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“I think Russia tries to have an impact on the Swedish debate and political decisions,” he said. “That’s what I think.”

A month after France sent additional troops to the Central African Republic to join African peacekeepers trying to restore stability, the violence is getting worse, “making the delivery of humanitarian relief ever more difficult,” Mr. Baloch said.

“Targeted attacks against civilians, looting and the presence of armed elements at some displacement sites have severely limited humanitarian access to those in need of urgent assistance,” Mr. Baloch said. “We have heard about a lot of revenge attacks.” Some attacks have taken place inside health clinics.

, around 512,000 people — more than half the population — have fled their homes and more than 100,000 have sought shelter and protection around the airport, where aid agencies are delivering emergency supplies.

presence of a French Army contingent providing security at the Bangui airport has not helped relief agencies trying to distribute aid, a task that has become “more challenging,” Mr. Baloch said.

World Health Organization reported on Friday an outbreak of measles in Bangui as well as in the north of the country and said it was working with the medical charity Doctors Without Borders to start an emergency vaccination program.

Doctors Without Borders reported that fighting had forced it to curtail operations at the Bangui airport. Clashes on Tuesday and Wednesday killed two children and wounded 40 people, the organization said.

Doctors Without Borders had planned to open two new health posts to provide support for vaccination and nutritional programs but suspended those plans and will operate with only an emergency team, Mr. Bergstrand said.

For 30 wonderful years, we had been unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen. The year it started not happening was 1975. Every year since, we tweaked our finances, hiking tuition a bit, taking in a few more students, making large lectures a little larger, hiring a few more adjuncts.

Over the decades, though, we’ve behaved like an embezzler who starts by taking only what he means to replace, but ends up extracting so much that embezzlement becomes the system. There is no longer enough income to support a full-time faculty and provide students a reasonably priced education of acceptable quality at most colleges or universities in this country.

Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability.

Though the landscape of higher education in the U.S., spread across forty-six hundred institutions, hosts considerable variation, a few commonalities emerge: the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older, enrolled at a community or commuter school, and working towards a degree they will take too long to complete. One in three won’t complete, ever. Of the rest, two in three will leave in debt. The median member of this new student majority is just keeping her head above water financially. The bottom quintile is drowning.

One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how. The value of our core product—the Bachelor’s degree—has fallen in every year since 2000, while tuition continues to increase faster than inflation.

The metaphor my colleagues often use invokes religion. In Wannabe U, the author describes the process of trying to turn UConn into a nationally competitive school as the faculty being ‘dechurched’. In this metaphor, we are a separate estate of society that has putative access to its resources, as well as the right to reject democratic oversight, managerial imperatives, and market discipline. We answer to no one but ourselves.

When the economic support from the Golden Age began to crack, we tenured faculty couldn’t be forced to share much of the pain. Our jobs were secure, so rather than forgo raises or return to our old teaching loads, we either allowed or encouraged those short-term fixes—rising tuition, larger student bodies, huge introductory lectures.

All that was minor, though, compared to our willingness to rely on contingent hires, including our own graduate students, ideal cheap labor. The proportion of part-time and non-tenure track teachers went from less than half of total faculty, before 1975, to over two-thirds now

In the same period, the proportion of jobs that might someday lead to tenure collapsed, from one in five to one in ten. The result is the bifurcation we have today: People who have tenure can’t lose it. People who don’t mostly can’t get it.

If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.

The other way to help these students would be to dramatically reduce the price or time required to get an education of acceptable quality (and for acceptable read “enabling the student to get a better job”, their commonest goal.) This is a worse option in every respect except one, which is that it may be possible.

why is not part of the answer a secondary education certification scheme that is serious and ideally nation-wide. The British GCSE/A-levels is something that seems to work. Herding the cats that would be necessary to implement something like that is, I grant, a monstrous task, but perhaps no more difficult than revising the university system. As things stand now, the lack of standards in most high schools means wasted opportunities of academic development for a very large part of our reasonably gifted teenage population. A revised university system would still leave in place the distinctly inadequate high school system we have now.

The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.

The metaphor I have come to prefer (influenced especially by Richard Rorty) is that we in the academy are workers, and our work is to make people smarter — ourselves, our peers, our students, which is a goal that has to be constantly negotiated among various constituencies.

When the military rationale for both the GI Bill and the Soviet struggle ended, so did overall American interest in the kind of funding that drove the Golden Age. There is not now and has never been a broad commitment to higher education as a social good in this country

ow you can say — and many of my colleagues do — that this is all just a matter of getting state governments to take on different concerns or convictions, or getting a more nationalized educational system. That was the song my parents, both educators, sang, and the song I grew up singing. But the period when the states really drove funding up lasted just 15 years — 1960 to 1975 — and has been in decline for 40 years since.

I can — barely — imagine some states increasing some subsidies to some campuses at a rate faster than inflation. Some of the schools in California, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Michigan are candidates for this. I cannot, however, imagine my tenured colleagues tolerating the situation that makes higher education broadly affordable in social democracies, which would require us earning less while teaching more.

