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On failures of capability, the shutdown began at the worst possible moment for the federal workforce. Beyond the obvious short-term impairment of capabilities caused by furloughing tens of thousands of employees, December and January are crucial months to recruit entry-level employees for the coming year

The president has also undermined institutional memory with the slowest appointments process in recent history

The result is a federal bureaucracy on autopilot with limited alertness in a moment of great vulnerability.

These threats to policy, capability and management reflect a governmentwide failure of imagination. Congress and presidents have plenty of expertise in 20/20 hindsight but have shown little interest over the years in long-range planning.

Congress must own its failure to address the bureaucratic vulnerabilities that trigger failure. Congress has not enacted a significant ethics, personnel or reorganization bill since the 1970s, and it has not conducted a significant examination of the federal bureaucracy’s functioning since the 1990s

the administration is gradually making the program a little more restrictive overall. (This appears to have had little impact thus far on the number of people who have applied for H-1Bs—as Bloomberg Law noted, more than 201,000 people put in for the 85,000 visas issued this year, a 6 percent increase over the previous year’s figures.)

in the Immigration Act of 1990. That original legislation did two things: It expanded legal immigration by increasing the number of green cards awarded each year, and it updated a 1950s-era program for temporary workers of “distinguished merit and ability” by capping the number who could obtain the visa at 65,000. (The cap has varied over the years.) This new program, the H-1B, was designed for skilled, temporary workers in certain occupations.

what came next: the global tech boom and the birth of the outsourcing industry. Suddenly, what had begun as a temporary solution to address a labor shortage became a device through which hundreds of thousands of IT professionals from around the world, especially India, came to the United States. The program became a de facto path to permanent residence and, ultimately, American citizenship.

Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who studies the impact of the visa, says the H-1B prioritizes outsourcers, sets wages too low, and doesn’t address the problem it was created to solve—filling labor-market gaps.“The program has been flawed from the inception,” he told me. “My primary complaint is that it’s used for cheap indentured workers.”

cation process is expensive, costing upwards of $2,400 (not counting lawyer’s fees), and has become cumbersome, they argue, so no American company would voluntarily seek to hire a foreign worker when simply hiring an American one is far easier.

Previous administrations tried to walk the line between these competing interests, but the Trump administration, through its actions, is making the H-1B far more difficult to get—especially for Indian software companies, whose visa applications were rejected in record numbers last year.

all of the changes so far to the existing system have introduced an atmosphere of uncertainty for people like Mahoney-Steel. Johns Hopkins decided not to seek to renew her visa. She told me that her supervisors were trying to rewrite her job description, but that the position she occupied was deemed by her employers too generic to be a specialized skill.

Looking far ahead to the 2018 elections, most Trump detractors, perhaps unsurprisingly, say they would consider voting for a Democrat for Congress this November. However one-third would also consider voting for a Republican who is independent of the president

On the issues looming now, most Americans - 70 percent - favor DACA. Among Mr. Trump's backers, a slim majority support it. But in a sign of how much they want the border wall built, most of his backers are in favor of cutting a deal on DACA to get the wall funded. Resisters are overwhelmingly opposed to such a deal.

Race plays a role in explaining views of the president. Many African Americans feel the president works directly against people of their racial group, and many feel like they have less of a voice in what happens in America now. Large percentages of Mr. Trump's opponents - and African Americans in particular - feel he has disrespected people like them. Two-thirds of Trump backers think he works for their racial group. 

The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.

Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.

is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.

There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.

A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.

Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.

WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.

Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.

Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information

Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.

Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said it was Democrats' responsibility to "rise above" the president's words and actions.

"I think our challenges as public leaders, all of us, is not to simply reflect and amplify that division but to find moments where we can work to heal some of our sharp divisions," Coons said. "It is a challenge for all of us in public life not to respond in kind to some of the things that the president does and says but to instead find ways to rise above it." .recirc_item:nth-child(5) { display: none; } #recirc_item_b65848e2-d4a2-4992-b707-9e7c445fc574 { display: none; } #recirc_item_b65848e2-d4a2-4992-b707-9e7c445fc574 ~ .recirc_item:nth-child(5) { display: list-item; }

When the number of new cases has fallen, and we have the tools to keep it low, we can start to gradually lift restrictions — for example, allowing restaurants to reopen at half their normal capacity, or reopening schools but keeping kids to a single teacher in a single classroom. This will have to happen in fits and starts, relaxing some restrictions, carefully watching for signs of outbreaks and tightening up again where necessary.

