In July, the U.S. government announced a plan for Costa Rica to temporarily host up to 200 refugees from Central America while they are processed for placement in the U.S. or elsewhere.
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The U.S. wants Costa Rica to host refugees before they cross the border. Here's why - 0 views
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The new scale and diversity of refugees is challenging tiny Costa Rica’s capacity to manage these populations and ensure protection of their human rights. The U.S. plan to send more refugees their way will only add to this challenge.
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The plan for Costa Rica to temporarily house refugees is in addition to an existing program that helps Central American minors gain refugee status in the U.S.
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While the plan offers a short-term solution for protecting those most vulnerable to violence, it does not address the magnitude of the migration. In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the U.S. border patrol apprehended 120,700 people from the Northern Triangle countries attempting to enter the U.S. Some of those who cross the border will apply for asylum, but the majority will be sent back to their countries of origin and the violence they were fleeing.
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Costa Rica is a major destination for migrants and refugees in the region, and immigrants account for 9 percent of the country’s population of 4.8 million. Like the United States, Costa Rica has seen a dramatic increase in arrivals of refugees from Northern Triangle countries, particularly El Salvador, since 2012
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Central Americans moving to Costa Rica today often already have established social networks in Costa Rica –
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Immigration officials expect to continue to see around 500 Colombian refugees arriving each year, despite the newly signed peace accord. Costa Rica has also seen a large increase in Venezuelans fleeing economic crisis.
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Costa Rica has become a popular destination and transit country because of its relatively open borders and policies, its reputation as a champion of human rights and its relatively low levels of crime, violence and poverty. I
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Over the past 10 years, the country has increased restrictions on immigration, hoping to discourage low-income economic migrants from Nicaragua from entering. These restrictions echo the national security logic of U.S. policies.
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It neither addresses the underlying conditions of violence that refugees seek to escape nor strengthens regional governments’ abilities to deal with the arrival of these vulnerable populations.
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What Is the Function of Confirmation Bias? | SpringerLink - 1 views
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Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’
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Confirmation bias is typically viewed as an epistemically pernicious tendency. For instance, Mercier and Sperber (2017: 215) maintain that the bias impedes the formation of well-founded beliefs, reduces people’s ability to correct their mistaken views, and makes them, when they reason on their own, “become overconfident” (Mercier 2016: 110).
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Is This How Discrimination Ends? A New Approach to Implicit Bias - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“There are a lot of people who are very sincere in their renunciation of prejudice,” she said. “Yet they are vulnerable to habits of mind. Intentions aren’t good enough.”
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the psychological case for implicit racial bias—the idea, broadly, is that it’s possible to act in prejudicial ways while sincerely rejecting prejudiced ideas. She demonstrated that even if people don’t believe racist stereotypes are true, those stereotypes, once absorbed, can influence people’s behavior without their awareness or intent.
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While police in many cases maintain that they used appropriate measures to protect lives and their own personal safety, the concept of implicit bias suggests that in these crucial moments, the officers saw these people not as individuals—a gentle father, an unarmed teenager, a 12-year-old child—but as members of a group they had learned to associate with fear.
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In fact, studies demonstrate bias across nearly every field and for nearly every group of people. If you’re Latino, you’ll get less pain medication than a white patient. If you’re an elderly woman, you’ll receive fewer life-saving interventions than an elderly man. If you are a man being evaluated for a job as a lab manager, you will be given more mentorship, judged as more capable, and offered a higher starting salary than if you were a woman. If you are an obese child, your teacher is more likely to assume you’re less intelligent than if you were slim. If you are a black student, you are more likely to be punished than a white student behaving the same way.
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Mike Pence, for instance, bristled during the 2016 vice-presidential debate: “Enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias whenever tragedy occurs.” And two days after the first presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton proclaimed the need to address implicit bias, Donald Trump asserted that she was “essentially suggesting that everyone, including our police, are basically racist and prejudiced.”
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Still other people, particularly those who have been the victims of police violence, also reject implicit bias—on the grounds that there’s nothing implicit about it at all.
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Bias is woven through culture like a silver cord woven through cloth. In some lights, it’s brightly visible. In others, it’s hard to distinguish. And your position relative to that glinting thread determines whether you see it at all.
