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Javier E

'It's already way beyond what humans can do': will AI wipe out architects? | Architectu... - 0 views

  • on a Zoom call with Wanyu He, an architect based in Shenzhen, China, and the founder of XKool, an artificial intelligence company determined to revolutionise the architecture industry. She freezes the dancing blocks and zooms in, revealing a layout of hotel rooms that fidget and reorder themselves as the building swells and contracts. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The entire plan is ready to be sent to the factory to be built.
  • I applaud He on what seems to be an impressive theoretical exercise: a 500-room hotel complex designed in minutes with the help of AI. But she looks confused. “Oh,” she says casually, “that’s already been built! It took four and a half months from start to finish.”
  • AI is already being deployed to shape the real world – with far-reaching consequences.
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  • They had become disillusioned with what they saw as an outmoded way of working. “It wasn’t how I imagined the future of architecture,” says He, who worked in OMA’s Rotterdam office before moving to China to oversee construction of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange building. “The design and construction processes were so traditional and lacking in innovation.”
  • XKool is at the bleeding edge of architectural AI. And it’s growing fast: over 50,000 people are already using it in China, and an English version of its image-to-image AI tool, LookX, has just been launched. Wanyu He founded the company in 2016, with others who used to work for OMA
  • “The problem with architects is that we almost entirely focus on images,” says Neil Leach, author of Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “But the most revolutionary change is in the less sexy area: the automation of the entire design package, from developing initial options right through to construction. In terms of strategic thinking and real-time analysis, AI is already way beyond what human architects are capable of. This could be the final nail in the coffin of a struggling profession.”
  • It’s early days and, so far, the results are clunky: the Shenzhen hotel looks very much like it was designed by robots for an army of robot guests.
  • XKool aims to provide an all-in-one platform, using AI to assist with everything from generating masterplan layouts, using given parameters such as daylight requirements, space standards and local planning regulations, right down to generating interiors and construction details. It has also developed a tool to transform a 2D image of a building into a 3D model, and turn a given list of room sizes into floor plans
  • She and her colleagues were inspired to launch their startup after witnessing AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a human champion at the Chinese board game Go in 2016. “What if we could introduce this intelligence to our way of working with algorithmic design?” she says. “CAD [computer aided design] dates from the 70s. BIM [building information modelling] is from the 90s. Now that we have the power of cloud computing and big data, it’s time for something new.”
  • “We have to be careful,” says Martha Tsigkari, head of applied research and development at Foster + Partners in London. “It can be dangerous if you don’t know what data was used to train the model, or if you haven’t classified it properly. Data is everything: if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out
  • The implications for data privacy and intellectual property are huge – is our data secured from other users? Is it being used to retrain these models in the background?”
  • Although the actual science needed to make such things possible is a long way off, AI does enable the kind of calculations and predictive modelling that was impossibly time-consuming before
  • Tsigkari’s team has also developed a simulation engine that allows realtime analysis of floor plans – showing how well connected one part of a building is to another – giving designers instant feedback on the implications of moving a wall or piece of furniture.
  • One told me they now regularly use ChatGPT to summarise local planning policies and compare the performance of different materials for, say, insulation. “It’s the kind of task you would have given a junior to do,” they say. “It’s not perfect, but it makes fewer mistakes than someone who hasn’t written a specification before.”
  • Others say their teams regularly use Midjourney to help brainstorm ideas during the concept phase. “We had a client wanting to build mosques in Abu Dhabi,” one architect told me. “I could quickly generate a range of options to show them, to get the conversation going. It’s like an instant mood board.”
  • “I like to think we are augmenting, not replacing, architects,” says Carl Christiansen, a Norwegian software engineer who in 2016 co-founded AI tool Spacemaker, which was acquired by tech giant Autodesk in 2021 for $240m, and then rebranded as Forma. “I call it ‘AI on the shoulder’ to emphasise that you’re still in control.” Forma can rapidly evaluate a large range of factors – from sun and wind to noise and energy needs – and create the perfect site layout. What’s more, its interface is designed to be legible to non-experts.
martinelligi

Architect of the Capitol Outlines $30 Million In Damages From Pro-Trump Riot : Capitol ... - 0 views

  • The cost of repairing damages from the attack on the U.S. Capitol and related security expenses have already topped $30 million and will keep rising, Architect of the Capitol J. Brett Blanton told lawmakers on Wednesday.
  • The price tag will go even higher, Blanton told lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee, if the fence and other security measures are needed beyond March.
  • In the Capitol building complex, historical statues, murals and furniture were damaged, mainly from pepper spray accretions and residue from chemical irritants and fire extinguishers, requiring expert cleaning and conservation.
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  • "The events of January 6 were stark reminders that institutional biases, priorities and actions taken out of sync with actionable data resulted in poor decisions," he said. "If we do not learn from these mistakes, the campus will continue to remain vulnerable to unknown and unexpected threats."
Javier E

Who Is the Real 'Architect' of Today's Republican Party? - 0 views

  • by emphasizing politics over policy as he did, Rove shifted Bush—and therefore the party—from centrist to hard right. “Instead of having a permanent majority,” Tom Pauken, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas during the 1990s, told me,Rove has potentially put in place a situation that will lead to the destruction of the Republican party as we’ve known it in the Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan tradition. Rove has taken what people have worked thirty years to achieve . . . and squandered it all away. He’s participated in the potential destruction of the conservative movement in the long term.
  • Matt Towery, a protégé of Gingrich, said, “Every Republican I know looks at the Bush administration as a total failure. I felt like the political operation was running things, so they never created policy goals. Political consultants are paranoid by nature. That’s the thing about the Bush White House—no one knew who was in charge and yet everyone knew: Karl Rove.”
  • “I think the legacy,” said Ed Rollins, a longtime Republican political consultant, “is that Karl Rove will be a name that’ll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it. Rove could have broadened the base of the party. He had an opportunity to strengthen state parties. But, I think, at the end of this, the party will be weaker in numbers in the Congress . . . and numbers of Republicans.
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  • That move, along with nearly a dozen proposed state constitutional amendments on ballots, made same-sex marriage a powerful wedge issue in 2004. And just as Rove wanted, that issue, along with others on which Bush staked out social conservative positions, helped ensure that he did not lose his conservative base in 2004, as his father had in the strange election of 1992.
  • He did little to attract young people to become Republicans. Nobody who’s come of age during the Bush era will stand up and say, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a Bush Republican.’”
  • Operating under the theory that Bush Sr. lost because he was too liberal-leaning on a range of topics, particularly cultural issues, Rove moved Bush to the right—most notably, as the 2004 campaign season was getting underway, having him propose a constitutional amendment opposing same-sex marriage.
  • these maneuvers also meant that, once Bush left office in 2009, deeply unpopular thanks especially to the wars, there was no clear next step for the GOP, no one positioned to inherit the mantle of leadership. Rather, the party faced an intellectual and leadership vacuum that left it vulnerable to the right-wing populism of the Tea Party, a movement that got underway just weeks after Bush left office, which led a few years later to the House Freedom Caucus, whose inaugural meeting in January 2015 was described by Mick Mulvaney as being “the first time we . . . decided we were a group, and not just a bunch of pissed-off guys.”
  • Such “pissed-off” people would mostly have been outsiders in the political world of Bush Sr.; these days, however, under the weak speakership of Kevin McCarthy, for all intents and purposes it is the pissed-off Trump acolytes who more or less run the House, an indication of how far the hardliners have come since Rove opened the door to them.
  • anyone who leaves Rove out cannot understand the story of the rise of Trump and the remaking of the party he has come to dominate.
Javier E