I am done, in other words, thinking of myself and my peers on faculty as blameless, and I am done imagining that 40 years of evidence from the behavior of democratically elected legislatures is some sort of readily reversible blip. I do not believe that the caste system that has established itself at elite institutions can be funded at the rate which we insist we need, and I do not believe that we will willingly see any of our own benefits reduced to help our junior colleagues or our students.

Note that having a college degree only retains value right now because there isn’t a better (more predictive, and trusted) credential to be had for people who are seeking jobs.

Today it is not only that the PhD:s are abundant but also that in many areas peak knowledge is short lived. You might be competent when you graduate but five years later that competence is of yesteryear and the ones with the newest knowledge kick you out just like you kicked someone else out five years ago. We need a base to stand on but then we need to go in and out of education during our whole lives to keep up with development. This puts a strain on each end everyone of us as individuals but it also calls for a whole new role for academia

Change the game and lower the transaction costs: Instead of treating students as backseat passengers in a higher educational vehicle that’s geared towards the transmission of self-contained content, i.e., content produced by professors for the self-serving purpose of publication–put steering wheels in the hands of students, take them out on road trips, negotiate real problems–and they will become self-educating

Students feel compelled to acquire credentialing as a means of improving their economic positions. Unfortunately, along the way, “professional” training has taken precedence over education. The two have become conflated in the public mind.

the online versions of education have reduced the college experience down to what’s easy to implement and easy to measure: receiving lectures, and activities of the quiz-and-test variety. It’s not clear that the value of the traditional old-school college experience (and it’s accompanying degree) were the result of those particular aspects of the experience. Granting degrees based only on coursework runs the risk of diluting the perceived value of the degree.

Most people in the area blame the half-dozen major dams the government has built in the region for the lake’s disappearance. The dams have greatly reduced the flow of water in the 11 rivers that feed into the lake. As an arid country with numerous lofty mountain chains, Iran has a predilection for dams that extends to the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

In a 2005 book that he wrote on national security challenges for Iran, Mr. Rouhani estimated that 92 percent of Iran’s water is used for agriculture, compared with 80 percent in the United States (90 percent in some Western states).

“They turn open the tap, flood the land, without understanding that in our climate most of the water evaporates that way,” said Ali Reza Seyed Ghoreishi, a member of the local water management council. “We need to educate the farmers.”

“We are all to blame,” Mr. Ranaghadr said. “There are just too many people nowadays, and everybody needs to use the water and the electricity the dams generate.”

While Iran is shooting monkeys into space to advance its missile program, the Rouhani government, low on funds because of the impact of the international sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, has not made any money available for efforts to restore the lake.

what is it that American conservatives want to conserve?

To translate: civility in public discourse, maximal federalism and subsidiarity, a sense of transcendence to overcome the delusions of materialism and individualism, and a relentless defense of universities as the core places where our society learns to breathe and grow in the light of knowledge and understanding.

Here’s what McClay gleans from Oakeshott’s writing that could help the cause of conservative reform: First, the idea of conversation as the model for civilized life. Second, the need to create and preserve appropriate scale in our communities, for the sake of fostering just such conversation. Third, the profound human need for release from the burden of purposefulness, which is perhaps another way of expressing the enduring need for transcendence, an avenue that Rationalism tends to foreclose to us. And fourth, the irreplaceable mission of liberal learning.

Today’s Republicanism is, in contrast, absolutist, ideological, fundamentalist and angry. It has ceased to be a voice among others in a genuine conversation about our country and become a rigid, absolutist ideology fueled by the worst aspects of the right – from racism to Randian indifference to the many others who made – and make – our lives possible. A lot of the time, it is quite simply philistine.

Is this an agenda? Not in any sense of the word. And that is the point. There is no fixed set of policies that an Oakeshottian conservative will embrace. It will all depend on the time and the place and the problem. He will question change and reform as a constant necessity

But he will also try and judge when reform is necessary to preserve the coherence of a society.

The issue, in the end, is one of prudential judgment about all these questions, a skill and virtue that can never be reduced to an ideology or “ism”.

Understanding the limits of one’s own understanding makes a political conversation natural.

It’s a way of thinking. And until we revive that manner of thinking, American conservatism will remain defined by its ugliest and dumbest protagonists.

The war effort itself went badly during 1917. Wilson tapped General John J. Pershing to command the American Expeditionary Force, but he gave him complete autonomy — unlike war leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who supervised their generals closely and played an active role in formulating strategy

Wilson, after declaring that the war should “make the world safe for democracy,” became complicit in one of the worst governmental assaults upon freedom of speech in American history, via the Espionage Act of 1917, and the Sedition Act of 1918.

In the autumn of 1917, as German victory approached on the eastern front, Wilson sent Col. House to discuss war aims with the British and the French. The timing could not have been worse: American troops had not taken part in any fighting and Gen. Pershing was completely noncommittal as to when they would be ready for battle.