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All of which is to say that while bias in the world is plainly evident, the exact sequence of mental events that cause it is still a roiling question. Devine, for her part, told me that she is no longer comfortable even calling this phenomenon “implicit bias.” Instead, she prefers “unintentional bias.” The term implicit bias, she said, “has become so broad that it almost has no meaning.”
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Weeks afterwards, students who had participated noticed bias more in others than did students who hadn’t participated, and they were more likely to label the bias they perceived as wrong. Notably, the impact seemed to last: Two years later, students who took part in a public forum on race were more likely to speak out against bias if they had participated in the training.
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This hierarchy matters, because the more central a layer is to self-concept, the more resistant it is to change. It’s hard, for instance, to alter whether or not a person values the environment. But if you do manage to shift one of these central layers, Forscher explained, the effect is far-reaching.
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And if there’s one thing the Madison workshops do truly shift, it is people’s concern that discrimination is a widespread and serious problem. As people become more concerned, the data show, their awareness of bias in the world grows, too.
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A blob of hot ocean water killed a million seabirds, scientists say - CNN - 0 views
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As many as one million seabirds died at sea in less than 12 months in one of the largest mass die-offs in recorded history -- and researchers say warm ocean waters are to blame.
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The birds, a fish-eating species called the common murre, were severely emaciated and appeared to have died of starvation between the summer of 2015 and the spring of 2016, washing up along North America's west coast, from California to Alaska.
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The heat wave created the Blob -- a 1,000-mile (1,600 km) stretch of ocean that was warmed by 3 to 6 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 10.8 Fahrenheit). A high-pressure ridge calmed the ocean waters -- meaning heat stays in the water, without storms to help cool it down.
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Other animals that experienced mass die-offs include sea lions, tufted puffins, and baleen whales. But none of them compared to the murres in scale.
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The murres likely starved to death because the Blob caused more competition for fewer small prey. The warming increased the metabolism of predatory fish like salmon, cod, and halibut -- meaning they were eating more than usual. These fish eat the same small fish as the murres, and there simply wasn't enough to go around.
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During the 2015 breeding season, three colonies didn't produce a single chick. That number went up to 12 colonies in the 2016 season -- and in reality it could be even higher, since researchers only monitor a quarter of all colonies.
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It's especially rare to see a patch of warm ocean water over such a large area, but scientists say global climate change is making these phenomena more common. From 1982 to 2016, there was an 82% rise in the number of heat wave days on the global ocean surface, according to a 2018 study. That's because heat waves are increasing in both frequency and duration, with the highest level of maritime heat wave activity occurring in the North Atlantic
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Happiness may be healthier for some cultures than others - CNN - 0 views
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Just a few months ago, the New York Times declared that "studies have shown an indisputable link between having a positive outlook and health benefits like lower blood pressure, less heart disease, better weight control and healthier blood sugar levels." Plenty of news articles present similar ideas in a stark black-and-white fashion: optimists live longer; pessimism kills.
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But some research suggests that things aren't so simple. In 2016, for example, a study of more than 700,000 British women failed to find a link between happiness and longevity. Which raises the question: What makes this particular group of study participants any different? Could it be that culture plays a role -- that British people, overall, are just more tolerant and accepting of gloominess?
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Even after accounting for things like a person's age, gender, socioeconomic status, and chronic health conditions, there was a significant difference between the two groups: "American adults who experience high levels of positive emotions, such as feeling 'cheerful' and 'extremely happy,' are more likely to have healthy blood-lipid profiles," explains lead study author Jiah Yoo, but the same was not true among Japanese adults.
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Past research has reached similar conclusions. In a 2015 Stanford study of 690 Chinese and American participants, for example, the Americans generally sought to maximize positive feelings and minimize negative ones, while the Chinese subjects were more likely to report that they commonly felt mixed emotions. The study authors argued that the results had to do with differing ideas about the importance of the individual: The individualistic American culture places more emphasis on people doing what's best for themselves, while more collectivist East Asian cultures prioritize doing what's best for the group.
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Yoo believes the cultural influence on the positivity-health connection may be the result of culturally specific health behaviors. "Frequent experience of positive affect in the Western context would be aligned with prescribed values and beliefs, and thus likely motivate engagement in and pursuit of healthy behaviors," she explains. "In contrast, positive affect aligns less with norms and beliefs about positive affect in the East Asian context, and thus may not be associated with healthy behaviors."