In Los Angeles, a Nimby Battle Pits Millionaires vs. Billionaires - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles
  • “Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.
  • Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”
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  • the market for these Versailles knockoffs is “flight capital.” “It’s oligarchs, oilgarchs, people from Asia, people who came up with the next app for the iPhone,” he said. While global wealth is pouring into other American cities as well, Los Angeles is still a relative bargain, Mr. Hyland said, adding: “Here you can buy the best house for $3,000 a square foot. In Manhattan, you’re looking at $11,000 a square foot and you get a skybox.”
  • In a city traditionally as hostile to architectural preservation as it is hospitable to architectural innovation, the gigamansion trend is accelerating the decimation of residential gems. A midcentury modern home in Bel Air designed by Burton Schutt (best known as the architect of the Hotel Bel-Air) and furnished by the decorator Billy Haines for Earle Jorgensen, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” and his wife, Marion, was recently razed
  • In the Sunset Strip area, a geometric hacienda built by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for the actor Ricardo Montalbán was “remodeled” into a hulking glass spec house.
  • As the number of Los Angeles’s buildable lots dwindles and land values soar, houses that are out of scale with their surroundings are popping up everywhere. (
g-dragon

The Taj Mahal - 0 views

  • The Taj Mahal is a beautiful, white-marble mausoleum built by Mughul emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
  • It was in 1607, that Shah Jahan, grandson of Akbar the Great, first met his beloved. At the time, he was not yet the fifth emperor of the Mughal Empire.
  • Sixteen-year-old, Prince Khurram, as he was then called, flitted around the royal bazaar, flirting with the girls from high-ranking families that staffed the booths.
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  • Although it was love at first sight, the two were not allowed to marry right away. First, Prince Khurram had to marry Kandahari Begum. (He would later marry a third wife as well.)
  • The public was enamored with her, in part because Mumtaz Mahal cared for the people, diligently making lists of widows and orphans to make sure they received food and money.
  • The plan was that the Taj Mahal (“the crown of the region”) would represent heaven (Jannah) on Earth. No expense was spared to make this happen.
  • when the feud with Khan Jahan Lodi was won, Shah Jahan had the remains of Mumtaz Mahal dug up and brought 435 miles (700 km) to Agra. The return of Mumtaz Mahal was a grand procession, with thousands of soldiers accompanying the body and mourners lining the route.
  • Although no one, main architect for the Taj Mahal is known, it is believed that Shah Jahan, who was already passionate about architecture, worked on the plans himself with the input and aid of a number of the best architects of his time
  • The couple had 14 children together, but only seven lived past infancy. It was the birth of the 14th child that was to kill Mumtaz Mahal.
  • At the time, the Mughal Empire was one of the richest in the world and thus Shah Jahan had the means to pay for this huge venture.
  • Most pictures of the Taj Mahal show only a large, white, lovely building. What these photos miss is the intricacies that can only be seen up close.
  • Shah Jahan stayed in deep mourning for two years but even after that, the death of Mumtaz Mahal still deeply affected him. That is perhaps why the third of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan’s four sons, Aurangzeb, was able to successfully kill off his three brothers and imprison his father.
  • Shah Jahan spent his last eight years staring out a window, looking at his beloved’s Taj Mahal.
  • When Shah Jahan died on January 22, 1666, Aurangzeb had his father buried with Mumtaz Mahal in the crypt beneath the Taj Mahal. On the main floor of the Taj Mahal, above the crypt, now sits two cenotaphs (empty, public tombs). The one in the center of the room belongs to Mumtaz Mahal and the one just to the west is for Shah Jahan.
  • By the 1800s, the British ousted the Mughals and took over India. To many, the Taj Mahal was beautiful and so they cut gemstones from the walls, stole the silver candlesticks and doors, and even tried to sell the white marble overseas.
  • It was Lord Curzon, the British viceroy of India, who put a stop to all that. Rather than looting the Taj Mahal, Curzon worked to restore it.
Javier E

Telosa: Marc Lore and Bjarke Ingels unveil plans for 5-million-person city in the Ameri... - 0 views

  • The former Walmart executive last week unveiled plans for Telosa, a sustainable metropolis that he hopes to create, from scratch, in the American desert. The ambitious 150,000-acre proposal promises eco-friendly architecture, sustainable energy production and a purportedly drought-resistant water system. A so-called "15-minute city design" will allow residents to access their workplaces, schools and amenities within a quarter-hour commute of their homes.
  • Although planners are still scouting for locations, possible targets include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region, according to the project's official website.
  • The first phase of construction, which would accommodate 50,000 residents across 1,500 acres, comes with an estimated cost of $25 billion. The whole project would be expected to exceed $400 billion, with the city reaching its target population of 5 million within 40 years.
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  • "Cities that have been built to date from scratch are more like real estate projects," Lore said in a promotional video for the project. "They don't start with people at the center. Because if you started with people at the center, you would immediately think, 'OK, what's the mission and what are the values?'
  • On Telosa's official website, Lore explains that he was inspired by American economist and social theorist Henry George. The investor cites capitalism's "significant flaws," attributing many of them to "the land ownership model that America was built on."
  • BIG's founder, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, is meanwhile quoted as saying that Telosa "embodies the social and environmental care of Scandinavian culture, and the freedom and opportunity of a more American culture."
  • It is not the first new city being planned by Ingels' firm, which famously installed a ski slope on top of a Copenhagen power plant and has co-designed Google's new headquarters in London and California. In January 2020, Japanese carmaker Toyota revealed that it had commissioned BIG to create a master plan for a new 2,000-person city in the foothills of Mount Fuji. Although significantly smaller than Telosa, the project, dubbed Woven City, promises autonomous vehicle testing, smart technology and robot-assisted living.
Javier E