What you wanted me to tell you was that in a few weeks, at most, you could go back to your old life. But the government didn’t take your old life; the virus did. The government can’t give it back, except by containing covid-19.

the important question is not “When is the government going to lift the restrictions?” but “When is the government going to have the testing and tracing infrastructure that can let us go about our lives without being afraid?”

a third question might be even more important: “How can I help the government do what it needs to?”

wo answers to that question: “By supporting politicians who propose solutions instead of days on the calendar” and “By staying close to home now, without complaining or cheating even a little, so that we can all knock R0 down to size as quickly as possible.”

I have asked some of them, “If the Senate votes to acquit, what will you do to keep this president from getting worse?” Their responses have been shrugs and sheepish looks.

Or — worst of all — that he might come to their state to campaign against them in the Republican primary. They worry:“Will the hosts on Fox attack me?”“Will the mouthpieces on talk radio go after me?”“Will the Twitter trolls turn their followers against me?”

As Senator Murray said on the Senate floor in 2002, “We can act out of fear” or “we can stick to our principles.” Unfortunately, in this Senate, fear has had its way. In November, the American people will have theirs.

“I get chills when I see those young people, especially at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”

Naomi said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have overstated their impact.AD“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are manmade CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”

Naomi argues that other factors, such as solar energy, play a role — though the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth has actually declined since the 1970s, according to federal measurements

The German media have described her as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Naomi says she is not a member of AfD — she describes herself as libertarian — but acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.

Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors, Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its staff and researchers enjoy ready access to the Trump administration, and one of its senior fellows, William Happer, served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council between September 2018 and 2019.

An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions should be viewed as beneficial to society — not a pollutant that drives global warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,”

Why would an American think tank want to get involved in German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent investigation aired on German television.

For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions this year by 40 percent compared to 1990 — and by up to 95 percent by mid-century.

The proposal described Naomi as “the star” of a “Climate Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over 100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Naomi was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.

Taylor said the tendency to associate Naomi with Greta is “kind of natural” — and benefits Heartland’s message.“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.

“From all the data we have, it suggests we’re just beginning to approach the peak for several regions of the country,” Kolak said. She said she is worried about future surges in tribal areas in the Southwest, and in areas of the South where social distancing measures were implemented just recently.

Hanage said he remains “incredibly anxious” about smaller communities around the nation.

In Europe, the virus-ravaged countries of Italy and Spain seemed to be on the far side of the pandemic’s peak, with infection rates growing far more slowly.

In both countries, the public initially resisted and then complied, in part because the information flowing from officials at every level was largely consistent.

Playing their own versions of explainer in chief, Mr. Morrison has veered toward conservative radio, while Ms. Ardern prefers Facebook Live. But they’ve both received praise from scientists for listening and adapting to evidence.

“It’s a case of politicians just not being in the way,” said Ian Mackay, an immunologist at the University of Queensland who has been involved in response planning for the pandemic. “It’s a mix of things, but I think it comes down to taking advice based on expertise.”

Australia and New Zealand have squashed the curve

Australia, a nation of 25 million people that had been on track for 153,000 cases by Easter, has recorded a total of 6,670 infections and 78 deaths. It has a daily growth rate of less than 1 percent, with per capita testing among the highest in the world.

New Zealand’s own daily growth rate, after soaring in March, is also below 1 percent, with 1,456 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. It has just 361 active cases in a country of five million.

These figures put the two countries closer to Taiwan and South Korea, which have controlled the virus’s spread for now, than to the United States and Europe — even places seen as success stories, like Germany.

It all started with scientists. In Australia, as soon as China released the genetic code for the coronavirus in early January, pathologists in public health laboratories started sharing plans for tests. In every state and territory, they jumped ahead of politicians.

The government then opened the budgetary floodgates to support suffering workers and add health care capacity. When infections started climbing, many of the labs and hospitals hired second and third rounds of scientists to help.

That collaboration set the tone. Many of the state and local task forces spurred on by Mr. Morrison’s early action have stayed in constant contact, drawing in academics who independently started to model the virus’s spread

The newly formed national cabinet has delivered a surprising level of consensus for a country with a loose federal system subject to high levels of discord among state premiers, whose roles and powers resemble those of American governors.

Dr. Michael Baker, a physician and professor at the University of Otago in Wellington, became a prominent voice outside the government pushing for elimination of the virus, not just its suppression.