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It's not simply that Americans are more intent on seeking happiness, then -- there's also a high bar for how intense that happiness is supposed to feel. "Westerners value high-arousal emotions more than Easterners, so they promote activities that elicit high-arousal emotions.," Lim noted. "Even children of the West learn through storybooks that high-arousal emotions are ideal, and the opposite is true for children of the East."
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Why Americans turn to conspiracy theories - The Washington Post - 0 views
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As the impeachment inquiry heats up, members of Congress and the media are left with the difficult job of untangling the conspiracy theory that seems to have driven the president’s actions in Ukraine: a wild tale of a missing computer server whisked off to Eastern Europe for nefarious, if never entirely clear, purposes, and something involving Joe Biden, his son Hunter and, for good measure, China, too.
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Seeing the full ideological array of conspiratorial thinking and understanding its deep history are essential to understanding how paranoid thinking about Russian conspiracies, which so troubled the McCarthyites in the 1950s and 1960s, could jump from right to left in the wake of the 2016 election.
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Republican fears of power’s expansionist tendencies spurred the revolutionary generation to regard British taxation after 1763 as not simply a deviation from prior norms, but as the first step on a swift descent toward political enslavement. American revolutionaries were not simply whiny about taxes; they were paranoid.
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Did Federalists just use the specter of the Illuminati to tar their rivals? Or did they mean it? Did the Jeffersonians really think the Federalists were conspiring to bring back monarchy as they alleged? Or were they just trying to win elections? The answer depends on who and when, but it’s safe to say that some did believe these theories.
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Conspiracy theory after theory, Americans cast a paranoid eye on their partisan opponents throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “conspiracy theory” first appeared in the early 20th century United States, in the context of political histories of the 19th century.
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Democrats’ anxieties about Russian conspiracies to interfere in the 2016 campaign cannot be extricated from this historical context of paranoia just because they have a significant basis in fact. As Joseph Heller wrote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”
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The republican political theory underlying the American paranoid style had its origin in the writings of opposition politicians in 18th-century Britain. Since then, conspiratorial thinking, has remained most attractive to opposition parties seeking to discredit their establishment rivals. This is the nature of Trump’s criticism of Democratic investigations of Russian conspiracies to hack the 2016 campaign. They’re just whining because they lost, Trump has said repeatedly.
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If Trump’s embrace of the Ukraine conspiracy doesn’t sink his political future by leading to impeachment, it may nonetheless signal that his political future is bleak.
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Opinion | Empathy Is Exhausting. There Is a Better Way. - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...israel-war-empathy-pain.html
empathy compassion response indifference evil distress
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“What can I even do?”Many people are feeling similarly defeated, and many others are outraged by the political inaction that ensues. A Muslim colleague of mine said she was appalled to see so much indifference to the atrocities and innocent lives lost in Gaza and Israel. How could anyone just go on as if nothing had happened?
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inaction isn’t always caused by apathy. It can also be the product of empathy. More specifically, it can be the result of what psychologists call empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.
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I felt it intensely this fall, as violence escalated abroad and anger echoed across the United States. Helpless as a teacher, unsure of how to protect my students from hostility and hate. Useless as a psychologist and writer, finding words too empty to offer any hope. Powerless as a parent, searching for ways to reassure my kids that the world is a safe place and most people are good. Soon I found myself avoiding the news altogether and changing the subject when war came up
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Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.
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Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.
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Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.
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The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.
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Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies
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when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.
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In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.
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empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”
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Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”
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“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”
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Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.
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To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.
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A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:
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When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help
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The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.
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in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.
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To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.
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Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.
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Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.
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If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.
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Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.
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Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.
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Exercise Boosts Brain Health, but Is There a Downside? - The New York Times - 0 views
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A 2014 experiment with mice first raised that worrying idea, finding that the more the animals exercised, the worse their long-term memories became.
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Study after study in animals has shown that exercise, especially aerobic activities like running, can double or triple the number of new cells in the hippocampus, compared with the number in animals that do not exercise, and that these new cells translate into a significantly heightened ability to learn new skills. Animals that run, in essence, become brighter than those that do not. But most of these studies of exercise and neurogenesis have examined the effects on learning and short-term memory.
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But for now, he believes that the available evidence suggests that, unless you are a mouse, working out is going to be “quite beneficial” for your brain.
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Does the Language I Speak Influence the Way I Think? | Linguistic Society of America - 1 views
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What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them?