The Scary Future of the American Right - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left.
  • The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage:
  • people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).
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  • The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction
  • I couldn’t quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.”
  • Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elite—the media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans.
  • The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.
  • At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed
  • In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all
  • “Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.”
  • The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”
  • The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone
  • “We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.
  • The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques
  • The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?
  • Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government
  • Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps.
  • But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine.
  • If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.
  • Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere.
  • If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.
  • Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.
  • For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.
  • The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square.
  • Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”
  • Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic.
  • Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.
  • Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions.
  • Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.
  • My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state.
  • “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”
  • The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites.
  • This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values.
  • Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”
  • Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.
  • They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life.
  • Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956.
  • there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.
  • One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged.
  • Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated.
  • Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.
  • NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist.
  • Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism.
  • Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century
  • the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.
  • the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung.
  • the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.
Javier E

Climate activists mixed hardball with a long game - 0 views

  • Although the story will be much more heroic if this bill or something like it passes into law, the achievement is already heroic, by bringing such legislation, in this country, even this close.
  • In less than five years, a new generation of activists and aligned technocrats has taken climate action from the don’t-go-there zone of American politics and helped place it at the very center of the Democratic agenda, persuading an old-guard centrist septuagenarian, Biden, to make a New Deal-scale green investment the focus of his presidential campaign platform and his top policy priority once in office
  • This, despite a generation of conventional wisdom that the issue was electorally fraught and legislatively doomed. Now they find themselves pushing a recognizable iteration of that agenda — retooled and whittled down, yes, but still unthinkably large by the standards of previous administrations — plausibly forward into law.
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  • If you believe that climate change is a boutique issue prioritized only by out-of-touch liberal elites, as one poll found, then this bill, should it pass, represents a political achievement of astonishing magnitude: the triumph of a moral crusade against long odds.
  • if you believe there is quite a lot of public support for climate action, as other polls suggest — then this bill marks the success of outsider activists in holding establishment forces to account, both to their own rhetoric and to the demands of their voters.
  • whatever your read of public sentiment, what is most striking about the news this week is not just that there is now some climate action on the table but also how fast the landscape for climate policy has changed, shifting all of our standards for success and failure along with it
  • The bill may well prove inadequate, even if it passes. It also represents a generational achievement — achieved, from the point of view of activists, in a lot less time than a full generation.
  • Technological progress has driven the cost of renewable energy down so quickly, it should now seem irresistible to anyone making long-term policy plans or public investments. There has been rapid policy innovation among centrists and policy wonks, too, dramatically expanding the climate tool kit beyond carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems to what has been called a whole-of-government approach to decarbonizing.
  • To trust the math of its architects, this deal between Manchin and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, splits the difference — the United States won’t be leading the pack on decarbonization, but it probably won’t be seen by the rest of the world as a laughingstock or climate criminal, either.
  • None of this is exclusively the work of the climate left
  • The present-day climate left was effectively born, in the United States, with the November 2018 Sunrise Movement sit-in. At the time, hardly anyone on the planet had heard of Greta Thunberg, who had just begun striking outside Swedish Parliament — a lonely, socially awkward 15-year-old holding up a single sign. Not four years later, her existential rhetoric is routinely echoed by presidents and prime ministers and C.E.O.s and secretaries general, and more than 80 percent of the world’s economic activity and emissions are now, theoretically, governed by net-zero pledges pointing the way to a carbon-neutral future in just decades.
  • as the political scientist Matto Mildenberger has pointed out, the legislation hadn’t failed at the ballot box; it had stalled on Manchin’s desk
  • He also pointed to research showing climate is driving the voting behavior of Democrats much more than it is driving Republicans into opposition and that most polling shows high levels of baseline concern about warming and climate policy all across the country. (It is perhaps notable that as the Democrats were hashing out a series of possible compromises, there wasn’t much noise about any of them from Republicans, who appeared to prefer to make hay about inflation, pandemic policy and critical race theory.)
  • It is hard not to talk about warming without evoking any fear, but the president was famous, on the campaign trail and in office, for saying, “When I think ‘climate change,’ I think ‘jobs.’”
  • He focused on green growth and the opportunities and benefits of a rapid transition.
  • In the primaries, Sunrise gave Biden an F for his climate plan, but after he sewed up the nomination, its co-founder Varshini Prakash joined his policy task force to help write his climate plan. As the plan evolved and shrank over time, there were squeaks and complaints here and there but nothing like a concerted, oppositional movement to punish the White House for its accommodating approach to political realities.
  • over the past 18 months, since the inauguration, whenever activists chose to protest, they were almost always protesting not the inadequacy of proposed legislation but the worrying possibility of no legislation at all
  • When they showed up at Manchin’s yacht, they were there to tell him not that they didn’t want his support but that they needed him to act. They didn’t urge Biden to throw the baby out with the bathwater; they were urging him not to.
  • When, last week, they thought they’d lost, Democratic congressional staff members staged an unprecedented sit-in at Schumer’s office, hoping to pressure the Senate majority leader back into negotiations with Manchin. And what did they say? They didn’t say, “We have eight years to save the earth.” They didn’t say, “The blood of the future is on your hands.” What their protest sign said was “Keep negotiating, Chuck.” As far as I can tell, this was code for “Give Joe more.”
  • They got their wish. And as a result, we got a bill. That’s not naïveté but the opposite.
  • The deal, if it holds, is very big, several times as large as anything on climate the United States passed into law before. The architects and supporters of the $369 billion in climate and clean-energy provisions in Joe Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, announced Wednesday, are already calculating that it could reduce American carbon emissions by 40 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by 2030. That’s close enough to President Biden’s pledge of 50 percent that exhausted advocates seem prepared to count it as a victory
jaxredd10

