Group items tagged

they felt trapped. So they made a disastrous calculation and decided that the only way to win these two Senate seats was to humor the dangerous president for a little while longer.

From their perspective, the violence that Sterling had warned about was hypothetical—merely empty threats. Meanwhile, they perceived the threat to Mitch McConnell’s Senate majority to be very real if their candidates didn’t support Trump’s batshit plot.

The result? David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler became the only two major-party candidates since the Civil War to run campaigns promising that they would help overturn a legitimate election if they got to Washington.

And all of their advisers all agreed that this was the best of the bad options.That’s how quickly it happens. That’s how people like Clarence and all the good ol’ boy consultants on “Team Normal” sacrifice their integrity out of ambition and loyalty to a team . . . in only a few weeks.

That’s how quickly it happens. That’s how people like Clarence and all the good ol’ boy consultants on “Team Normal” sacrifice their integrity out of ambition and loyalty to a team . . . in only a few weeks.

People prefer to tell themselves stories that are convenient. We prefer stories in which the hardship was out of our hands. Where we did the best we could given the circumstances. Stories that center the trauma we overcame rather than the sacrifice we avoided.

And so when the GOP political class was faced with the hardship of a mob demanding they follow the orders of a madman who wanted to undermine our democracy, they began telling themselves a story in which it was not their responsibility to put their own heads on the chopping block.

Team Normal went about their business and convinced themselves that doing so was just the latest little sacrifice required by their career. That the bad actors were somewhere out there. On Team Crazy.

But inside, they knew that what they were doing was, at best, an icky part of doing business—and at worst, it amounted to direct support for a horror that their kids and grandkids will read about in their history books.

So they made a speech on the Senate floor to ease the feeling of guilt. Or tossed a few bucks into Raffensperger’s campaign kitty. Or flattered themselves with daydreams about how next time they’ll take down the real bad guys.

Or tossed a few bucks into Raffensperger’s campaign kitty. Or flattered themselves with daydreams about how next time they’ll take down the real bad guys.

But we all know they’ll just get in line again.

Their mental contortions are not solely to blame for the precipice on which we sit. It’s true that there were more directly implicated evildoers—the Jeffrey Clarks who tried to seize the throne when the moment presented itself.But without the enablers, the evildoers would have had no opportunity to execute their plot.

Understanding why the “normals” did what they did is crucial if we want any of them to be shaken free from their cozy complacence. If we are going to avoid the next threat to our democracy, we will need these functionaries to tell themselves a story where they are responsible for getting us out of the hardship. Or, even better, a story where they can be the heroes.

Introduction: Our Virtue

“There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” p. 25

Democratic education…wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” p. 26

The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered—if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. p. 37-38

Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom—i.e., decreased regulation. But “it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character.” p. 28

Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism—showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. p. 29-30

The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. p. 31

However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority—indeed, “much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority…. The very idea of a majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities.” p. 32-35

However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean “openness,” i.e., relativism. p. 26-27

“Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice.” p. 40

Today, “the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture…: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.” p. 38-39

Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained—“closed”—by cultural influences. p. 38

“There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference…and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude.” p. 41

The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education—why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, “to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant…true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” p. 41

The Clean Slate

On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world.” And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. p. 52-55

So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. p. 55-56

Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” p. 56-57

“As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” p. 67

Books

“I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing…may well require encouragement at the outset.” p. 62

Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. p. 62-64

But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, “they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives…. [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.” p. 64

Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the “distance from the contemporary” that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. p. 64

The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a “perversion of the democratic principle,” this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. p. 66-67

“Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.” p. 58

We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.” p. 74-75

Relationships

“In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man

“This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?” p. 87-88

“The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure…is the relation between blacks and whites.” Although black students are present on campuses, they “have, by and large, proved indigestible.” p. 91

the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. p. 94-95

“The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.” Affirmative action cements this dynamic. p. 95-96

The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. “And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail…. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves.” p. 129

“I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.” p. 130

“All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” p. 131

Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. p. 134-136

The German Connection

Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and “constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” p. 141

Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. “Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.” p. 147

Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual. p. 82-86

“We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals.” p. 153

The question isn’t even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them—i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. p. 154

The Self

Although a precise definition remains elusive, “the self is the modern substitute for the soul.” p. 173

Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. p. 174-175

Following their advice, “our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.” p. 175

Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. “Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism.” p. 175-176