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There's a language called Guugu Yimithirr (spoken in North Queensland, Australia) that doesn't have words like left and right or front and back. Its speakers always describe locations and directions using the Guugu Yimithirr words for north, south, east, and west. So, they would never say that a boy is standing in front of a house; instead, they'd say he is standing (for example) east of the house. They would also, no doubt, think of the boy as standing east of the house, while a speaker of English would think of him as standing in front of the house.
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Whorf believed that because of this difference, Hopi speakers and English speakers think about events differently, with Hopi speakers focusing more on the source of the information and English speakers focusing more on the time of the event.
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But not always. You can easily conjure up mental images and sensations that would be hard to describe in words.
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Not really, but if the new language is very different from your own, it may give you some insight into another culture and another way of life.
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I found it very interesting that how we speak can have some influence on how we think. It may even have a slice of the logic and ideology of our culture. As my second language, English is very different from Chinese. We may have different description for the same event because we value things differently. --Sissi (10/24/2016)
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When the facts don't matter, how can democracy survive? - The Washington Post - 6 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9b7c-57290af48a49_story.html
facts democracy logic policy culture politics knowledge
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a Marketplace-Edison Research Poll
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The survey found that more than 4 in 10 Americans somewhat or completely distrust the economic data reported by the federal government
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Among Donald Trump voters, the share is 68 percent, with nearly half saying they don’t trust government economic data “at all.”
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One risk of this apparently widespread suspicion is that it could become self-fulfilling. If enough people and businesses believe the economy is secretly terrible, they will behave in ways that make it terrible — by curbing their own spending and hiring, for example.
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This distrust of public data is partly, though not entirely, Trump’s fault.
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At times Trump has mused that “real” unemployment is as high as 42 percent , a comically hyperbolic figure
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Such comments are part of his broader narrative of numerical nihilism, a political strategy of discrediting any statistic or fact that could obstruct his path to the presidency.
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as World’s Worst Surrogate Ben Carson said Friday on MSNBC, “Let’s throw the economists out, and let’s use common sense.” Presumably Carson believes that all forms of expertise, including neurosurgical, should be similarly disposed of in favor of “common sense.”
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this anti-intellectual, ignore-the-data attitude mostly owes its growth to a careless, conspiracy-theorizing league of (mostly) conservative politicians and pundits.
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They elevated themselves by sowing distrust in traditional institutions and sources of authority, from the media to civil servants to scientists. They presented themselves as the sole truth-tellers, system de-riggers and messianic statistics unskewers, while maintaining that everyone else was feeding the public lies.
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The problem with elevating yourself by tearing down the existing authoritative institutions is that once you succeed, you’ve established a road map for others to tear you down, too
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This is how a democracy crumbles: not with a bang, but with data trutherism.
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Why Republican Women Are Calling on Men to Follow Suit in Denouncing Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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I, a conservative female, have spent years defending the Republican Party against claims of sexism. When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in.
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Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.
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I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door.
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This election, many Republicans won’t withhold their support from an openly cruel, sexist bigot. And there is a lesson in their failure. It suggests the best way forward. If the groups that Trump targets, especially the sizable ones, like women and Latinos, turn out in large enough numbers to vote against him, handing a crushing loss to the corrupting billionaire; if other folks who usually vote Republican join in that protest, to signal that this behavior is a dealbreaker; then the GOP will likely never nominate a man like this for high office ever again.
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Those are the stakes in November, the rare election where the larger the margin of the GOP loss, the better the chance it will have to be reborn into something viable and constructive. It certainly cannot succeed with conservative women in swing states calling its delegation scum and even a faction of elected Republicans cheering her on.
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What Will Fix the Republican Party? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“It’s like that scene in Titanic,” he remarked to me, “where they know the ship is going down, and the conductor decides there’s nothing to do but keep the orchestra playing.”
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Roy, a health-care expert who has advised Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney, once looked forward to 2016 as a year of Republican opportunity, when the party would choose a leader capable of reorienting it toward the future.
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Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion.
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But in the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future.
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Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.
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Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters.
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Trump is the “logical end point” of the GOP’s long history of racialized politics.
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After talking in class about the imploding Republican party, I found this article that discusses disaffected Republicans.
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Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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many observers worried that Americans had lost interest in politics. In his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the social scientist Robert Putnam bemoaned the collapse in American political participation during the second half of the 20th century. Putnam suggested that this trend would continue as the World War II generation gave way to disengaged Gen Xers.