Renaissance Period: Timeline, Art & Facts - HISTORY - 1 views

  • The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.
  • Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. T
  • Galieo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.
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  • Some historians, however, believe that such grim depictions of the Middle Ages were greatly exaggerated,
  • Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.
  • In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly.
  • Great Italian writers, artists, politicians and others declared that they were participating in an intellectual and artistic revolution that would be much different from what they experienced during the Dark Ages.
  • Although other European countries experienced their Renaissance later than Italy, the impacts were still revolutionary.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter, architect, inventor, and “Renaissance man” responsible for painting “The Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.
  • Also known as the “Dark Ages,” the era is often branded as a time of war, ignorance, famine and pandemics such as the Black Death.
  • By the early 17th century, the Renaissance movement had died out, giving way to the Age of Enlightenment.
  • Raphael (1483–1520): Italian painter who learned from da Vinci and Michelangelo. Best known for his paintings of the Madonna and “The School of Athens.”
  • Michelangelo (1483–1520): Italian sculptor, painter, and architect who carved “David” and painted The Sistine Chapel in Rome.
  • Art, architecture and science were closely linked during the Renaissance.
  • For instance, artists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.
  • Renaissance art was characterized by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in a true-to-life way.
  • Some of the most famous artistic works that were produced during the Renaissance include:The Mona Lisa (Da Vinci)The Last Supper (Da Vinci)Statue of David (Michelangelo)The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)
  • Also, changing trade routes led to a period of economic decline and limited the amount of money that wealthy contributors could spend on the arts.
  • Donatello (1386–1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for lifelike sculptures like “David,” commissioned by the Medici family.
  • While many scholars view the Renaissance as a unique and exciting time in European history, others argue that the period wasn’t much different from the Middle Ages and that both eras overlapped more than traditional accounts suggest.
Javier E

Hirshhorn would go back to square one if Smithsonian bursts the Bubble - The Washington... - 0 views

  • The brilliance of the Bubble idea, as designed by the New York-based architecture firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is that it would cost less than one-tenth of the projected cost of the Gehry wing at the Corcoran, yet would have an outsized impact on architectural thinking in Washington. Koshalek and his architects have finessed one of this city’s hardest design challenges: How to make something new, in the center of the city, but in such a way that no permanent violence is done to the historic character of the Mall and its environs.
  • Since he arrived in 2009, Koshalek has rigorously addressed the most obvious and fundamental question of any art museum today: How to break out of the institutional bunker, and into a larger dialogue with the city and the country at large?
  • The Bubble would also bring innovative temporary architecture — one of the most intellectually exciting currents in contemporary architectural thinking — to the District. It would enliven the generally moribund civic space of the Mall, and demonstrate something that is now seriously in question: that Washington has developed progressive instincts when it comes to architecture, design and culture.
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  • The Bubble was his answer. If Clough vetoes it, the Hirshhorn will be back to square one, forced to reconsider the question Koshalek already answered. Or else it will retreat into itself and succumb to isolation, repetition and complacency
Javier E

Pope Francis Changes Tone at the Vatican - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Beyond appointing eight cardinals as outside advisers, Francis has not yet begun making concrete changes or set forth an ambitious policy agenda
  • He has chosen to live not in the papal apartments but rather in the Casa Santa Marta residence inside the Vatican, where he eats dinner in the company of lower-ranking priests and visitors.
  • n his speeches, “his style is simple and direct. It’s not elaborately constructed and complex,
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  • “If investments in the banks fail, ‘Oh, it’s a tragedy,’ ” he said, speaking extemporaneously for more than 40 minutes at a Pentecost vigil last weekend, after a private audience with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the architect of Europe’s austerity policies. “But if people die of hunger or don’t have food or health, nothing happens. This is our crisis today.”
  • “The financial crisis which we are experiencing makes us forget that its ultimate origin is to be found in a profound human crisis,” he said, adding: “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”
  • Francis’ speeches clearly draw on the themes of liberation theology, a movement that seeks to use the teachings of the Gospel to help free people from poverty and that has been particularly strong in his native Latin America. In the 1980s, Benedict, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, led a campaign to rein in the movement, which he saw as too closely tied to some Marxist political elements.
  • Francis studied with an Argentine Jesuit priest who was a proponent of liberation theology, and Father Lombardi acknowledged the echoes. “But what is clear is that he was always against the strains of liberation theology that had an ideological Marxist element,”
  • In his Pentecost remarks last weekend, he cited biblical verses, but he also said with a smile that he sometimes dozed off while praying and recalled how he had been inspired to enter the priesthood by the simple faith of his mother and grandmother.
  • “The economy has picked up again here,” said Marco Mesceni, 60, a third-generation vendor of papal memorabilia outside St. Peter’s Square. “It was so hard to sell anything under Benedict. This pope attracts huge crowds, and they all want to bring back home something with his smiling face on it.”
julia rhodes

Analyses - The Debate Over How To Deal With North Korea | Kim's Nuclear Gamble | FRONTL... - 0 views

  • It was a playing field on which we were expected to pay the North Koreans not to do dangerous things, and that is not a sound basis for a policy.
  • When Bush won the presidency, talks [with North Korea] ceased immediately. The criticism that comes from the Clinton camp is that there was no continuity in policy.
  • I honestly don't see how, looking back, the architects of that agreement can hold the Bush administration culpable for behavior that, in retrospect, should make us reconsider whether the original Framework Agreement was a sensible idea.
    • julia rhodes
       
      hmm
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  • It is the policy of the government of North Korea, in my judgment, to use its capacity to do harm to elicit support from those who might be harmed by actions they would agree not to take
  • The criticism of the Bush administration would be that it, in all of this tough talk and rebuffing the Sunshine Policy, that they have failed to get to the negotiating table and that things have only gotten worse.
  • The Sunshine Policy, we now know, involves a lot less sunshine, a lot less light than heat -- massive payments, as I understand it -- in order to stage meetings that have political ramifications within South Korea, without any significant movement by the North Koreans in any direction that's any way helpful. So the Sunshine Policy has simply not succeeded. It's a failure.
    • julia rhodes
       
      Every prison camp escapee urges governments to not give anything to North Korea
  • I think that we had a different view of what the 21st century could be like, with much more of a sense, from our perspective, of trying to have an interdependent world, looking at solving regional conflicts, having strength in alliances, operating within some kind of a sense that we were part of the international community and not outside of it. And I just think that basically many of them, saw the world quite differently.
  • But the situation is quite different here, in that a strike on Yongbyon is likely to produce another Korean War, with hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, people dead.Well, we don't know whether it would produce another Korean War. But that's a risk.
  • Well, just a much more zero-sum view of the world. ...
  • The so-called "Perry approach" was focused primarily on WMD -- did not embrace changes in the conventional force alignment, or did not embrace human rights issues.
    • julia rhodes
       