He said that “the return of a Republican majority to either House of the Congress would . . . certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” And so, by his very own proclamation, he stood repudiated, for the Republicans captured both houses of Congress. As usual, he had not taken time to engage in any worst-case contingency planning

in January 1918, with American influence at low ebb, he and House created his soon-to-be famous “Fourteen Points.” These principles for a peace settlement were composed by these two men in total secrecy. No members of Wilson’s cabinet were consulted, no members of Congress were consulted, no foreign heads of state or foreign ministers were consulted.

a League of Nations, the Fourteenth Point of Wilson’s manifesto, was supported by a great many influential people on both sides of the Atlantic. Again and again, such people reached out to Wilson in 1918 to offer their assistance. Wilson spurned them.

The British leaders, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, were beside themselves with frustration and fury as Pershing committed only minimal numbers of American troops to battle and Wilson refused to order his commander to increase the American effort.

The British and the French knew that within a few months the Germans would be able to shift massive numbers of troops to the western front for the knock-out blow in France. They needed troops from the United States right away. Wilson refused to order Pershing to speed up his timetable. Not surprisingly, the British and the French refused to agree to the principle of a non-vindictive peace.

What was wrong? There is reason to believe that the medical theorists may well be correct — that for more than a year (and perhaps for several years) before the stroke of October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered from cerebro-vascular degeneration that led to episodic dementia.

As the German position fell apart in the fall of 1918, Wilson botched the negotiations for the armistice. As usual, he sent Col. House as his representative and he gave him no written instructions at all except to emphasize his own commitment to freedom of the seas and the other principles set forth within the Fourteen Points. And so as House obsessed about freedom of the seas, harsh armistice terms were imposed upon the Germans

“Before Uber was a thing, I would rarely go to Hollywood,” said Drew Heitzler, an artist who lives in Venice, a potentially treacherous drive away. “The prospect of going to Hollywood on a weekend night, if I was invited to a party or an art event, it just wouldn’t happen. I would just stay home.”

Taxis here were often unreliable, he added, but ride shares are always just a swipe away.

“There’s a lot of New Yorkers here, and they’re saying it’s almost like New York.”

Once, only the privileged few, the studio bosses and pampered starlets, could afford to have a chauffeur and a waiting car to transport them around sprawling Los Angeles. Now anyone with a credit card can enjoy that freedom.

“Uber and Lyft have made it much more affordable, and encouraged people to venture out of their neighborhoods, and to explore.”

That is especially true of downtown Los Angeles, which is enjoying the double whammy of a recent cultural resurgence — partly bolstered by the Ace, which opened its hotel and performance space in a historic 1920s movie palace in January — and the car services that deliver once-reluctant visitors. Along with Santa Monica and West Hollywood, it is the area with the highest ridership, according to an Uber representative, though the company refused to release specific figures.

A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.

Grand Central Market, a food hall from 1917, has lately turned Smorgasburg-y; on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut. Outside, the street is blocked off for pedestrians, with cafe tables and umbrellas, and nearby is a linger-worthy bookstore and a retro barbershop with shuffleboard. Along Broadway, between discount stores and pupusa stands, are boutiques like OAK NYC and Acne Studios, the Swedish fashion label that opened a giant store there this fall.

“I find myself going down there a lot and taking friends that are coming to visit, because there’s so much cool stuff to do,” s

Ride sharing, some analysts say, has become a viable alternative to owning a car: between the cost of gas, insurance, garages and valet tips, it’s often more economical to get a lift in a professional’s Toyota than to drive solo in your own, and that’s without factoring in the mental cost of sitting in gridlock on Interstate 405.

A short ride through downtown in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes.

In a nod to the city’s continued obsession with the status ride, the company recently implemented, in Los Angeles and Orange County only, UberPlus, with a fleet of BMWs and other luxury vehicles. Even with ride shares, what you pull up in matters.

as if to balance Hamas’s blame for every single death in the conflict, Goldblog feels the need to chide the Israeli prime minister for his “mistake” in having utter contempt for any two-state solution. “Mistake” is an interesting word to use. It implies a relatively minor slip-up, a miscalculation, a foolish divergence from sanity. But it is perfectly clear to anyone not always finding excuses for the Israeli government that Netanyahu wasn’t making a mistake. He was simply reiterating his longstanding view that Israel will never, ever allow a sovereign Palestinian state to co-exist as a neighbor. And unless you understand that, nothing he has done since taking office makes any sense at all. Everything he has said and done presupposes permanent Greater Israel. And he is not some outlier. Israel’s entire political center of gravity is now firmly where Netanyahu is. The rank failure of the peace process simply underlines this fact. As do half a million Jewish settlers and religious fanatics on the West Bank.

Despite protestations otherwise, possession of the West Bank has become a fundamental and existential part of the character of Israeli nationhood. Possession of the West Bank is not temporary, it is not contingent, and it is not an exception to the general rule of the character of Israeli nationhood. Occupation and settlement are as central to the Israeli nation, its politics and culture, as burritos, Hollywood, and Sunbelt conservatism are to American politics, culture, and national identity.

