage, and finally collapsing on to your hotel bed.

In Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories there's no such thing; the checks rarely seem to end.

I was out there to work on stories, and most of our travel time would go in passing through various security checkpoints dotted throughout the area.

I have only heard and read about apartheid in South Africa, and I often wondered how it was possible to segregate public facilities and social activities.

Nothing quite prepared me for what I saw in Jerusalem.

Life is segregated for Israelis and Palestinians to the extent that there are even different buses for Jews and Arabs.

I was travelling on one such bus with Palestinians leaving Jerusalem for the occupied West Bank when soldiers stopped the bus and demanded to see identification documents.

The soldiers checked ID cards for everyone on board - Israel issues military permits to a few Palestinians who are allowed to visit Jerusalem.

A young Palestinian carrying a baby in her arms was asked to get off the bus as her permit had expired.

Even though the woman kept telling them that she was leaving Jerusalem and returning to the West Bank, they took her off the bus regardless.

She was made to stand in the sun with her baby while officials at the checkpoint sat in their vehicle and questioned her.

I was watching from my window growing increasingly frustrated because I could not intervene and help her.

If it was a free country, people could have gone out to help her and challenge the officials. However, this is what occupation looks like, where repressed people are forced to endure every injustice thrown their way.

Since we were getting late for an interview and the bus had been standing for nearly an hour, we decided to get off the bus and cross the checkpoint on foot. I don't know what happened to her.

Racial profiling is routine on the streets of Jerusalem and I witnessed three men thoroughly searched in a span of just 10 minutes.

Such treatments come coupled with widespread hatred for Palestinians. A day before we reached Jerusalem, Israeli forces killed 34 unarmed Palestinians on Gaza border. We decided to interview people in West Jerusalem about those killings.

"Just 34 killed?" Asked one Israeli.

"They should have killed 200. I want them to kill all the Palestinians there," he said.

I was still confounded by shock as he went on: "My life is before (that of) the Arabs," meaning his life is worth more than an Arab's.

TIME TO END THE NATIONAL PACT:

AS ALWAYS, THE PROPER WAY TO LOOK AT AMERICAN ACTION VIS-A-VIS IRAN...:

NOW WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH NOT THINKING UP "PATIENT ZERO" OURSELVES:

The problem ultimately isn't Kelly Sadler, or Scott Pruitt, or Manafort, or Gen. Flynn, or Rob Porter, or Scaramucci, and on and on. Just reflect on what is the common denominator of all those people. That is where the problem is. Patient zero is the President.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) May 12, 2018

LET RUDY SPEAK!:

IT IS NOT THE POLITICAL TILT OF THE MEDIA THAT THEY OBJECT TO...:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Khamenei's photo showed him reading author Michael Wolff's 2018 bestseller, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" -- a book that rocked Washington and the international community with its provocative descriptions of the commander in chief and his inner circles.

SUFFICIENT CAUSE TO VOTE AGAINST HER:

About two-thirds of the way through the public part of Gina Haspel's confirmation hearing, before the Senate Intelligence Committee, for her nomination as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Senator Kamala Harris, of California, asked her a simple question: "Do you believe that the previous interrogation techniques were immoral?" Those techniques--acts of torture adopted by the C.I.A. in the years after the 9/11 attacks--included repeated waterboarding, confinement in a coffin-like box, exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation, and forced rectal infusions. After a pause, Haspel began to answer, in careful tones, "Senator, I believe that C.I.A. officers, to whom you refer--"

"It's a yes-or-no answer," Harris said. She clarified, "I'm not asking, do you believe they were legal? I'm asking, do you believe they were immoral?"

There was another pause, and then Haspel, again, dodged the question. "Senator, I believe that the C.I.A. did extraordinary work to prevent another attack on this country, given the legal tools that we were authorized to use."

"Please answer yes or no," Harris again interrupted. "Do you believe, in hindsight, that those techniques were immoral?"

"Senator, what I believe sitting here today is that I support the higher moral standard we have decided to hold ourselves to," Haspel replied. This was a formulation that she had already used repeatedly in answering earlier questions. But all it amounted to was that she didn't object to the United States being extra-double-plus moral--as when Congress and the Obama Administration both renounced waterboarding--without ever saying that its actions had been immoral before. So Harris kept trying: "Could you please answer the question."

"Senator, I think I've answered the question," Haspel said.

"No, you've not," Harris said...

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT A RIGHT IS:

 I've been speaking and writing about free speech for a quarter-century. I've been litigating free-speech issues just as long. Two things stand out to me.

First, the law of free speech has mainly improved. Americans might have more legal defenses against government censorship now than they ever have before. If the government moves against your speech based on your viewpoint and you fight back, you're likely to win.

Second (and more importantly) the culture of free speech has decayed. Individuals and organizations are far more sensitive and far less tolerant of dissent than they were even in the recent past. People in academia and in much of corporate America who report increasingly politicized workplaces, with HR departments weaponized in the service of identity politics social-media accounts monitored for thought crimes. People are all too aware of social-media pile-ons, and they know that one complaint -- even if hypersensitive and meritless -- can derail a career.

WE'RE GONNA NEED AN AWFUL LOT MORE MEXICANS:

The big pickup in job openings has done what's not ever been accomplished in the nearly two-decade history of this economic series -- there's now a job opening for every unemployed worker.

According to the latest data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, there were 6.55 million job openings in March. In March, there were 6.59 million unemployed, meaning there are 1.01 unemployed workers for every job.

In July 2009, just as the U.S. exited the Great Recession, there were 6.65 unemployed people for every available job.