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Here is the news - but only if Facebook thinks you need to know | John Naughton | Opini... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...s-publishers-feeding-the-beast
media algorithm facebook social media news power influence
shared by Javier E on 16 May 16
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power essentially comes in three varieties: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do; the capability to stop them doing what they want to do; and the power to shape the way they think
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This last is the kind of power exercised by our mass media. They can shape the public (and therefore the political) agenda by choosing the news that people read, hear or watch; and they can shape the ways in which that news is presented.
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For a long time, Google was the 800lb gorilla in this domain, because its dominance of search determined what people could find in the unimaginable wastelands of cyberspace
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search could be – and was – personalised, because Google’s algorithms could figure out what each user was most likely to be interested in, and therefore what kinds of information would be most relevant for her or him. So, imperceptibly, but inexorably over time, we have come to live in what Eli Pariser christened a “filter bubble”.
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Before the internet, our problem with information was its scarcity. Now our problem is unmanageable abundance. So now the scarce resources are attention and time, over which a vicious war has broken out between traditional media and the internet-based upstarts.
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YouTube has a billion users, half of whom access it via mobile devices. The average time spent on the site is 40 minutes. Facebook now claims to have 1.65 billion monthly active users, who spend on average 50 minutes a day on its services. So if Google is an 800lb gorilla, Facebook is a megaton King Kong.
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Competition for attention and time is a zero-sum game that traditional media are losing. In desperation, they are trying both to appease Facebook and to harness its hold on people’s attention
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In doing so, they have entered into a truly Faustian bargain. Because while publishers can without difficulty ship their stuff to Instant Articles, they cannot control which ones Facebook users actually get to see. This is because users’ news feeds are determined by Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms that try to guess what each user would like to see (and what might dispose them to click on an advertisement).
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when you ask – as Professor George Brock memorably did – whether Mark Zuckerberg and his satraps understand that they have acquired editorial responsibilities, they look blank. Facebook is not a publisher, they explain, merely a “platform”. And, besides, no humans are involved in curating users’ news feeds: it’s all done by algorithms and is therefore neutral. In other words: nothing to see here; move on.
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Any algorithm that has to make choices has criteria that are specified by its designers. And those criteria are expressions of human values. Engineers may think they are “neutral”, but long experience has shown us they are babes in the woods of politics, economics and ideology.
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April 11th, 2016 - theSkimm - 0 views
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GOLDMAN SACHS THE STORY Yesterday, Goldman Sachs agreed to fork over $5 billion and a 'sorry for the financial crisis' note to the US gov. EXPLAIN PLEASE. The settlement docs say that leading up to the '08 crisis, Goldman knew of the issues in the mortgage market. But the bank continued to sell bonds packaged with sketchy mortgages to its investors without giving them the heads up. A handful of other Wall St. banks have agreed to similar settlements with the feds over the years. No individual bankers have ever been punished. theSKIMM More than a few people are annoyed by this. Including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. He's made Wall St. reform THE issue of his campaign, so expect to hear about this during his debate with Hillz later this week.
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How GOP Leaders Must Manage Their Political Lives in the Era of Donald Trump - The Atla... - 0 views
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The day-in, day-out work of the politician is the management of electoral coalitions: coaxing, cajoling, compelling people to work together who—in the more natural course of things—might have nothing in common
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Unlike writers and intellectuals, politicians don’t have the freedom to work only with people they like and admire. Unlike writers and intellectuals, they have no duty to speak aloud their inner convictions—their work would become impossible if they did.
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Politics unfortunately abounds in shams that must be treated reverentially for every politician who would succeed. If you are the sort of man whose stomach revolts against treating shams reverentially, you will be well advised to stay out of politics altogether and set up as a prophet; your prophecies may perhaps sow good seed for some future harvest. But as a politician you would be impotent. For at any given time the bulk of your countrymen believe firmly and devoutly, not only in various things that are worthy of belief, but also in illusions of one kind and another; and they will never submit to have their affairs managed for them by one who appears not to share in their credulity.
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More F.S. Oliver: Nothing in politics is sadder than: the man of sterling character whose genius is so antipathetic to the particular emergency in which he finds himself as to stupefy his thoughts and paralyze his actions. He drifts to disaster, grappling blindfolded which are beyond his comprehension, failing without really fighting.
