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. The bad news is that a form of doomsday-machine politics — in which you threaten to blow up things that you care about, because you think your rivals care about them more — is playing out in Washington right now, courtesy of the Republican Party.

Doomsday-machine politics made its first U.S. appearance in the 1990s, when Republicans shut down the federal government in an attempt to extract concessions from Bill Clinton.

Republicans tried again, with more success, in 2011, using the threat of refusing to raise the debt ceiling — forcing the U.S. government into default, with possibly catastrophic effects on the world economy — to win policy concessions from Barack Obama.

Mindfulness is one of the most basic practices of Buddhism. It is part of the Eightfold Path and is one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment.

The four foundations are frames of reference, usually taken up one at a time. In this way, the student begins with a simple mindfulness of breath and progresses to mindfulness of everything. These four foundations are often taught in the context of meditation, but if your daily practice is chanting, that can work, too.

This is an awareness of the body as body—something experienced as breath and flesh and bone.

When our reality is too ugly, we deny reality. It is too painful to look at. Reality is too hard to accept.Mental health experts routinely say that denial is among the most common defense mechanisms. Denial is how the person defends his superior sense of self, her racially unequal society.Denial is how America defends itself as superior to “shithole countries” in Africa and elsewhere, as President Trump reportedly described them in a White House meeting last week, although he has since, well, denied that. It’s also how America defends itself as superior to those “developing countries” in Africa, to quote how liberal opponents of Mr. Trump might often describe them.

But Mr. Trump is no exception. In framing Mr. Trump’s racism as exceptional, in seeking to highlight the depth of the president’s cruelty, Mr. Durbin, a reliably liberal senator, showed the depth of denial of American racism.

I grew up to the beat of racist denial in Queens, not far from where Mr. Trump grew up. I was raised in the urban “hell” of neighborhoods he probably avoided, alongside immigrants from countries he derided last week. In school or elsewhere, we all heard recitals of the American ideal of equality, especially on the day we celebrate the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Those events often feature recitals of the words “all men are created equal,” which were written by a slaveholder who once declared that black people “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

WASHINGTON — Last summer, President Donald Trump publicly pinned much of the blame for his administration’s woes on its communications efforts.

Trump defends his use of Twitter, saying that it offers him a chance to communicate directly with the American people in an open and honest way. But the president, who often takes his cues from cable news — he frequently tags Fox News to his tweets — or from the last adviser to brief him, has proven that in many cases, his views are flexible and subject to influence.

On Thursday, Trump contradicted himself in a pair of tweets sent nearly three hours apart, initially indicating he had serious concerns with the surveillance program that he claimed “may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration.” With the House about to vote on the reauthorization of the FISA program, his comments set off a flurry of confusion

RIO DE JANEIRO — As dozens of fires scorched large swaths of the Amazon, the Brazilian government on Thursday struggled to contain growing global outrage over its environmental policies, which have paved the way for runaway deforestation of the world’s largest rain forest.

The fires, many intentionally set, are spreading as Germany and Norway appear to be on the brink of shutting down a $1.2 billion conservation initiative for the Amazon.

“The ongoing forest fires in Brazil are deeply worrying,” the European Commission said in a statement on Thursday. “Forests are our lungs and life support systems.”

the ice sheet sent 197 billion tons of water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean during July. This is enough to raise sea levels by 0.5 millimeter, or 0.02 inches, in a one-month time frame

every increment of sea-level rise provides a higher launchpad for storms to more easily flood coastal infrastructure, such as New York’s subway system, parts of which flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Think of a basketball game being played on a court whose floor is gradually rising, making it easier for even shorter players to dunk the ball.

“this is the year Greenland is contributing most to sea-level rise,”

Carlson argued that white supremacy is a fake crisis cooked up by Democrats as a campaign ploy. “It’s actually not a real problem in America,” Carlson said, adding later, “This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

violence tied to far-right ideologies have killed roughly as many Americans since 9/11 as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State combined.

The president has often called Hispanic migration an “invasion” — language echoed in a manifesto police believe the accused El Paso shooter posted online decrying a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy.

On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000

Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median

When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.

In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.

One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.

Eighty years ago, as Americans came together to defeat the fascism that threatened civilization, American factories poured out the weapons needed to crush Germany and the other Axis Powers.

Today America can do it again and create the arsenal that defeats this latest threat to civilization: the coronavirus. From ventilators and N95 masks, to anti-viral drugs and ICU equipment and hospital beds, American companies are being mobilized in the face of the most serious public health crisis in more than a century. But these companies will only be successful if we learn the right lessons from the industrial mobilization that won the world's biggest war.

Have a clear objective and a realistic timeline When war mobilization began in 1940-41, no one said the goal was to defeat fascism — and no one was able to mass produce tanks or bombers from a standing start. From the beginning, Washington set a more purposeful goal of building a modern, well-equipped military in case war came.

Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days.

disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds

he pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse.

It’s time to acknowledge what black history really reveals — not individual heroism or the endurance of democratic ideals, but their opposites. Time to examine what black history has always shown us: how hundreds of years of codified oppression, groupthink, hypocrisy, lies and political cowardice have made possible, and palatable, the political oppression and moral corruption of the current moment that threatens to wipe out democracy for everybody.