“All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared.” p. 176

That reason “is unable to rule in culture or in soul…constitutes a crisis of the West…[whose] regimes are founded on reason.” Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. p. 196

Psychology came to us “in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society…. Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.” p. 178

Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified—not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. p. 180

And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. p. 181-182

Yet those who praise creativity don’t realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. p. 181-182

The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. p. 194-195

When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), “a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys.” p. 195

“The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.” p. 179

Rousseau and others recognized this. “The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.” But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. p. 196-197

We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. p. 197

“The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.” p. 197

“Since values are not rational…they must be imposed.” Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. “Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left.” p. 201-202

Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. p. 202

“Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber.” Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but “when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits.” p. 213-214

“Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here.” And it remains dominant. p. 214

The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and “the sacred,” which are no longer seen as dangerous.

“As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.” p. 239

This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?” p. 240

In a city like New York, where everything is superlative, who exactly is middle class?

“My niece just bought a home in Atlanta for $85,000,” she said. “I almost spend that on rent and utilities in a year.

“Housing has always been one of the ways the middle class has defined itself, by the ability to own your own home. But in New York, you didn’t have to own.” There is no stigma, he said, to renting a place you can afford only because it is rent-regulated; such a situation is even considered enviable.

“It’s overwhelmingly housing — that’s the big distortion relative to other places,” said Frank Braconi, the chief economist in the New York City comptroller’s office. “Virtually everything costs more, but not to the degree that housing does.”

The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000.

New Yorkers also live in a notably unequal place. Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone — the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites make 40 times more than the lowest fifth, according to 2010 census data.

There is no single, formal definition of class status in this country. Statisticians and demographers all use slightly different methods to divvy up the great American whole into quintiles and median ranges. Complicating things, most people like to think of themselves as middle class. It feels good, after all, and more egalitarian than proclaiming yourself to be rich or poor. A $70,000 annual income is middle class for a family of four, according to the median response in a recent Pew Research Center survey, and yet people at a wide range of income levels, including those making less than $30,000 and more than $100,000 a year, said they, too, belonged to the middle.

“You could still go into a bar in Manhattan and virtually everyone will tell you they’re middle class,” said Daniel J. Walkowitz, an urban historian at New York University.

The price tag for life’s basic necessities — everything from milk to haircuts to Lipitor to electricity, and especially housing — is more than twice the national average.

If the money you live on is coming from any kind of investment or dividend, you are probably not middle class, according to Mr. Braconi.

Without the clear badge of middle-class membership — a home mortgage — it is hard to say where a person fits on the class continuum. So let’s consider the definition of “middle class” through five different lenses.

If you live in Manhattan and you are making more than $790,000 a year, then congratulations, you are the 1 percent.

“Understanding who is middle class, in New York, but especially Manhattan, is all about when you got into the real estate market,” he said. “If you bought an apartment prior to 2000, or have long been in a rent-stabilized apartment, you could probably be a teacher in Manhattan and be solidly middle class. But if you bought or started renting in a market-rate apartment over the last 5 or 10 years, you could probably be a management consultant and barely have any savings.”

By the same formula — measuring by who sits in the middle of the income spectrum — Manhattan’s middle class exists somewhere between $45,000 and $134,000.

But if you are defining middle class by lifestyle, to accommodate the cost of living in Manhattan, that salary would have to fall between $80,000 and $235,000. This means someone making $70,000 a year in other parts of the country would need to make $166,000 in Manhattan to enjoy the same purchasing power.

Using the rule of thumb that buyers should expect to spend two and a half times their annual salary on a home purchase, the properties in Manhattan that could be said to be middle class would run between $200,000 and $588,000.

On the low end, the pickings are slim. The least expensive properties are mostly uptown, in neighborhoods like Yorkville, Washington Heights and Inwood. The most pleasing options in this range, however, are one-bedroom apartments not designed for children or families.

“There’s no room for the earlier version of the middle class,” Mr. Walkowitz said. Firefighter, police officer, teacher and manufacturing worker all used to be professions that could lift a family into its ranks. But those kinds of jobs have long left people unable to keep up with soaring real estate prices.

Positions that would nudge a family into the upper class elsewhere — say, vice president or director of strategy — and professions like psychologist are solidly middle class in Manhattan.