In Australia, officials are mostly discussing elimination in private, as a potential side effect of a strategy they still describe as suppression

elimination would be a “nirvana” scenario — an achievement that would be tough to maintain without indefinite bans on international travel or 14-day quarantines until a vaccine arrives.

Like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the American government’s scientific response, they are known for extensive public health pedigrees, calm demeanors and no-nonsense adherence to facts.

He and others like him at the local level are key factors in a revival of trust in government that has appeared in poll after poll lately, even as the two countries’ economies have cratered and people have been told to severely restrict their lives.

some scientists wonder if eliminating the virus with good management might rebuild some faith not just in democracy, but also in the value of expertise.

“Maybe we’ll see the return of science,” Dr. Mackay added. “I doubt it, but who knows.”

Others, including former Vermont Gov. and DNC Chairman Howard Dean and Rep. Ted Lieu, D-California, pointed out on Twitter that if Mr. Trump’s allegations are true a judge would have had to find probable cause to approve the wiretap request:

“Facebook Law,” allows the government to fine social-media platforms with more than 2 million registered users in Germany—a club that includes giants like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit—up to 50 million euros for leaving “manifestly unlawful” posts up for more than 24 hours. Unlawful content is defined as anything that violates Germany’s Criminal Code, which bans incitement to hatred, incitement to crime, the spread of symbols belonging to unconstitutional groups, and more.

Unlike in the United States, freedom of speech is “not the most important civil right” in Germany

Instead, Article One of Germany’s postwar constitution instructs, “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” This notion “means you are not allowed to claim false things about me, because it hurts my dignity,” Beckedahl said. “You are not allowed to tell anyone in public lies about me, or I can take you to court.”

The invocation of human dignity carries immense moral force, and parallels the language of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Malicious misinformation “is even more dangerous than hatred or incitement,”

Like Künast, Jun has been assiduously collecting and reporting instances of pro-Nazi language and other forms of hate speech on Facebook since 2015, logging them methodically in a Dropbox folder and Excel spreadsheet that he’s eager to share with inquiring journalists. Images from the internet of beheadings, murders, Nazi salutes, and racist slurs abound. His aim in collecting this wealth of abhorrent material is simple: to underscore the chasm separating Germany’s constitution, which bans the dissemination of material documenting “cruel or otherwise inhuman acts of violence” and incitement to hatred, and the permissive culture of the internet. The result, Jun said, is that Germans—and most Facebook users around the world—are living a kind of double life, subject to two very different legal and moral codes.

In response to what he saw as Facebook’s negligence on this score, Jun took a different approach, targeting individual managers at the company for perpetuating, or even encouraging, hateful behavior. “If a manager of a company has positive knowledge about a concrete crime, and he doesn’t do anything about it, then he will have personal liability for that crime,” he explained. In other words: If he could prove that Facebook employees were aware of hate speech on the network and did not take the posts down, they could be found guilty of a crime in a German court. (The law is usually applied to copyright infringements, and whether it will work in a criminal case against a social-media platform remains an open question.)

Some religious leaders are willing to call good evil, and evil good, in service to a different faith — a faith defined by their political identity. This is heresy at best; idolatry at worst.

Many of the people who should be supplying the moral values required by self-government have corrupted themselves. The Trump administration will be remembered for many things. The widespread, infectious corruption of institutions and individuals may be its most damning legacy.

But French was a colonial rival of Britain, and while arguably Europe’s most prestigious nation, France had suffered humiliating defeats to the British in the Seven Years War - especially its American theatre, the French-Indian War - only years earlier.

France was looking for any way to boost its own reputation while undermining Britain's, and helping the colonists to independence looked like a perfect way of doing this. The fact that some of the revolutionaries had fought France in the French- Indian war scant years earlier was expediently overlooked.

colonists would soon throw the British out, and then France and Spain had to unite and fight Britain for naval dominance.Covert Assistance

Then news arrived of defeats suffered by Washington and his Continental Army in New York. With Britain seemingly on the rise, Vergennes wavered, hesitating over a full alliance and afraid of pushing the colonies back to Britain, but he sent a secret loan and other aid anyway. Meanwhile, the French entered negotiations with the Spanish, who could also threaten Britain, but who were worried about colonial independence.

In December 1777 news reached France of the British surrender at Saratoga, a victory which convinced the French to make a full alliance with the revolutionaries and to enter the war with troops.