This is what really put Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank in perspective for me: Israel has possessed the West Bank for almost precisely the same proportion of its national existence as the United States has possessed Texas and California. About seven-tenths

the United States would first have to become an existentially different nation before it would even consider peaceably permitting California and Texas to leave the union. Just so with Israel

Since the whole idea of a two-state solution is as dead as the infamous parrot, why on earth are Americans still pursuing it? I think because many want Israel to be other than what it plainly is. They understand that this project of a bi-national state with Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement is a horrible fate. Jeffrey is as eloquent on this today as he has ever been: If Netanyahu has convinced himself that a Palestinian state is an impossibility, then he has no choice but to accept the idea that the status quo eventually brings him to binationalism, either in its Jim Crow form—Palestinians absorbed into Israel, except without full voting rights—or its end-of-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state form, in which the two warring populations, Jewish and Arab, are combined into a single political entity, with chaos to predictably ensue. But this is clearly the reality. The Obama administration was the last hope for some kind of agreement, and the Israelis have told the president to go fuck himself on so many occasions the very thought of accommodation is preposterous. With the acceleration of the settlements, and the ever-rising racism and religious fundamentalism in Israel itself, this is what Israel now is.

It also helps distract from the fact that Hamas itself did not kill the three Israeli teens which was the casus belli for the latest Israeli swoop through the West Bank; that Netanyahu had called for generalized revenge in the wake of the killings, while concealing the fact that the teens had been murdered almost as soon as they had been captured; and that Israeli public hysteria, tapping into the Gilad-like trauma of captivity, then began to spawn increasingly ugly, sectarian and racist acts of revenge and brutality.

scrappily clad in plaid shirts as well as camouflage gear, and armed with hunting rifles alongside their ancient AK-47s.

On October 11, more than 100 parachutes floated down through the night sky over northern Syria

The United States is trying to help relieve the shortage of supplies.

The YPG, a Kurdish group of some 30,000 fighters, is the senior partner in the Syrian Democratic Forces, which also includes some smaller Arab and Christian groups

instalment in a new U.S. strategy

failure

pallet of ammunition.

A Kurdish commander in the province of Hasakah confided

"train and equip"

raw courage of YPG fighters, nor of the Kurdish Women's Defense Unit (YPJ) that fights alongside them.

"They throw themselves into battle, have no sense of covering fire, just charge at the enemy," said a Dutch veteran who is now a sniper with the YPG.

Just weeks ago, a massive vehicle bomb blew up the entrance to the YPG headquarters here.

The camp appears to have been occupied by an elite squad of suicide bombers,

Kurds, Assyrian Christians, different Arab tribes. They fight together and against each other.

e.Other Arabs here resent that the Kurds were slow to join the insurgency against the regime, preferring to sit it out. Even now, the YPG co-exists with a substantial contingent of Syrian soldiers inside Hasakah city. "We have nothing to do with them, though sometimes we have an agreement not to encroach on an area," Commander Lawand told CNN inside the YPG's bombed headquarters. "We are the real opposition to the regime, but first we must fight the terror groups."That's just what the U.S. wants to hear. In the wake of its failed efforts to train and equip moderate rebel groups elsewhere in Syria, there is a lot riding on the Kurds and their Arab allies. American airstrikes were instrumental in helping the Kurds save the city of Kobani on the Turkish border and then pushing ISIS back. In a country of shifting alliances, it's a proven partnership.

Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.

In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”

As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”

This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.

It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.

Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.

That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.

OPEC members Qatar, Venezuela and Kuwait said they were also ready to freeze output and oil sources in Iraq - the world's fastest-growing producer in the past year - said Baghdad would abide by a global deal aimed at tackling a growing oversupply and helping prices recover from their lowest in over a decade.

Benchmark Brent oil prices fell 2 percent on Tuesday to below $33 per barrel on concerns that Iran may reject the deal and that even if Tehran agreed it would not help ease the growing global glut.

The fact that output from Saudi Arabia and Russia is near record highs complicates any agreement since Iran is producing at least 1 million barrels per day below its capacity and pre-sanctions levels.

However, two non-Iranian sources close to OPEC discussions told Reuters that Iran may be offered special terms as part of the output freeze deal. "Iran is returning to the market and needs to be given a special chance but it also needs to make some calculations," said one source. The sources did not elaborate on the special terms, which technically could be anything from setting limited production increase levels for Iran to linking future output rises to a recovery in oil prices.

The last global deal - OPEC and non-OPEC - dates back to 2001 when Saudi Arabia persuaded Mexico, Norway and Russia to contribute to production cuts, although Moscow never followed through and raised exports instead.

— Russia and China “possess precision-strike capabilities, integrated air defenses, cruise and ballistic missiles, advanced cyberwarfare and anti-satellite capabilities.”

— “If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan . . . Americans could face a decisive military defeat.”

“Air superiority, which the United States has taken for granted since World War II, is no longer assured. And, without control of the skies, U.S. ships and soldiers would be [highly] vulnerable.”

The slippage in our military power has at least three causes, only two of which we can influence.

The first is other countries’ decisions to beef up their militaries; we can’t change that. The second is the shifting nature of warfare, with the rise of cyberwarfare and other new technologies (communications satellites and the like). We can do better here by addressing the third cause: unwise cuts in defense spending.

The time has long passed since the Pentagon was the driving force behind the federal budget. In 1960, defense was 52 percent of federal outlays and 9 percent of overall economic activity (gross domestic product). In 2017, the comparable figures were 15 percent of outlays and 3 percent of GDP.