The same holds true for jobs in higher education, a growth sector for the city. The average tenured university professor at New York University or Columbia makes more than $180,000 a year, according to a 2012 survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Sweetening the deal for those looking to buy, N.Y.U. has offered mortgage assistance and discounted loans, while qualified Columbia faculty are eligible for a subsidy of up to $40,000 a year. Some faculty members benefit from university housing that rents well below the market rate, in prime locations on the Upper West Side and in Greenwich Village.

Because her building is owned by Columbia, her rent, about $1,800 a month, is manageable on an associate professor’s salary, which averages about $125,000. A similar market-rate apartment on the Upper West Side costs about $6,000 a month,

One way to stay in Manhattan as a member of the middle class is to be in a relationship. Couples can split the cost of a one-bedroom apartment, along with utilities and takeout meals. But adding small roommates, especially the kind that do not contribute to rent, creates perhaps the single greatest obstacle to staying in the city.

Only 17 percent of Manhattan households have children, according to census data. That is almost half the national average, making little ones the ultimate deal-breaker for otherwise die-hard middle-class Manhattanites.

By one measure, in cities like Houston or Phoenix — places considered by statisticians to be more typical of average United States incomes than New York — a solidly middle-class life can be had for wages that fall between $33,000 and $100,000 a year.

“The only artists I know now who are still in Manhattan,” she said, “either made it big and bought, or are still in the rent-controlled studios they landed in 1976, and will leave in a coffin.”

People define class as much by association and culture as they do by raw numbers — a sense, more than anything, of baseline financial security garnished by an occasional luxury like a vacation, and a belief that things can get better through hard work and determination.

In the last decade, the percentage of people who are paying “unaffordable rents” (defined as more than 30 percent of their income) has increased significantly, according to a report issued in September by the city’s comptroller.

The only young people she sees moving in around her are often buoyed by parental support, given an apartment at graduation the way she was given a Seiko watch. As her own friends and neighbors age or die out, she wonders, “who is going to take our place?”

World War II forced transformative market changes when supplies from Europe and elsewhere were cut off. Many companies expanded and moved across the Hudson to set up new factories

One of the newer breakthroughs to come along in the science of flavor is called taste modulation. About a decade ago, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego named Charles Zuker isolated, for the first time, the receptors on the tongue that are responsible for our perception of taste. He did this using tastebud cells from laboratory mice. What he found was that each cell was incredibly specific, containing receptors for just one taste — either sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory (also called umami

Coupled with mass spectrometers, which identify what’s been isolated, this technology opened up a vast world of possibilities, allowing for a much more thorough (though still incomplete) map of nature’s aromas. The number of flavor chemicals known in orange peels, for instance, has gone from nine in 1948 to 207 today. In spearmint leaves, it’s leapt from 6 to 100, and in black peppercorns, from seven to 273.

In nature, flavor comes as a sophisticated mix of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals, each with its own unique taste and smell. Using early-20th-century chemistry tools, scientists could hope to identify perhaps a handful of these in any given plant

Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.

the United States could halve by 2030 the oil used in cars and trucks compared with 2005 levels by improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles and by relying more on cars that use alternative power sources, like electric batteries and biofuels.

New York State — not windy like the Great Plains, nor sunny like Arizona — could easily produce the power it needs from wind, solar and water power by 2030

“You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it.”

“There is plenty of room for wind and solar to grow and they are becoming more competitive, but these are still variable resources — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” said Alex Klein, the research director of IHS Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm on renewable energy. “An industrial economy needs a reliable power source, so we think fossil fuel will be an important foundation of our energy mix for the next few decades.”

improving the energy efficiency of homes, vehicles and industry was an easier short-term strategy. He noted that the 19.5 million residents of New York State consume as much energy as the 800 million in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa)

a rapid expansion of renewable power would be complicated and costly. Using large amounts of renewable energy often requires modifying national power grids, and renewable energy is still generally more expensive than using fossil fuels

Promoting wind and solar would mean higher electricity costs for consumers and industry.

many of the European countries that have led the way in adopting renewables had little fossil fuel of their own, so electricity costs were already high. Others had strong environmental movements that made it politically acceptable to endure higher prices

countries could often get 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar without much modification to their grids. A few states, like Iowa and South Dakota, get nearly that much of their electricity from renewable power (in both states, wind), while others use little at all.