Black history rooted in slavery means that the country was always going to have to make ugly compromises with its own ideals, a process that became normalized. The longevity of slavery meant that business and the pursuit of profit, not justice, would be the dominant force in American life and the real energy driving even the most optimistic notions of American exceptionalism.

in this context, the cult of Trump is not new, just another compromise with our ideals, albeit a far-reaching one that looks particularly bad in the supposedly enlightened post-civil rights era of the 21st century.

In essence, he was raising an issue that economists have long grappled with: How can a society assess the trade-off between economic well-being and health?

“Why is nobody putting some numbers on the economic costs of a monthlong or a yearlong shutdown against the lives saved? The whole discipline is well equipped for it. But there is some reluctance for people to stick their neck out.”

There is, however, a widespread consensus among economists and public health experts that lifting the restrictions would impose huge costs in additional lives lost to the virus — and deliver little lasting benefit to the economy.

“There is so much negative energy; it’s so angry,” says the former four-term Democratic senator from California. “You can be angry about the unfairness in the world. But this becomes a personal, deep-seated anger at anyone who doesn’t say exactly what you want to hear.”

Boxer’s story is one of the milder ones The Times tells about the Internet trolls whose goals seem to have less to do with building Sanders up than with hounding and humiliating anyone who stands in their man’s way.

When Mr. Sanders’s supporters swarm someone online, they often find multiple access points to that person’s life, compiling what can amount to investigative dossiers,”

it’s worth stepping back to remember that this is a recent development, and that the polarization of the media stems in large part from public policy decisions. Such polarization was not inevitable or in any way natural.

In the decades that followed World War II, the big three television networks dominated the news. Together with a few major metropolitan newspapers, they set the tone for the national conversation.

on virtually all these programs, journalists steered clear of a partisan perspective.

America faces a serious problem which that decision did not address: the erosion of public faith in the rule of law and democratic governance.

Public Policy Polling has released the startling results of a national survey taken this week. Those results show significant fissures in the public’s embrace of the rule of law and democracy.

When asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how “essential” it is for them “to live in a democracy,” 72% of Americans born before World War II check “10,” the highest value.

Many critics have used the incident at Middlebury, as well as violent protests at the University of California Berkeley, to argue that free speech is under assault. To these critics, liberal activists who respond aggressively to ideas they dislike are hypocrites who care little about the liberal values of tolerance and free speech.

the truth is that violent demonstrations on campus are rare, and are not what the critics have primarily been railing against. Instead, they have been complaining about an atmosphere of intense pushback and protest that has made some speakers hesitant to express their views and has subjected others to a range of social pressure and backlash, from shaming and ostracism to boycotts and economic reprisal.

As Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in his celebrated 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

historians are particularly well positioned to place current events in longer time frames and to offer more perspective on the origins of a certain situation

For my own part, I have spent much of my time on CNN and here in The Atlantic trying to explain how the Donald Trump presidency can only be understood within the context of the strengthened role of partisanship in Washington since the 1970s and the transformation of the news media. In other words, I have tried to show that President Trump is not a cause of our current political environment but a product of changes that have been building for years.

Sometimes comparisons with the past, even if imperfect, are very useful. Most of the good historical work in the media does not claim that Trump is President Nixon. Rather, the point is that the institution of the presidency creates certain incentives and opportunities for abusing power and that some people who have held these positions have done just that.

Despite betting markets and expert forecasts that predicted Theresa May’s Conservatives to win a large majority in the U.K. parliamentary elections, the Tories instead lost ground on Thursday, resulting in a hung parliament. As we write this in the early hours of Friday morning, Conservatives will end up with either 318 or 319 seats, down from the 330 that the Tories had in the previous government. A majority officially requires 326 seats.1Although, there are some ambiguities on account of Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party which traditionally does not take its seats in parliament, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, who traditionally does not vote.

There were also a lot of events during the campaign, but the compressed time frame makes them hard to sort out from one another. How much did the Conservative manifesto hurt the Tories? Did terrorist attacks in Manchester and London work against them? Was May’s perceived softness toward President Trump a factor, especially after Trump began to attack London Mayor Sadiq Khan? Given the results of the French election, is there an overall resurgence toward liberal multiculturalism in Europe, perhaps as a reaction to Trump? We don’t know the answers to these questions, although we hope to explore some of them in the coming days. We do know that elections around the world are putting candidates, pollsters and the media to the test, and there isn’t a lot they can be taking for granted.

All Politics Are National

Reminders of campaign glory form a red stripe across the white walls of a cramped conference room in a GOP fundraising office. There is a poster commemorating "NIXON" in colorful all-caps, as well as framed photographs marking the victories of George W. Bush. Cartoons of former first ladies stretch from corner to corner. Missing was any reference to Donald J. Trump. Maybe Karen Handel chose to meet here because it's the only place in Georgia where he isn't hanging over her head.

Tom Price, who resigned in January to become Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, was reelected here six times without his support dipping below 62 percent.