      NOOO!
  • because what we are insisting on is that the regional powers get more involved.
  • Now, this is a tough issue because there's no question that the Chinese should be interested in whether there's a nuclear Korean peninsula, and I know that one of the things the administration wants to do is to get the Chinese to take more responsibility for this.
  • what should happen is that the North Koreans should freeze whatever they're doing, and we should freeze whatever military buildup and various things we're doing in the area in order to negotiate something new, which would be beyond the Agreed Framework.
  • The Bush administration is saying we shouldn't have to give them anything. They're violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, they're in defiance of the world. They should be held to task; that appeasement leads to more aggressive behavior.
  • It's not a concession. ... I think that I would not give concessions. There's no reason to. What you do is that you have various quid pro quos in any agreement, but if you decide up front that just having the direct talks is a concession, you're pretty much stuck. That's the problem.
  • A concession, at least to me, is if one side concedes and the other doesn't. I mean, I think that there are ways that there are things we want, and there are things that they want.
  • They wanted that reiterated. As far as I know, we have no hostile intent towards North Korea. Why would it have been such a big deal just to reiterate that? It's things like that where this administration has kind of dug its heels in and said anything that we did vis-a-vis North Korea is appeasement.
  • I completely disagree because I believe that it is essential to see whether there's a way to have some agreements. We talked to Stalin, we talked to Mao, we talked to Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. We made agreements. I don't consider talking appeasement
  • One of the lines of debate in pursuing Korean policy is whether our focus should be on nonproliferation or whether our focus should be on regional stability. These are two different ways of looking at the North Korean problem.
  • I think that's an exaggeration. The clear policy of our government is that we find nuclear weapons in North Korea to be unacceptable and intolerable. Nobody wants nuclear weapons in North Korea. So why not talk to them?
  • I believe the [Agreed Framework] would have been more effective if other players had been more directly involved.
  • They just want to talk to the United States.Well, do we have to give them what they want all the time?
  • I was surprised. I'm not surprised some people in the administration thought that. I'm surprised they'd take that policy approach to North Korea. I thought it was counterproductive.
  • t may be therapeutic for us to to talk that way, but does not accomplish our objectives, and does not enhance our security. Indeed, as it's turning out, I think it's putting it in some danger
  • I think it's quite possible that the North Koreans have already decided that they're going to become a declared nuclear state and that no amount of dialogue will stop them from that.
  • The world is running out of time.
  • For us to strike militarily at North Korea, given the risk that we would be incurring for South Korea, would be one of the most immoral acts conceivable. So we are left then, with only the option of engaging with them.
  • But, yes, it's extortion, and we're rewarding bad behavior. But much of diplomacy is rewarding bad behavior. You're trying to figure out how you can stop the worst of the behavior at the lowest-possible price
  • I think they've not accomplished much that's good.
  • preemptive war, preventive war -- kind of runs up against its match in the Korean peninsula?
  • Why are we doing in Iraq what we're not trying to do in North Korea?
  • And that's the whole problem with one, the axis of evil concept and two, the doctrine, if it is a doctrine, of preemptive deterrence. That there are some things that you can't preemptively deter. And North Korea I think is a classic example. ...
    • julia rhodes
       
      EXACTLY!
  • Those who criticize the deal because they cheated on it, I think are not understanding the nature of international politics. We have done deals with people who we expected might well cheat. And indeed, the Soviet Union cheated on all kinds of deals, massively in the biological weapons convention. You look at the deal and say
  • I think they're worried about the survival of their regime, independent of what we would do, because they know that they are in deep trouble, in terms of their economy.
  • I think the North Koreans are truly concerned about their security.
  • And if it worked, I'd have no problem with it. There's nothing wrong with the rhetoric. The problem is, it hasn't.
  • "We don't talk to these rogue regimes," and feel good about that, people may die because you failed to deal with this in an effective way, in a diplomatic way. It is not a concession, in my view, to the North Koreans to pay for performance on their part. You can call it a concession. You can call it appeasement. It is dealing with the problem as it is. It is preferable to me than the use of force.
katieb0305

Why Won't Hillary Clinton Defend Trade Deals? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • crimped construct leaves no room for the very different perspective of someone like architect Charles Kelley in Portland, Oregon
  • “Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”
  • consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.
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  • “Now … I can’t imagine what the region would be like if we didn’t have the level of trade we have [today].”
  • Donald Trump insists that trade and immigration are undermining wages and devouring jobs
  • has also refused to defend the North American Free Trade Agreement that her husband Bill Clinton signed—an agreement Trump routinely calls “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.”
  • But her resistance to expanded trade reflects outdated assumptions about the Democratic coalition
  • international trade specifically as beneficial for the U.S. economy, consumers and their own living standards,
  • Democratic partisans are now much more likely than Republicans to view globalization and trade as a positive force on all those fronts
  • the movement of blue-collar whites largely skeptical of trade into the GOP, and their replacement in the Democratic coalition by minorities,
  • Clinton may rely even more than previous Democratic nominees on these pro-trade groups
  • voters from all parties worry that trade can eliminate domestic jobs.
  • NAFTA has likely saved many U.S. jobs that might otherwise have migrated elsewhere
  • creates an undeniable need for fresh thinking on how to connect those displaced workers with the economy’s new opportunities.
  • “If you are able to produce parts of your finished product in Mexico and lower your cost, you can increase your share of the market,”
  • her conditional early support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Obama negotiated with 11 Asian nations, but has also refused to defend the North American Free Trade Agreement that her husband Bill Clinton signed—an agreement Trump routinely calls “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.”
  • Kelley works with about a dozen cities across six countries, with a special concentration in Asia. “Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”
  • Threatening tariffs and walls, Donald Trump insists that trade and immigration are undermining wages and devouring jobs (while also presenting migration from Mexico and the Middle East as a security threat). Clinton has defended immigration, but effectively surrendered to Trump on trade.
  • “We Build Green Cities,” a loose consortium of Portland-based engineering, architectural, and environmental science firms that consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.
  • Clinton’s suspicion of trade isn’t just a tactical maneuver: Veterans of the Bill Clinton administration say that internally she was always dubious about pursuing NAFTA. But her resistance to expanded trade reflects outdated assumptions about the Democratic coalition.
  • While Trump has never appeared more confident than when he’s denouncing TPP or NAFTA, Clinton has been tongue-tied.
  • But the latest Chicago Council survey, released last month, shows that Democratic partisans are now much more likely than Republicans to view globalization and trade as a positive force on all those fronts. (Over two-thirds of Democrats now say trade benefits both the overall U.S. economy and their own living standards.)
  • With Trump centering his campaign on mobilizing working-class whites, Clinton may rely even more than previous Democratic nominees on these pro-trade groups—even as she further sublimates their views.
  • The reason: It’s encouraged an integrated North American supply chain that allows American firms to produce autos and other products at less cost overall by shifting some manufacturing to Mexico.
  • Wood acknowledges that U.S. manufacturing workers who lose jobs in this exchange often are not equipped to compete for the new positions that the integration process creates. That creates an undeniable need for fresh thinking on how to connect those displaced workers with the economy’s new opportunities.
  • If she wins, she’ll eventually need to acknowledge the same about economic globalization
Javier E

Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say - The New York Times - 1 views

  • “This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”
  • Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.
  • “Who knows what Donald Trump with a pen and phone would do?” asked Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute.
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  • With five months to go before Election Day, Mr. Trump has already said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations. He has threatened to sic federal regulators on his critics. He has encouraged rough treatment of demonstrators.
  • His proposal to bar Muslims from entry into the country tests the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom, due process and equal protection. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • And, in what was a tipping point for some, he attacked Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of the Federal District Court in San Diego, who is overseeing two class actions against Trump University.Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat.
  • Beyond the attack on judicial independence is a broader question of Mr. Trump’s commitment to the separation of powers and to the principles of federalism enshrined in the Constitution. Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown and an architect of the first major challenge to President Obama’s health care law, said he had grave doubts on both fronts.
  • “You would like a president with some idea about constitutional limits on presidential powers, on congressional powers, on federal powers,” Professor Barnett said, “and I doubt he has any awareness of such limits.”
  • Mr. Post said that view was too sanguine, given the executive branch’s practical primacy. “The president has all the power with respect to enforcing the law,” he said. “There’s only one of those three branches that actually has the guns in its hands, and that’s the executive.”
  • “I don’t think he cares about separation of powers at all,” said Richard Epstein, a fellow at the Hoover Institution who also teaches at New York University and the University of Chicago.
  • President George W. Bush “often went beyond what he should have done,” Professor Epstein said. “I think Obama’s been much worse on that issue pretty consistently, and his underlings have been even more so. But I think Trump doesn’t even think there’s an issue to worry about. He just simply says whatever I want to do I will do.”
  • “I can easily see a situation in which he would take the Andrew Jackson line,” Professor Epstein said, referring to a probably apocryphal comment attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce i
  • “I can easily see a situati
  • There are other precedents, said John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who took an expansive view of executive power as a lawyer in the Bush administration. “The only two other presidents I can think of who were so hostile to judges on an individual level and to the judiciary as a whole would be Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt,” he said.
  • Other legal scholars said they were worried about Mr. Trump’s commitment to the First Amendment. He has taken particular aim at The Washington Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon
  • On one hand, Mr. Trump seemed to misunderstand the scope of presidential power. Libel is a state-law tort constrained by First Amendment principles, and a president’s views do not figure in its application.
  • “There are very few serious constitutional thinkers who believe public figures should be able to use libel as indiscriminately as Trump seems to think they should,” Professor Somin said. “He poses a serious threat to the press and the First Amendment.”
  • On the other hand, said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, Mr. Trump’s comments betrayed a troubling disregard for free expression.
  • Many of Mr. Trump’s statements about legal issues were extemporaneous and resist conventional legal analysis. Some seemed to betray ignorance of fundamental legal concepts, as when he said in a debate that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had criticized Mr. Trump’s sister, a federal appeals court judge, “for signing a certain bill,” adding for good measure that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., while still an appeals court judge, had also “signed that bill.”
  • But bills are legislative rather than judicial documents. And, as it happened, Judge Alito had not joined the opinion in question.
davisem

How populism could shake up Europe: A visual guide - CNN.com - 0 views

shared by davisem on 05 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Europe's populist movements are on the cusp of sweeping far-right, nationalist and euroskeptic parties into power across the continent in a series of upcoming elections
  • he revolving door swung against current Prime Minister Matteo Renzi Sunday, when voters rejected his proposed changes to the country's constitution
  • Experts say that if Grillo comes to power, he'll likely follow through on promises to call a referendum to scrap the euro, reintroduce the Italian lira, and perhaps even follow Britain out of the European Union
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  • Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) had ridden a populist wave to challenge for presidential power (albeit in a largely ceremonial role). The race had appeared close, but on Sunday Hofer conceded to left-wing independent Alexander Van der Bellen when early returns ran against him
  • Marine Le Pen, leader since 2011, has tried to "detoxify" the party founded by her father Jean-Marie of its reputation for racism and xenophobia -- and has seen its share of the vote rise to 27% in last year's regional elections
  • Formed in 2013, the anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was initially galvanized into action by what it saw as Merkel's bungled handling of the eurozone crisis -- specifically the multiple Greek bailouts
  • The National Front leader has utilized similar tactics to the US President-elect by tapping into frustrations of the French electorate and focusing on a more nationalistic agenda to sway voters to her corner.
  • Farage was one of the chief architects of the Brexit campaign for Britain to leave the European Union
  • since the 2008 economic crisis unemployment has risen from 7.1% to around 10%, while almost a quarter of the nation's youth is now out of work.
  • Voters in the Netherlands are set to elect a new parliament in March 2017, when the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Party for Freedom (PVV) hopes to build on its strong showing in the past two elections
  • Wilders has run on a party manifesto focused on a so-called "de-Islamification" of the Netherlands
  •  
    Europe is one the peak of sweeping right, nationalist and eurosceptic parties come into power in following elections, and we see some examples of countries and how the GPA, Unemployment, and others were effected.
fischerry

11 Surprising Facts About Benjamin Franklin - History in the Headlines - 0 views

  • Founding father Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston. Along with serving as one of the architects of American independence, he was also a scientist, inventor, printer, writer, newspaper owner and philosopher who became a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic.
Javier E

The years of calm are over. In Donald Trump we'll have a child at the White House | Dav... - 0 views

