Group items tagged

America is, in principle, a democracy, in which every vote counts the same. It’s also a nation in which income inequality has soared, a development that hurts many more people than it helps. So if you didn’t know better, you might have expected to see a political backlash: demands for higher taxes on the rich, more spending on the working class and higher wages.

In reality, however, policy has mostly gone the other way. Tax rates on corporations and high incomes have gone down, unions have been crushed, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s. How is that possible?

The answer is that huge disparities in income and wealth translate into comparable disparities in political influence.

he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.

Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.

Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.

He doesn't know how old he is, but he's probably about 10.

When I meet Ahmed, he is shackled in a room all alone. There are marks on his body from the beatings he has been given.

one of 23 Islamic educational institutions in Sudan, known as khalwas,

Despite almost daily disclosures of new coronavirus infections among President Trump’s close associates, the White House is making little effort to investigate the scope and source of its outbreak.

The White House has decided not to trace the contacts of guests and staff members at the Rose Garden celebration 10 days ago for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, where at least eight people, including the president, may have become infected, according to a White House official familiar with the plans.Instead, it has limited its efforts to notifying people who came in close contact with Mr. Trump in the two days before his Covid diagnosis Thursday evening.

Even the contact tracing efforts within the two-day window have been limited, consisting mostly of emails notifying people of potential exposure, rather than the detailed phone conversations to warn anyone who may have been exposed, coach them on which symptoms to look for and counsel them to isolate if they do begin to show symptoms.

President Trump revealed early Friday morning that he and his wife, Melania Trump, had tested positive for coronavirus. It is not clear when or how Mr. Trump contracted the virus. But over the past week, he interacted with scores of staff members, donors and supporters. Photographers for The New York Times captured some of those meetings.

President Donald Trump applauded his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in the Oval Office before his public announcement.

Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence at the White House.

President Donald Trump's physician, Navy Cmdr Dr. Sean Conley, held a second medical briefing that again raised more questions than answers about the President's condition.

Trump's doctors said that even though the President has had at least two concerning drops in oxygen levels, they are hoping he could be discharged as early as tomorrow from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Late Saturday night, the public learned new details about why Trump was airlifted to the hospital Friday, when chief of staff Mark Meadows said during an interview with Fox News that Trump had a fever on Friday morning and his oxygen level had "dropped rapidly." Meadows added that Trump has made "unbelievable improvements from yesterday morning."

President Trump is has formed a so-called leadership political action committee, a federal fund-raising vehicle that will potentially let him retain his hold on the Republican Party even after he leaves office.

The move comes just days after the major news networks and newspapers, as well as The Associated Press, called the 2020 election for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Such committees can accept donations of up to $5,000 per donor per year — far less than the donation limits for the committees formed by Mr. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee — but a leadership PAC could accept donations from an unlimited number of people. It could also accept donations from other political action committees.

In theory, populists should favor democratic processes that allow for wide-ranging citizen input in policy formation

The executive bureaucracy has proved a more reliable instrument for translating populist causes into policy than nominally democratic institutions like Congress.

For populist policy reforms to succeed, populists — especially those on the right — need to drop their naïve and self-defeating pretensions of “dismantling the administrative state.” Populism should not be conceived as a rejection of all technocratic expertise but rather as a competing vision of how to use it, a concept that some scholars have termed “technopopulism.”

The WHO spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars honing a globe-spanning system of defenses against a pandemic it knew would come. But the virus moved faster than the United Nations agency, exposing flaws in its design and operation that bogged down its response when the world needed to take action.

The WHO relied on an honor system to stop a viral cataclysm. Its member states had agreed to improve their ability to contain infectious disease epidemics and to report any outbreaks that might spread beyond their borders. International law requires them to do both.

Time and again, countries big and small have failed to do so. The WHO, which isn’t a regulatory agency, lacks the authority to force information from the very governments that finance its programs and elect its leaders

At the elite level there is a clutch of politicians and candidates who keep groping for a more populist agenda and a group of nationalist intellectuals who think they’re on the cusp of imposing one upon the party

But there is still a larger group of lawmakers, strategist and donors who are very comfortable having no agenda whatsoever, or falling back on the familiarity of upper-bracket tax cuts and pretend budget cuts as soon as they’re restored to power.

Among the party’s voters, activists and media personalities, meanwhile, there remains a clear appetite not for the Youngkin-style appropriation of certain parts of Trumpism, but for Donald Trump in full — nourished by the plausible belief that populists and social conservatives can’t entirely trust more-corporate Republicans, the implausible belief that Trump’s nastiness helped him more than it hurt him, the false belief that he actually won the 2020 election, plus the very America-in-2021 desire for politics to be high-stakes TV entertainment rather than boring attempts to cobble together governing majorities.