America is rich in renewable resources and (unlike Europe) has the empty space to create wind and solar plants. New York State has plenty of wind and sun to do the job, they found. Their blueprint for powering the state with clean energy calls for 10 percent land-based wind, 40 percent offshore wind, 20 percent solar power plants and 18 percent solar panels on rooftops

the substantial costs of enacting the scheme could be recouped in under two decades, particularly if the societal cost of pollution and carbon emissions were factored in

There were at times more than 100,000 contractors in Iraq, including nearly 50,000 "soldiers," many making $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty military, with the money coming from American taxpayers. Conveniently for politicians, if these "soldiers" died, they were not counted in the official death toll of Americans killed in the war.

If multiple public functions are privatized, or partially privatized, government employees have huge incentives to curry favor with potential private employers by granting them rich contracts or consulting fees, and then subsequently getting jobs paying multiples of their government salaries -- or just giving nice perks to one's former colleagues and friends who left for the private sector

Antigovernment ideologues demonize government and government employees, cutting their pay and their programs and finding other ways to undercut them. That makes recruiting top-flight people much more difficult, especially in areas such as computer science or engineering. Government responds not by providing incentives to recruit and keep the best and brightest, but by going through the back door of privatizing and letting private firms pay far more to do essentially the same work.

Some experts believe there is still far more to come, the result in Spain of a political structure that puts huge power in the hands of local officials. Many of them can grant procurement contracts or rezone land with little or no consultation.

experts say that the concentration of power in the hands of regional and municipal officials and their ties to the local savings banks created ideal conditions for corruption in the construction boom years.

“Over a lunch, they can decide that you are going to make 100 million euros,” around $131 million, said Manuel Villoria, a professor of political science at the University of Juan Carlos in Madrid, who is writing a report on Spanish corruption for the European Union. “So, they could ask for what they wanted. It often wasn’t for them. It was an apartment for a daughter or for a sister’s children.

Unlike in Greece, corruption is not a way of life in Spain. Most Spaniards go about their daily business without ever paying a bribe.

There are so many scandals that some newspapers have taken to organizing all but the biggest developments in a quick-list format, rather than writing whole articles.

Already there is talk of overhauling the country’s party financing and transparency laws, increasing sentences for corruption and strengthening the independence of auditors. At the same time, many experts say more needs to be done to bolster an underfinanced judicial system, which allows many corruption cases to go unresolved for years.

The Russians have shut off all co-operation that uses American money, including on health care, civil society, fighting human trafficking and drugs, and dismantling unconventional weapons.

All this, according to Mr Pushkov, ends an era when Russia looked to the West as a model. Some Russian deputies have even suggested fining cinemas that show too many foreign films, or banning foreign words. A new law makes it treasonable to provide consultancy or “other assistance” to a foreign state directed against Russia’s national security. “The government’s policies are driving Russia into isolation,” says a Western diplomat.

For instance, the Kremlin has banned American couples from adopting Russian orphans, depriving many children with severe disabilities of the chance of a decent life.

. The trigger for the new anti-Americanism was the street protests against the Duma election in December 2011, which the Kremlin blamed on America. Falling popular trust in the Kremlin, worries about capital flight and the economy, and an antagonistic urban middle class have led Mr Putin to resort to nationalism, traditionalism and selective repression. Unable to stoke ethnic nationalism for fear of igniting the north Caucasus again, he has instead taken aim at the West and Western values.

As Mr Pushkov tweeted, “Stalingrad was not only a breaking point in the war, but also in the centuries-long battle between the West and Russia. Hitler was the last conqueror who came from the West.”

A few years ago, such comments came only from right-wing nationalists. Now they belong to the mainstream.

the Kremlin has imposed its traditionalist agenda on Russian society by prosecuting Pussy Riot, the punk singers who performed obscenely on the altar of Russia’s main cathedral, by banning the promotion of homosexuality and by blocking the American adoptions.

Yet it has not boosted Mr Putin’s popularity or restored trust in his presidency. Indeed, the numbers seeing America as a friend, not a foe, have risen in the past year, according to a Levada opinion poll. One explanation for this might be growing mistrust of the Kremlin. That is what made Soviet propaganda ineffective 20 years ago. Russian society also seems to have limited enthusiasm for the growing political role of the church.

The irony is that the Kremlin’s anti-Americanism reveals not its independence but its reliance on America as an enemy. The real casualty may be Russia itself.

consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which fired him after he was charged.

He has a long history working with sensitive government intelligence, and served in the US Navy and Naval Reserves for more than 10 years, reaching the rank of lieutenant

Prosecutors characterized the notes as seemingly intended for a non-intelligence community audience

Martin had classified information dating from 1996 to 2016, the government said, including a document "regarding specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies."