  • Every time we allowed ourselves to be even remotely optimistic, some new reminder arrived that we, an immature electorate, had elected a child.
  • In eight years in the White House there had been an uninterrupted stretch of calm and decency. In eight years there has been no scandal, not even a whiff of scandal, coming from the White House. That is a profoundly difficult thing to do, especially with the two houses of Congress in Republican hands and the president’s every move or hope met with biblical opposition.
  • For eight years we have been able to look to the White House and see a president who thinks and acts with cool deliberation, whose every sentence is well-considered. Anyone can disagree with President Obama’s policies but it cannot be denied that the first family acted with unerring decorum and amenity.
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  • People of all affiliations must admit that the period of calm dignity at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is fast approaching its end.
  • We don’t know. But we do know that the days of decency are gone. We had almost 3,000 such days in a row, and it will soon come to an end. That we have traded Obama’s unshakable composure for Trump’s undivinable mayhem is not a matter of debate.
  • We are in a time of extraordinary relativism, when the incoming president was sued for fraud by 7,000 different people and this was not seen as a disqualifying fact. The president-elect was accused of defrauding thousands of their life savings
  • He will recite the oath properly and, if he employs the same writer who penned his victory speech, will probably deliver a well-worded inaugural address. But which man will show up on 21 January?
  • Donald Trump is not a man of serenity. He is loud and brash, he is not above spreading rumours and falsehoods, and controversy follows him as surely as dusk follows day. There are currently 75 lawsuits outstanding against him. They range from employees at his buildings suing him for personally sexually assaulting them to an architect who claims he was never paid for the work he completed. Trump has been married three times, and has filed for bankruptcy five times, in each case emerging unscathed while his creditors receive pennies on the dollar.
  • We can agree that Trump was elected. We can agree that his election has sent the Dow to a new high. We can agree that he very well may rebuild the nation’s infrastructure – and if he does, he will have the backing of most of the country.
  • But we must also agree that this president has the bearing and impulses of a nine-year-old boy – a troubled nine-year-old boy. He wants most to be liked and admired, and when he isn’t, he lashes out with insults and aggrieved demands for apologies. He has no patience and little self-control. He cannot spell and does not read
  • For the next four years, the highs will be high and the lows will be low, and the embarrassments to our democracy will arrive with great regularity. Remember George W Bush trying to give an impromptu massage to Angela Merkel? Remember Bill Clinton receiving oral sex in the Oval Office? Remember the totality of Richard Nixon? All were difficult to bear. Having one’s president behave worse than anyone you know is wounding to the soul. Prepare yourself for more.
  • In 2008 badges were made that said No more Drama, Vote Obama. This year the electorate, or a meaningful portion of it, voted for drama. Constant drama. Lawsuits. Feuds. Threats. Denials. Insults. Speaking before deliberating. Tweeting before thinking. The use of exclamation marks with unprecedented frequency.
Javier E

What's the matter with Dem? Thomas Frank talks Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and everythin... - 0 views