In truth, military spending is in a quiet competition with the American welfare state

he Pentagon is losing badly. Welfare programs have vast constituencies of voters. Defense has fewer. Politicians straddle the conflict. They vote for welfare while insisting that the U.S. military is still the world’s most powerful. This rationalizes inaction on defense but conveniently forgets that the military’s margin of superiority has dramatically shriveled

It’s hard to miss the parallels with the period before World War II, when England, France and the United States allowed Adolf Hitler to rearm Germany, altering the global balance of power. The delusional complacency recalls John F. Kennedy’s book, “Why England Slept.”

This is not a call for war. It is a call for stopping many self-inflicted wounds. We need to stop underfunding the military, especially on research and cyberwarfare, even if that means less welfare. We need to keep our commitments — Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria devalues our word. And we need to repair our alliances.

War is changing, and we need to change with it. Otherwise, we may drift into a large war impossible to win

But Milton also stirringly articulated  how the formation of private convictions required public spaces, public institutions—what Jürgen Habermas so famously defined as the “public sphere.”

By the time, he wrote Areopagitica, it was robust: coffee houses, newspapers, book publishers and bookstores, theatres, and meeting places—the locales that allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and state—and, in fact, many of these institutions emerged with the express purpose of liberating society from the grasp of church and state.

Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began to pile, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in Milton’s lifetime lasted until our own.

It took centuries for the public sphere to develop—and the technology companies have eviscerated it in a flash. By radically remaking the advertising business and commandeering news distribution, Google and Facebook have damaged the economics of journalism. Amazon has thrashed the bookselling business in the U.S. They have shredded old ideas about intellectual property—which had provided the economic and philosophical basis for authorship

Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy

This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theory—in practice its survival is contingent and tenuous.

We’re witnessing the way in which public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media, but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture. They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well meaning, and the president of the United States. The toxicity of the environment shreds the quality of conversation and deters meaningful participation in it

it becomes harder and harder to cling to the idea of the rational individual, formulating opinions on the basis of conscience. And as we lose faith in that principle, the public will lose faith in the necessity of preserving the protections of free speech.

The public sphere was always rife with manipulation—political persuasion, after all, involves a healthy dose of emotionalism and the tapping of submerged biases

humankind is entering into an era where manipulation has grown simultaneously invisible, terrifyingly precise, and embedded in everyday life.

And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately in people’s lives, this time as  personal assistants. The tech companies want us to tie ourselves closely to their machines

These machines don’t present us with choices. They aren’t designed to present us with a healthy menu of options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and cultural wants and needs.

What’s so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us against ourselves. They take our data—everywhere we have traveled on the web, every query we’ve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to write but never publish—and exploit this knowledge to reduce us to marionettes

To state the obvious, these are multinational corporations, with an ultimate interest in their bottom lines. They will never be capable of regulating the public sphere that they control in any name other than their own profit.

the Facebook CEO supplied a response that befuddled the senator: “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people's lives, is what is the right regulation, not whether there should be or not.”

now that these companies bestride the markets in which they roam, the primary danger they face isn’t meddling regulators or hyperactive legislators. What the behemoths of Silicon Valley truly fear is the possibility that antitrust laws will be deploye

tech companies carry a very different sort of cargo—they trade in the commodities of speech. Once we extend the state into this realm, we’re entering danger territory.

We don’t need to use our imaginations here. There are examples all over the world—in Russia, in China—where governments have made their peace with social media, by setting the terms that govern it. These regimes permit a cacophony of ideas, except for the ones that truly challenge political power.

The present global explosion of anxiety and hate is unlike anything most of us have ever witnessed. People don’t know how to confront these evils

In the face of such menace, it’s natural to appeal to a higher power for protection—but in our panic we need to be clear about which threats are genuine and which are merely rhetorical. And panic shouldn’t lead us to seek protection that inadvertently squashes our own liberties.

Silicon Valley doesn’t understand truth as a quest or trial, but as an engineering challenge. They believe human behavior and human choices can be predicted by algorithms on the basis of past behavior

They believe that our lives can be programmed to be more efficient. By steering and nudging us, by designing the architecture of our decision-making process, they claim to be relieving of us of the burden of choice. Silicon Valley talks endlessly about the virtues of the frictionless life.

As we join Zuckerberg’s community, he fantasizes that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt away—like a digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my book, World Without Mind, a revival of the sixties counterculture and the vision of life on a commune.

In other words, preservation of democracy requires preserving this ecosystem of ideas that has miraculously persisted with us since the 17th century. People can’t afford to be seduced by the false prophets of disruption, the charlatans who argue that we abandon old wisdoms in the face of new gadgets

We need to shape the culture so that the prestige of engineering doesn’t continue to come at the expense of the humanities. We need to preserve literature as a primary technology for interrogating the meaning of life. We need to resist the tendency to reduce the world to data.

So what exactly happened to his moment?