FBI investigators haven't concluded what Martin's motivation was for stealing the documents. So far, they don't believe he did it for a foreign country.

In a subsequent filing, Martin's attorneys argued he presents no flight risk, noting as the government does that he does not have his passport. Given that his wife and home are in Maryland and noting his military service, they said there was no reason nor legal basis to deny him bail.

"There is no evidence he intended to betray his country," they wrote.

France has been under a state of emergency since IS attacks on Paris in November killed 130 people in what President Francois Hollande called an "act of war".

It questioned the deployment of between 6,000 and 7,000 soldiers to protect schools, synagogues, department stores and other sensitive sites.

Security is a central issue in the run-up to next year's presidential election but Mr Valls said proposals by the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to set up special courts and detention centres were not the answer.

"Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must by preventively placed in a detention centre,"

Meanwhile, prosecutors charged one of the women arrested over a foiled attack near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said on Friday that Ornella G's fingerprints had been found inside the car. She was known to intelligence agents as someone who was considering going to Syria.

. In one sprawling 1960 essay, published in the Times the day before Nixon and Kennedy took the stage, the writer and former White House aide Emmet John Hughes imagined two starkly different futures—one in which television would help democracy flourish and the other in which television would severely debase the nation’s political culture.

Optimists saw the potential for a visual banquet that would bring real intimacy between candidates and voters

“American Presidential campaigning will never be the same again.” This was the Milwaukee Journal’s response, in 1960, to an event that has since become the stuff of political legend.

Broadcast media as a legitimizing force might, for instance, create the illusion that a candidate is more qualified than he really is.

“It invites, even demands, appeal to emotion rather than intellect. It commercializes, savagely hammering political discourses into capsule banalities to fit one-minute, thirty-second, ten-second ‘spots.’”

Just as technology critics feared it would, television helped corporatize American politics. It transformed the conventions into broadcast spectacles. It drove up the cost of campaigning and created the need for a new roster of advisors for candidates—bookers, handlers, media experts, and image consultants who then doubled as additional buffers between the candidate and the public.

By several measures, the quality of political discourse—as it plays out on Twitter and Facebook, for example—may be seen as worse than ever, another notch along a continuum of degradation that TV helped promote.

Many more will simultaneously track reaction, in real time, on social media—or opt to “watch” reaction by itself, without watching the debate at all. For half a century now, the American voter has turned to screens—televisions and now smartphones—to form political opinions.

Earlier in the evening, protesters blocked access to the venue. Surrounding the lecture hall with signs, they chanted, "Say it loud, say it clear, racists are not welcome here."

As tensions rose between supporters and protesters, a determination was made that it was no longer feasible to continue the event safely.

"It's disgusting," Shkreli told CNN's affiliate KOVR as he left the venue. "Progressivism is about having a conversation."

The British conservative has been accused of racism and transphobia but he took no responsibility for inspiring the tweets directed at Jones after his review of "Ghostbusters."

"Gays are always canaries in the coal mine. This has given them the excuse they needed because (Leslie Jones) is a black woman," he said. "Twitter has just died as a free speech platform.

The plane was diverted to Kuwait "for security reasons and in consultation with the relevant authorities," Eurowings said in an emailed statement, without elaborating.

Maybe he’ll do the right thing (e.g. divest)

But we need to get tax reform and repeal Obamacare

If we criticize, he won’t listen to us later.

He doesn’t mean what he says.

The excuses for not objecting when he does egregious things include (these are real examples uttered by one or more Republicans on the Hill, operatives, advisers, etc.):

He’s hiring good people.

We cannot do anything.

We find Trump’s post-election behavior to be entirely predictable — not normal or acceptable, but inevitable given his personality and temperamental and intellectual shortcomings.

Republicans’ capitulation is far quicker and more complete than we imagined, we admit. Chalk it up to fear of Trump and his voters, to the unquenchable thirst for influence and power and to humans’ ability to convince themselves of practically anything.

one can only cringe at conservative “leaders” prostrating themselves before Trump. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), with unctuousness approaching Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) levels, exclaimed: “I’m impressed with how Donald Trump handles himself. I’m impressed with how magnanimous he is. I’m impressed with just his demeanor, his temperament.”

giving an ovation to highly problematic nominees such as Rex W. Tillerson, Goldman Sachs tycoons or an erratic personality such as Flynn or hiding under the covers while Trump tramples on the Constitution does the country a disservice and does not help Trump to improve his powers of discernment.