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Bad choices over the past decade by Republican political leaders opened the way to Donald Trump, yes. For a decade, Republican voters have signaled they wanted to protect Medicare, cut immigration, fight fewer wars, and nominate no more Bushes. Their party leaders interpreted those signals as demands to cut Medicare, increase immigration, put boots on the ground in Syria, and nominate another Bush.
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Their task ahead, in the Biblical phrase, is to pluck the brands from the fire—rescue as much of their party as can be rescued—while simultaneously minimizing the damage to party and country by the nominee their rank-and-file has imposed on them. They need to maneuver so that Trump’s defeat is as solitary as possible, and so that he cannot shift the blame for the failure he has earned onto the heads of others
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Trump’s taught Republican politicians that they’ve neglected the interests and values of their core supporters. He’s demonstrated that much of their party ideology is obsolete, and that their language no longer moves their voters. He’s proven that their party is less culturally conservative than they believed, less hostile to social insurance than they imagined, and more worried about the economic and social costs of mass migration than they realized. Those are valuable lessons that need to be absorbed and pondered.
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He’s also demonstrated that he himself is a dangerous person
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To save themselves and their country, Republican politicians will have to rediscover the politician’s arts of deftness, flexibility, and self-preservation—while stealthily hastening Trump toward the defeat that almost certainly awaits him in November.
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That’s a big job and a hard job, all the harder because they cannot acknowledge what they are doing. They will seem to help Trump win, while actually working to ensure he fail
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What Walter Lippman said of presidents is really true of all politicians: They are not “working through noble institutions to dear ends … but trying to grind out a few crude results from a decadent political machine.”
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The harms they stop are more important than the good they cannot achieve. What they’re called upon to do is to practice statesmanship without fine phrases; to protect the republic without receiving any credit for it
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Woman says she was near killed Oregon occupier Finicum - CNN.com - 0 views
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Victoria Sharp says she is certain LaVoy Finicum was unjustly gunned down by state police after they and the FBI pursued his vehicle in southern Oregon.
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"I know what I saw."
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Sharp said she heard three shots and saw Finicum fall
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You know, I can't say that he was reaching for a weapon or not," said Sharp.She watched the video again."OK, he was running through snow and it does not look like he is reaching to me. He's trying to keep his balance. He's running, I remember it. He didn't reach for anything."
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'Affluenza' teen's mom, Tonya Couch, has bond lowered - CNN.com - 0 views
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has posted bail after her bond was lowered from $1 million to $75,000.
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after she's fitted with an electronic ankle monitor
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Tonya Couch of helping her son leave the country to avoid a probation hearing that might have led to jail time for him
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after a Los Angeles judge approved her extradition more than a week after Mexican authorities detained mother and son in a Pacific resort town
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undergo a mental exam after the court found "reasonable cause" to believe that she suffers from "a mental illness or is a person with a mental retardation,"
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mental examination will determine whether there is clinical evidence to support the argument that Tonya Couch may be incompetent to stand trial.
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withdrew $30,000 from her account and told her husband that he would not see them again,
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on probation for killing four people in a drunken driving accident in 2013, when he was 16.
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lawyers cited the now notorious "affluenza" defense, suggesting he was too rich and spoiled to understand the consequences of his actions.
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Mexican judge granted the teen a temporary stay, halting deportation proceedings.
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Mothers Against Drunk Driving started a petition
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ask for Ethan Couch to be moved from the juvenile justice system to the adult criminal system
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Donald Trump asks backers to swear their support, vows to broaden torture laws - CNNPol... - 0 views
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Just before leading the rally in the pledge, Trump once again opened the door to ordering the torture of captured suspected terrorists, just one day after vowing that he would not order military officials to violate U.S. or international laws.
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"We're going to stay within the laws. But you know what we're going to do? We're going to have those laws broadened because we're playing with two sets of rules: their rules and our rules," Trump said pointing to ISIS's tactics, which have included torture and brutal executions.
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The comments mark a stark contrast to a statement Trump issued just a day earlier. After vigorously defending the use of waterboarding and suggesting that the U.S. should "go a lot further than waterboarding," Trump vowed Friday in a statement that he would "not order our military or other officials to violate those laws."
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After the protesters were ejected, Trump remarked on "the hatred, the animosity" and the division in America today, seemingly laying the blame at the feet of President Barack Obama.