One answer is that the libertarian spirit was overextended and vulnerable to a backlash. Confident free-traders underestimated how much outsourcing had cost the Western working class. Entitlement reformers overestimated the political practicality of their proposals. Cultural laissez-faire weakened social solidarity, with opioid-driven disintegration the starkest symptom of decay. And the rise of ISIS transmuted the post-Iraq anti-interventionist impulse into a “raise the drawbridge” style of politics, with the libertarian aspect drained away.

n this account Trumpism, with its tariffs and walls and family-separating cruelties, is simply a rejection of the politics of liberty, an anti-libertarian moment.

there’s also a different story, in which Trump didn’t as much defeat Rand Paul’s worldview as co-opt its more effective messages, while exploiting libertarianism’s tendency to devolve into purely interest-based appeals.

On foreign policy, for instance, Trump ran as hard against the Iraq War and neoconservatism as the Kentucky senator or his father. Trump’s skepticism about international institutions and U.S. intelligence agencies is also in tune with common libertarian assumptions (and paranoias).

Meanwhile, on economic policy, you could argue that Trump has debased libertarianism rather than disavowing it, following many prior Republicans in using the rhetoric of capitalism to champion favored business interests rather than free markets.

Wandering and arguing at FreedomFest offered grist for both understandings of how libertarianism relates, or doesn’t, to Trumpism.

Amash’s approach is intellectually admirable; Paul’s is probably more in tune with what a lot of self-described libertarian voters currently want. Which leaves libertarianism in much the same difficult position as other forms of conservatism under Trump.

His ascent has a lot to teach ideological purists about the political limits of their theories, the need to temper dogma with more contingent wisdom.

The next president could go further and tell allies such as Germany, Japan and Canada that their status as major trading partners protected by the U.S. security umbrella is now contingent upon their making steep emissions cuts.

adaptation, which means preparing societies and their infrastructure for the effects of climate change, such as building flood walls to hold back higher sea levels or retrofitting buildings to withstand more severe heat waves.

Rich countries industrialized with fossil fuels, developing industries powered by coal, delivering fossil-fuel-based electricity and heat to homes, and building transportation systems that run on the internal-combustion engine. In following this path, these countries chewed through most of the planet’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas that could be spewed until global temperatures warmed by 2 degrees Celsius

The United States has contributed about 26 percent of the world’s cumulative emissions, and the 28 nations of the European Union are responsible for only slightly less.

if Americans had been restricted to emitting a proportional share of a global carbon budget that capped warming at 1.5 degrees, we would have blown through that limit in 1944.

Climate finance means foreign aid for three main purposes

mitigation: subsidies for renewable-energy deployment and storage, electrical-grid modernization, and other means of reducing emissions

In the Paris negotiations, developing nations were explicitly open to making more ambitious commitments if developed countries contributed to making them happen.

coverage for loss or damage: compensation for people whose homes become uninhabitable or whose livelihoods are destroyed by climate change.

“climate justice,” which also includes providing support to marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by climate change in rich countries.

Last year, at a climate summit in Poland, India reiterated its openness to doing more if it were adequately subsidized, and an organization of the 47 least-developed nations echoed that plea.

Nobody knows how big the ultimate U.S. number will need to be; it depends on how many rich countries pitch in, and how much they give, and how much help poorer countries need to modernize in eco-friendly way

to stay below 2 degrees of warming, by 2030 the global economy needs to give a “green” makeover to the $5 trillion per year spent worldwide on sectors such as agriculture, energy, transportation, construction and heavy industry.

his may be toxic for American voters. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change, are increasingly worried about it and in theory support the notion that the government should address it — but they are more divided in their willingness to actually pay for climate action

only 23 percent said they’d pay at least $40 per month to fight climate change

The United States may have a narrow opportunity to pay down some of its historical debts, stem the tide of future climate refugees and manage the political instability that extreme warming would cause. The last chance came in 2009-2010, but the Senate failed, in part thanks to Obama’s bungling of the negotiations, to pass even domestic climate legislation

The leaders of developing nations aren’t suckers, and they know how dire the problem is. They have something rich countries want (emissions reductions), and they’d be fools to just give it away for free, even if they could. If we want them to succeed, it’s going to cost us, and we’ll need to move quickly. The science is clear: We do not have another decade to waste.

Gaddis keeps pounding — to the point of monotony — the seemingly self-evident: The grand strategist must prune away emotion, ego and conventional wisdom to accept that “if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.

Their implicit idea is to remind America’s future best and brightest how the mostly successful grand strategy of the past saw America become the pre-eminent world power of the 20th century by winning two world conflicts along with the Cold War.

The case studies are variously drawn from some 16 years of co-teaching a well-regarded seminar on “Studies in Grand Strategy” at Yale

Paul Kennedy’s edited “Grand Strategies in War and Peace,” Charles Hill’s “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” and more recently Linda Kulman’s “Teaching Common Sense: The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University.”

His repetitious observation about proportionality might have been banal — if so many leaders, many of them geniuses, had not forgotten it

A recurrent theme is the danger of omnipresent hubris. Even a great power cannot master the unexpected and uncontrollable — from the great plague at Athens, to the harsh Russian winter, to I.E.D.s and tribal factionalism in Iraq

The book is as much personal remembrance as strategic reflection, and is chock-full of aphorisms and enigmatic adages.