The world needs to address the root causes of vaccine hesitancy. We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by flooding skeptical communities with public service announcements or hectoring people to “believe in science.”

For the past five years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups abroad and interviewed residents of the Bronx to better understand vaccine avoidance.

We’ve found that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t. Instead, hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.

Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet/Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially A.I.-dominated future. This is not good news. History has shown us that when the distribution of information is left in the hands of a few, the result is political and economic oppression. Without intervention, this history will repeat itself.

The fact that these companies are attempting to outpace each other, in the absence of externally imposed safeguards, should give the rest of us even more cause for concern, given the potential for A.I. to do great harm to jobs, privacy and cybersecurity. Arms races without restrictions generally do not end well.

We believe the A.I. revolution could even usher in the dark prophecies envisioned by Karl Marx over a century ago. The German philosopher was convinced that capitalism naturally led to monopoly ownership over the “means of production” and that oligarchs would use their economic clout to run the political system and keep workers poor.

The political action committee, called Win It Back, has close ties to the influential fiscally conservative group Club for Growth. It has already spent more than $4 million trying to lower Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters in Iowa and nearly $2 million more trying to damage him in South Carolina

But in the memo — dated Thursday and obtained by The New York Times — the head of Win It Back PAC, David McIntosh, acknowledges to donors that after extensive testing of more than 40 anti-Trump television ads, “all attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective.”

“Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh states in the “key learnings” section of the memo.

a Scottish moral philosopher.The philosopher, William MacAskill,

his latest book, “What We Owe the Future,” became a best seller after it was published in August.

His rising profile parallels the worldwide growth of the giving community he helped found, effective altruism. Once a niche pursuit for earnest vegans and volunteer kidney donors who lived frugally so that they would have more money to give away for cheap medical interventions in developing countries, it has emerged as a significant force in philanthropy, especially in millennial and Gen-Z giving.

In the 1770s, more than half of the town’s 1,800 residents were Black, though visitors to the modern-day recreation would not always have known it.

“Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot,” the rousing orientation film that started running in the visitors center in 1957, included few Black faces. Even into the 1980s, Black employees in the historic area generally worked as (costumed) custodians, coachmen or cooks — seen but little heard.

A shift began in 1979, when the foundation introduced “first-person” costumed interpreters portraying ordinary people, white and Black. In 1984, it created a dedicated African American history unit, led by Rex Ellis, who in 2001 became the foundation’s first Black vice president.

Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute

Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.

in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

t is a struggle not so much over traditional levers of power in Washington, but over who will shape the minds of a younger, diverse generation of voters that will soon steer the relationship to one of America’s closest allies.

As wartime passions splinter the left, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose boosters envision her eventually running for the presidency, is laboring to hold together a consequential but delicate coalition that has pushed the Democratic Party leftward on climate, policing and economics. Mr. Torres, talked about as a future senator or governor, appears intent on using the moment to smash that left-wing movement apart.

“What you are seeing here is really a question of vision for the future of the Democratic Party. Is it going to be the Ritchie Torres version or the A.O.C. version?”

When the hard right, the left and an autocrat (who denies Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians) combine forces, you know there is something wrong. Let’s be clear: German politicians do not need to wrestle free of history to navigate the debate on the Gaza war. It is a myth that Germany is uncritical in its support of the Israeli government.

Germans had been told they were “surrounded by friends”, as Helmut Kohl put it. They woke up ill-equipped to face a world of sworn enemies. Russia pulverised decades of German Ostpolitik when it attacked Ukraine, and with it the European postwar order.

There was never any love lost between either the Merkel or Scholz governments and Benjamin Netanyahu. Angela Merkel knew he was working with Donald Trump to kill off the nuclear deal with Iran behind her back. And that he was lying about his acceptance of two states. Nobody involved with the Middle East dossier in Berlin trusts Netanyahu

The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.

I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.

Gay interpreted the question not at face value but as pertaining to whether Harvard students who had brandished slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” which many people interpret as tantamount to a call for genocide, could be prosecuted under Harvard’s policies. Though the slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.

The Long Room, with its imposing oak ceiling and two levels of bookshelves laden with some of Ireland’s most ancient and valuable volumes, is the oldest part of the library in Trinity College Dublin, in constant use since 1732.

But that remarkable record is about to be disrupted, as engineers, architects and conservation experts embark on a 90 million euro, or $95 million, program to restore and upgrade the college’s Old Library building, of which the Long Room is the main part.

“We already knew that the Old Library needed work because of problems with the building,” said Prof. Veronica Campbell, who initiated the project. “When we saw Notre Dame burning, we realized, ‘Oh, my God, we need to do something now!’”