On February 6th, 1778 Franklin and two other American commissioners signed the Treaty of Alliance and a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France. This contained a clause banning either Congress or France making a separate peace with Britain and a commitment to keep fighting until US independence was recognized. Spain entered the war on the revolutionary side later that year.

France supplied arms, munitions, supplies, and uniforms. French troops and naval power were also sent to America,

The commanders were carefully selected, men who could work effectively with both themselves and US commanders; however, the leader of the French army, Count Rochambeau, didn’t speak English

There were problems in working together at first

But overall the US and French forces co-operated well – although they were often kept separated – and certainly when compared to the incessant problems experienced in the British high command. French forces attempted to buy everything they couldn’t ship in from locals rather than requisition it, and they spent an estimated $4 million worth of precious metal in doing so, further endearing themselves to locals.

Arguably the key French contribution came during the Yorktown campaign

France was now able to threaten British shipping and territory around the globe, preventing their rival from focusing fully on the conflict in the Americas. Part of the impetus behind Britain’s surrender after Yorktown was the need to hold the remainder of their colonial empire from attack by other European nations, such as France

Many in Britain felt that France was their primary enemy, and should be the focus; some even suggested pulling out of the US colonies entirely to focus on their neighbor.

Despite British attempts to divide France and Congress during peace negotiations, the allies remained firm – aided by a further French loan – and peace was reached in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 between Britain, France, and the United States.

The financial pressures France faced were only made worse by the cost of pushing the US into being and victory, and these finances would now spiral out of control and play a large role in the start of the French Revolution in 1789. France thought it was harming Britain by acting in the New World, but the consequences affected the whole of Europe just a few years later.

a pol who seeks to gain power by demonizing ethnic-minority groups and threatening their core rights is engaged in a special category of leadership failure.

My hope is that people rediscover why we had those norms, and rediscover the spirit of them, not just the dead letter. And if Trump serves as a midwife to that process, then thank you Donald Trump. I guess I have to hope that, because the alternative is Idiocracy on an accelerated time line.

One gets the sense from our current political class that, for example, torture and unconstrained drone strike assassination isn’t actually morally wrong as long as you adopt a furrowed brow and a constipated facial expression, sigh loudly, and say in your most patronizing voice, “This hurts me than it hurts you. I’m sorry I have to do this.” It’s adopting the “serious” tone that matters, not the actual content of your actions.

Trump can exist because our norms have become hollowed shells of what they purport to be. Our norms have been gamed. It feels very much like we’ve gotten to a point where people in many of our institutions, in positions of authority, follow the letter of the law about civic decency, but have almost entirely abandoned the spirit of the law. Trump just takes the last little leap and ditches the letter of the law too.

Our norms of civic decency were evolved for a reason. Watching Trump violate those norms is a really good reminder of why we evolved those norms in the first place. On the other hand, those norms have been profoundly subverted and corrupted for a while now, and used as often as mere cover for all manner of awfulness.

They don't think much would change one way or the other if Donald Trump were elected. The political system has failed them so badly that they think it can't be repaired and little's at stake. The election therefore reduces to an opportunity to express disgust. And that's where Trump's defects come in: They are what make him such an effective messenger.

The more he offends the superior people, the more his supporters like it. Trump wages war on political correctness. Political correctness requires more than ordinary courtesy: It's a ritual, like knowing which fork to use, by which superior people recognize each other

Some “politically correct” codes of conduct, like “Muslim Americans should be treated as equal citizens whose rights are not at all abrogated because some of their co-religionists are terrorists,” help to prevent the U.S. from perpetrating horrific injustices against innocents and serve to uphold the guarantees of our founding documents. Other “politically correct” codes are little more than arbitrary etiquette that people educated at selective colleges use to feel superior to others,

In between the core norms that are vital to democracy and the most frivolous demand for political correctness there is a lot of contested territory. Trump’s rise represents large swathes of that territory being seized by people who reject elite pieties.

citizens who oppose Trumpism are going to have to take a careful look at everything that falls under the rubric of political correctness; study the real harm done by its excesses; identify the many parts that are worth defending; and persuade more Americans to adopt those norms voluntarily, for substantive reasons, not under duress of social shaming or other coercion.

Trumpism cannot prevail in a contest of logic and rationally differentiated controversies; but in a contest of emotion, tribal loyalty, and stigmatizing out-groups, I’m no longer sure that it can be beat.