  • The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.
  • What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people
  • there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.
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  • The hierarchy of status is a different one. The professionals are the apex of that hierarchy.
  • these two hierarchies live side by side. They share a lot of the same assumptions about the world and a lot of the same attitudes, but they also differ in important ways. So I’m not one of these people who says the Democrats and the Republicans are the same. I don’t think they are. But there are sometimes similarities between these two groups.
  • professionals tend to be very liberal on essentially any issue other than workplaces issues. So on every matter of cultural issues, culture war issues, all the things that have been so prominent in the past, they can be very liberal.
  • On economic questions, however, they tend not to be. (dishes clattering) They tend to be much more conservative. And their attitudes towards working-class people in general and organized labor specifically is very contemptuous.
  • if you look just back to the Bill Clinton administration: In policy after policy after policy, he was choosing between groups of Americans, and he was always choosing the interests of professionals over the interests of average people. You take something like NAFTA, which was a straight class issue, right down the middle, where working people are on one side of the divide and professionals are on another. And they’re not just on either side of the divide: Working people are saying, “This is a betrayal. You’re going to ruin us.” And professional people are saying, “What are you talking about? This is a no-brainer. This is what you learn on the first day of economics class.” And hilariously, the working people turned out to be right about that. The people flaunting their college degrees turned out to be wrong.
  • Every policy decision he made was like this. The crime bill of 1994, which was this sort of extraordinary crackdown on all sorts of different kinds of people. And at the same time he’s deregulating Wall Street.
  • You’re teaching a course that meets three times a week and you’re getting $1,500 for an entire semester. That was a shocking lesson but at the same time that was happening to us, the price of college was going up and up and up, because increasingly the world or increasingly the American public understands and believes that you have to have a college degree to get ahead in life. So they are charging what the markets can bear
  • If you go down the list of leading Democrats, leading Democratic politicians, what you find is that they’re all plucked from obscurity by fancy universities. This is their life story. Bill Clinton was from a town in Arkansas, goes to Georgetown, becomes a Rhodes Scholar, goes to Yale Law School — the doors of the world open up for him because of college.
  • beginning in the 1960s, Americans decided that the right way to pursue opportunities was through the university. It’s more modern than you think. I was reading a book about social class from right after World War II. And the author was describing this transition, this divide between people who came up through their work, who learned on the job and were promoted, versus people who went to universities. And this was in the ’40s. But by the time Bill Clinton was coming up in the ’60s, university was essential
  • just look at his cabinet choices, which are all from a very concentrated very narrow sector of the American elite. It’s always Ivy League institutions.
  • The tuition price spiral is one of the great landmark institutions of our country in the last couple of decades.
  • Or deregulating telecoms. Or capital gains tax cuts. It’s always choosing one group over another.
  • look, I’m in favor of education. I think people should be educated, should go to college. I think it’s insane that it costs as much as it does. And I think that the country is increasingly agreeing with me
  • The student debt crisis? This is unbearable. We have put an entire generation of young people — basically they come out of college with the equivalent of a mortgage and very little to show for it. It’s unbelievable that we’ve done this. My dad went to college basically for free. It wasn’t even that expensive when I went, in the early 1980s. This is unbelieveable what we’re doing to young people now and it can’t go on
  • You seem to be suggesting, the way you talk about the Democrats, that somehow this is elitist and to pursue an education puts you out of touch with real people.I don’t think so. Especially since we’re rapidly becoming a country where — what is the percentage of people who have a college degree now? It’s pretty high. It’s a lot higher than it was when I was young.
  • One of the chronic failings of meritocracy is orthodoxy. You get people who don’t listen to voices outside their discipline. Economists are the most flagrant example of this. The economics profession, which treats other ways of understanding the world with utter contempt. And in fact they treat a lot of their fellow economists with utter contempt.
  • there’s no solidarity in a meritocracy. The guys at the top of the profession have very little sympathy for the people at the bottom. When one of their colleagues gets fired, they don’t go out on strike
  • There’s no solidarity in this group, but there is this amazing deference between the people at the top. And that’s what you see with Obama. He’s choosing those guys.
  • you start to wonder, maybe expertise is a problem.But I don’t think so. I think it’s a number of things.
  • The first is orthodoxy which I mentioned
  • when Clinton ran in ’92, they were arguing about inequality then as well. And it’s definitely the question of our time. The way that issue manifested was Wall Street in ’08 and ’09. He could have taken much more drastic steps. He could have unwound bailouts, broken up the banks, fired some of those guys. They bailed out banks in the Roosevelt years too and they broke up banks all the time. They put banks out of business. They fired executives, all that sort of thing. It is all possible, there is precedent and he did none of it
  • the third thing is this. You go back and look at when government by expert has worked, because it has worked. It worked in the Roosevelt administration, very famously. They called it the Brains Trust. These guys were excellent.
  • These were not the cream of the intellectual crop. Now he did have some Harvard- and Yale-certified brains but even these were guys who were sort of in protest. Galbraith: This is a man who spent his entire career at war with economic orthodoxy. I mean, I love that guy. You go right on down the list. Its amazing the people he chose. They weren’t all from this one part of American life.
  • Is there a hero in your book?I don’t think there is.
  • The overarching question of our time is inequality, as [Obama] himself has said. And it was in Bill Clinton’s time too.Well you look back over his record and he’s done a better job than most people have done. He’s no George W. Bush. He hasn’t screwed up like that guy did. There have been no major scandals. He got us out of the Iraq war. He got us some form of national health insurance. Those are pretty positive things. But you have to put them in the context of the times, weigh them against what was possible at the time. And compared to what was possible, I think, no. It’s a disappointment.
  • The second is that a lot of the professions have been corrupted. This is a very interesting part of the book, which I don’t explore at length. I wish I had explored it more. The professions across the board have been corrupted — accounting, real estate appraisers, you just go down the list
  • What else? You know a better solution for health care. Instead he has this deal where insurance companies are basically bullet-proof forever. Big Pharma. Same thing: When they write these trade deals, Big Pharma is always protected in them. They talk about free trade. Protectionism is supposed to be a bad word. Big Pharma is always protected when they write these trade deals.
  • You talk about “a way of life from which politicians have withdrawn their blessing.” What is that way of life?You mean manufacturing?You tell me. A sort of blue-collar way of life. It’s the America that I remember from 20, 30, 40 years ago. An America where ordinary people without college degrees were able to have a middle class standard of living. Which was — this is hard for people to believe today — that was common when I was young
  • Today that’s disappeared. It’s disappearing or it has disappeared. And we’ve managed to convince ourselves that the reason it’s disappeared is because — on strictly meritocratic grounds, using the logic of professionalism — that people who didn’t go to college don’t have any right to a middle-class standard of living. They aren’t educated enough. You have to be educated if you want a middle-class standard of living.
  • here have been so many different mechanisms brought into play in order to take their power away. One is the decline of organized labor. It’s very hard to form a union in America. If you try to form a union in the workplace, you’ll just get fired. This is well known. Another, NAFTA. All the free trade treaties we’ve entered upon have been designed to give management the upper hand over their workers. They can threaten to move the plant. That used to happen of course before NAFTA but now it happens more often.
  • Basically everything we’ve done has been designed to increase the power of management over labor in a broad sociological sense.
  • And then you think about our solutions for these things. Our solutions for these things always have something to do with education. Democrats look at the problems I am describing and for every economic problem, they see an educational solution
  • The problem is not that we aren’t smart enough; the problem is that we don’t have any power
  • Why do you think that is?I go back to the same explanation which is that Obama and company, like Clinton and company, are in thrall to a world view that privileges the interest of this one class over everybody else. And Silicon Valley is today when you talk about the creative class or whatever label you want to apply to this favored group, Silicon Valley is the arch-representative.
  • So do you think it’s just a matter of being enthralled or is it a matter of money? Jobs? Oh the revolving door! Yes. The revolving door, I mean these things are all mixed together.
  • When you talk about social class, yes, you are talking about money. You are talking about the jobs that these people do and the jobs that they get after they’re done working for government. Or before they begin working for government. So the revolving door — many people have remarked upon the revolving door between the Obama administration and Wall Street.
  • Now it’s between the administration and Silicon Valley. There’s people coming in from Google. People going out to work at Uber.
  • the productivity advances that it has made possible are extraordinary. What I’m skeptical of is when we say, oh, there’s a classic example when Jeff Bezos says, ‘Amazon is not happening to book-selling. The future is happening to book-selling.’ You know when people cast innovation — the interests of my company — as, that’s the future. That’s just God. The invisible hand is doing that. It just is not so.
  • Every economic arrangement is a political decision. It’s not done by God. It’s not done by the invisible hand — I mean sometimes it is, but it’s not the future doing it. It’s in the power of our elected leaders to set up the economic arrangements that we live in. And to just cast it off and say, oh that’s just technology or the future is to just blow off the entire question of how we should arrange this economy that we’re stumbling into.
  • I may end up voting for Hillary this fall. If she’s the candidate and Trump is the Republican. You bet I’m voting for her. There’s no doubt in my mind. Unless something were to change really really really dramatically.
  • Bernie Sanders because he has raised the issues that I think are really critical. He’s a voice of discontent which we really need in the Democratic party. I’m so tired of this smug professional class satisfaction. I’ve just had enough of it. He’s talking about what happens to the millennials. That’s really important. He’s talking about the out-of-control price of college. He’s even talking about monopoly and anti-trust. He’s talking about health care. As far as I’m concerned, he’s hitting all the right notes. Now, Hillary, she’s not so bad, right? I mean she’s saying the same things. Usually after a short delay. But he’s also talking about trade. That’s critical. He’s really raising all of the issues, or most of the issues that I think really need to be raised.
  • My main critique is that she, like other professional class liberals who are so enthralled with meritocracy, that she can’t see this broader critique of all our economic arrangements that I’ve been describing to you. For her, every problem is a problem of the meritocracy: It’s how do we get talented people into the top ranking positions where they deserve to be
  • People who are talented should be able to rise to the top. I agree on all that stuff. However that’s not the problem right now. The problems are much more systemic, much deeper, much bigger. The whole thing needs to be called into question. So I think sometimes watching Hillary’s speeches that she just doesn’t get that
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