Gaddis believes the best way to hone strategic thinking is not just by mastering the advice of Machiavelli or Clausewitz (who both figure prominently in the class), much less contemporary high-tech wizardry, but also by understanding the interplay of history, literature and philosophy over 2,500 years of Western civilization — with occasional insights from Sun Tzu and other non-Western thinkers

In some sense “On Grand Strategy” is a traditional argument for the value of classical education in the broadest sense.

The student of strategy learns to balance a grasp of detail with proper humility: It is, of course, wise to have a plan and contingencies. But how will these prompt rival counter-responses? Do such agendas have the means adequate for their ends? Or are they more dreams, warped by ego and emotion

In contrast, the often arrogant neglect of grand strategic thinking has led to postwar quagmires, stalemates and the assorted misadventures that often drained American resources for either impossible or irrelevant aims, while tearing the country apart over the last 70 years.

Understanding the underappreciated role of irony is essential for a leader, and might have prevented the disasters of both 415 B.C. and 1588.

Tolstoy and Clausewitz appreciated that bad things can come from good intentions and vice versa. The best generals live with and react to paradoxes, Gaddis argues. The worst ignore or seek to undo them.

Gaddis sees these more successful global strategists as rope-a-dope pragmatists who remain elastic and patient enough to capitalize on events and opportunities as they unfold, rather than forcing them to fit preconceived schemes.

Morality matters, if defined less as self-righteous ardor and more as self-awareness of a leader’s effect on those around him and an appreciation of paradox.

A pragmatic St. Augustine has no problem with war — if it is a last resort to save civilization, without which there can be neither calm nor organized religion.

Still, courting calculated risk is essential

The gambler Winston Churchill took chances in 1940, albeit rational ones backed by educated guesses that, for all Hitler’s bluster, the Third Reich had neither the air nor sea power to destroy the Anglosphere

Gaddis’s American heroes are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who he thinks “rescued democracy and capitalism.”

Roosevelt somehow was cognizant early on of how the singular military and economic potential of America might save Europe and Asia, but only if he first prepared reluctant Americans materially and psychologically for the inevitable war to come

Gaddis concludes with an invaluable warning that true morality embraces neither messianic interventionism nor the quest for utopianism

Instead, ethical leadership pursues the art of the possible for the greater (not the greatest) good

With regard to the American 21st century, Gaddis’s favorite novelists and philosophers perhaps argue against both optional intercessions abroad and moralistic lead-from-behind recessionals. The better course is to marshal American power to prepare for the often unavoidable existential crises on the horizon, with the full expectation that we do not have to be perfect to be good.

“On Grand Strategy” is many things — a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.

The president and his acolytes are championing conspiracy theories and a sweeping, uncalibrated, all-out assault on our institutions. There is reckless talk by Republicans about “secret societies,” “silent coups” and the “deep state.” Trump supporters have engaged in a desperate effort to discredit the Mueller investigation.

The president dehumanizes and belittles his opponents and (at best half-jokingly) accuses Democrats of being “treasonous” for not applauding him during his State of the Union speech. Rather than nourishing a sense of gratitude, he stokes grievances. And he tells lie after lie after lie after lie.

The Republican Party once prided itself as a defender of objective truth against postmodernism. Today, it has become the party of perspectivism — the view, articulated by Nietzsche, that all truth claims are contingent on a person’s perspective rather than on fundamental reality. “It is our needs that interpret the world,” Nietzsche wrote in “The Will to Power.”

Evangelicals who once professed the importance of personal character and “family values” now eagerly give the president a mulligan for his immorality.

The national Republican Party, at least for now, has become a vehicle less for advancing high ideals than for exercising raw power

something very different is going on in the Republican Party today. It has become the institutional expression of Donald Trump’s distorted and impulsive personality.

There are notable exceptions to this in the Republican Party, but that’s the point. They are the exception rather than the rule. Party leaders who were once willing to challenge Mr. Trump, to call him out now and then, are now far more compliant and therefore far more complicit

If those effects were repeated in Medicaid, it could prove disastrous for the health of the program’s beneficiaries. Especially in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, work requirements could create a new underclass of people ineligible for any health insurance. That includes a large contingent of people with disabilities who don’t qualify for Supplemental Security Income and vulnerable populations like young men with felonies. Caught in a vicious cycle, those people would then be less healthy and less financially secure, and thus less likely to be able to work and make it out of poverty

Such a program would have its most drastic effects on wages, productivity, and reducing racial and class-based wealth inequality if it were implemented as a universal program. But it could probably achieve CMS’s goals of long-term health benefits and poverty reduction if it were instituted solely for current Medicaid beneficiaries. If the 4.4 million non-elderly adults who aren’t working; aren’t caregivers, retired, or students; and don’t qualify for disability insurance are used as a floor, providing jobs for them would cost a little more than Lowrey’s total of $158 billion, around 30 percent of Medicaid’s annual budget of over $550 billion. If people who self-report as ill or disabled are excluded from that number, Medicaid would need to pay for a maximum of 880,000 jobs, or $35 billion a year, 6 percent of the annual Medicaid budget.