The public is much more discriminating. According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll, for example, 79 percent think it is very or somewhat important for Trump to remove himself from business operations and by a 45 to 27 percent margin they think he should sell off all or some of his businesses. By a 60 to 21 percent margin they think he shouldn’t have business interests or holdings in foreign countries. In other words, there is no public pressure to discard all independent judgment in deference to the president-elect.

If you look at exit polls of white voters only, Bump writes, Trump was clearly “earning more support from lower-income whites than wealthier ones.” Others have noted that exit polls diverged more sharply on racial lines than by income, and that Trump played on racial fears openly in his campaign. They argue that what triumphed on Tuesday was white racism.

That strikes me as true. And it also strikes me as true that white workers were acting out of a deep economic grievance on Tuesday. Argument A doesn’t falsify Argument B, in this case

In the nineteen-thirties, Germans suffered terrible economic pain—and many turned openly and violently anti-Semitic. It has been suggested that people find it easier to sustain moral virtues like racial tolerance, fairness, and open-mindedness when they’re prospering. The idea is a little discomfiting to conventional understandings of moral autonomy and personal responsibility. It suggests that it is impossible to provide ethical leadership for people without also attending to their material welfare—and that it is dangerous morally as well as materially for a demagogue to promise to solve an economic problem that he cannot.

Anger over the jobs lost to free trade was a hallmark of Trump’s campaign, and as it happens, in Brennan’s “Against Democracy”—as well as in books by Bryan Caplan and Ilya Somin that Brennan drew on to support his case—voters’ mistrust of free trade is commonly cited as an example of their ignorance.

According to Brennan and his allies, economists agree almost unanimously that free trade boosts a nation’s overall welfare. In March, 2012, when the University of Chicago Booth School of Business polled a panel of economic experts, fifty-six per cent agreed and another twenty-nine per cent strongly agreed that “Freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment.

In June, 2012, half of the same panel of experts agreed and another thirty-three percent strongly agreed that “Some Americans who work in the production of competing goods, such as clothing and furniture, are made worse off by trade with China.”

The professional consensus among economists, in other words, isn’t that free trade helps everyone; it’s that free trade so benefits the country as a whole that the government should find it easy to compensate the subset of citizens hurt by it—those who lose their jobs because workers abroad displace them.

In practice, such citizens are rarely given adequate compensation.

In previous administrations, those positions or their equivalent (before the creation of the director of national intelligence, the CIA director occupied that role) held permanent positions on the NSC.

Now, those key officials will be invited only when their specific expertise is seen to be required. Hard as it is to imagine any situation in which their views would not add value, this demotion is even harder to countenance given the threats the United States currently faces and the frayed state of the president’s relations with the intelligence community

A president who has no national security experience and can use all the advice he can get has decided to limit the input he receives from two of the most important advisers any president could have.

Even as he pushed away professional security advice, Trump decided to make his top political advisor, Stephen K. Bannon, a permanent member of the NSC.

The executive order on immigration and refugees was un-American, counterproductive and possibly illegal.

Worse still, it is a sign of other problems to come. Organizing the NSC this way does not reflect well on national security advisor Michael Flynn — whether the bad decision is a result of his lack of understanding of what the NSC should do or because he is giving in to pressure from his boss.

Moreover, elevating Bannon is a sign that there will be more than one senior official in Trump’s inner circle with top-level national security responsibility, an arrangement nearly certain to create confusion going forward.

rumors are already circulating that Bannon and senior adviser Jared Kushner are the go-to people on national security issues for the administration, again despite the lack of experience, temperament or institutional support for either.

Combine all this with the president’s own shoot-from-the-lip impulses, his flair for improvisation and his well-known thin skin. You end up with a bad NSC structure being compromised by a kitchen cabinet-type superstructure and the whole thing likely being made even more dysfunctional by a president who, according to multiple reports, does not welcome advice in the first place — especially when it contradicts his own views.

Bannon’s role as chairman of Breitbart.com, with its racist, misogynist and Islamophobic perspectives, and his avowed desire to blow up our system of government, suggests this is someone who not only has no business being a permanent member of the most powerful consultative body in the world — he has no business being in a position of responsibility in any government.

The restructuring of the NSC, and the way in which this White House is threatening to operate outside the formal NSC structure, all but guarantees that it will not be the last bad decision to emerge from the Trump administration.