A Medicaid jobs guarantee could serve to amplify both of those roles. It could essentially set a wage floor for Medicaid enrollees, who often work near the bottom of the wage scale and often barely crack the poverty line even while working full-time hours (or more). Integrating Medicaid into bespoke job structures for people with disabilities could provide transportation and rehabilitation, and further increase the accessibility of those positions, thus creating more synergy between health and employment.

Similar to how employer-sponsored insurance has become a backbone to the economic growth of the middle class, a jobs guarantee for Medicaid would take the largest health-insurance program in America and transform it into a nexus of anti-poverty policy and health equity. Put more simply: The easiest way to make sure people receive the health benefits of employment could be to employ them.

After Walpole’s fall over his handling of the war with Spain in 1742, which George II had very much opposed, the King backed John, Lord Carteret only to be forced to part with him twice: in 1744 and 1746

The Hanoverian ambitions of both kings made their British ministries vulnerable to domestic criticism and Hanover itself to foreign attack, but they learned, however reluctantly, to accept the limitations of their position.

As the monarch remained the ultimate political authority, his court remained the political centre, since it provided access to him

While it is true that George II’s closet was not as powerful as Henry VIII’s privy chamber, the insignificance of the Hanoverian Court has been overdone.

George I and George II both detested the Tories as the party whose ministry had negotiated the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (in which George II had fought), and abandoned Britain’s allies, including Hanover. George I and George II both suspected the Tories of Jacobite inclinations and were alienated by Tory opposition to their commitments to Continental power politics

This forced both kings to turn to the Whigs, limiting their ability to break away in the event of a dispute. The rulers had to make concessions in ministerial and policy choices. George I fell out with Walpole and his brother-in-law and political ally, Charles Viscount Townshend, in 1717 when the ministers opposed his Baltic policy and supported his son, George, Prince of Wales, in the first of those hardy perennials of Hanoverian royal politics, a clash between monarch and heir

Similarly, George II came to the throne in 1727 determined to part with Walpole, but he swiftly changed his mind when he realised that it was expedient to keep the minister if he wanted to enjoy parliamentary support, have the public finances satisfactorily managed, and retain the stability of Britain’s alliance system

Instead, much of the credit for Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy rests with those who redefined the royal position between 1689 and 1707, and then made it work over the following half-century

Cumberland’s eventually successful generalship at Culloden serves as a reminder of the extent to which Britain had to be fought for from 1688, just as Continental dynasties such as the Bourbons in Spain in 1704-15 had to fight to establish themselves in succession wars

The role of the Crown was still central. However constrained and affected by political exigencies, monarchs chose ministers. General Thomas Erle, a long-standing MP, wrote in 1717, ‘The King is certainly master of choosing who he thinks fit to employ’.

If monarchs needed to appoint and, if necessary, sustain a ministry that could get government business through Parliament, this was a shifting compromise, and one subject to contingency and the play of personality

Walpole was also expected to find money for George’s female German connections, and to spend time as a courtier, attending on the royal family, as on July 3rd, 1724, when he was present at George I’s review of the Foot Guards in Hyde Park. Similarly, Newcastle and even Pitt had, at least in part, to respond to George II’s interests and views

Both kings were pragmatists, who did not have an agenda for Britain, other than helping Hanover. In this they present a contrast with George III

Neither man sought governmental changes akin to those introduced by Peter the Great or by Frederick William I of Prussia. Neither George had pretensions to mimic the lifestyle of Louis XIV or the Emperor Charles VI. Instead, they presented themselves in a relatively modest fashion, although both men were quite prepared to be prodded into levées, ceremonies and other public appearances

George II had the Guards’ regimental reports and returns sent to him personally every week, and, when he reviewed his troops he did so with great attention to detail

Strong Lutherans, George I and George II were ready to conform to the Church of England. Although they sponsored a number of bishops whose beliefs were regarded as heterodox, they were not seen as threats to the Church of England as compared to that presented by the Catholic Stuarts

Neither George I nor his son did much to win popularity for the new order (certainly far less than George III was to do), but, far more crucially, the extent to which they actively sapped consent was limited. This was crucial when there was a rival dynasty in the shape of the Stuarts, with ‘James III’ a claimant throughout both reigns

Ultimately George I and George II survived because they displayed more stability, and less panic, in a crisis than James II and VII had shown in 1688

Both rulers also sought to counter Hanoverian vulnerability to attack from France or Prussia.

Georges I and II benefited from the degree to which, while not popular, they were at least acceptable

By the close of George II’s reign, Britain had smashed the French navy and taken much of the French empire, becoming the dominant European power in South Asia and North America

International comparisons are helpful. In Sweden in 1772, Gustavus III brought to an end the ‘Age of Liberty’.

Hereditary monarchy placed less emphasis on individual ability than did its ‘meritocratic’ counterpart, whether electoral (kings of Poland) or dictatorial (Cromwell, Napoleon); but it had an important advantage in the form of greater continuity and therefore stability

his form was to prove a durable one, and it provided a means to choose, an agreed method of succession, and a way to produce individuals of apparent merit. This system, however, had only been  devised in response to the unwanted breakdown of rule by the British Crown. Within Britain no such expedient was necessary, nor appeared so. The world of Georges I and II was one in which republicanism found little favour in Britain