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Donald Trump may be leaving the White House in a few days, but the umbrella of conspiracy theories he inspired is only just arriving in Washington.

The chief theory known as QAnon -- that the US government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles only Trump can expose -- began nearly four years ago as a fringe movement in the dark corners of the internet. Now QAnon has adherents in positions of power within the Republican Party and in the halls of Congress.

One of the more conspicuous rioters, wearing a horned helmet and carrying a six-foot spear, is known online as the "QAnon Shaman."

The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.

Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.”

The Roman Empire, at its height (c. 117 CE), was the most extensive political and social structure in western civilization. By 285 CE the empire had grown too vast to be ruled from the central government at Rome and so was divided by Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305 CE) into a Western and an Eastern Empire.

The Roman Empire began when Augustus Caesar (r. 27 BCE-14 CE) became the first emperor of Rome

In the east, it continued as the Byzantine Empire until the death of Constantine XI (r. 1449-1453 CE) and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE.

Bracing for the possibility of political violence stemming from Tuesday’s election, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is declaring a state of emergency in the Portland area

It’s the second time in two months that the governor has declared an emergency in preparation for possible violence.

“I want to be very, very clear that voter intimidation and political violence will not be tolerated,” Brown said.

none of these arguments reaches past adversarial notions of democracy. They all characterize free speech as a matter of conflicting rights-claims and competing factions.

some critics of the Harper’s letter seem eager to reduce all public debate to a form of power politics

Trans activist Julia Serano merely punctuates the tendency when she writes that calls for free speech represent a “misconception that we, as a society, are all in the midst of some grand rational debate, and that marginalized people simply need to properly plea our case for acceptance, and once we do, reason-minded people everywhere will eventually come around. This notion is utterly ludicrous.”

Hibbing’s book, based on reporting, focus groups and surveys, is an attempt to understand what motivates the most enthusiastic Trump supporters.

The most ardent ones, he notes, are not economically marginalized, not submissive, not authoritarian, not religious or conventionally conservative. They have a strong concept that there is a core America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John Wayne, football and hunting.

They feel that core America is under existential threat from people they view as outsiders: immigrants, Chinese communists, cosmopolitan urbanites and people of color. They see themselves as strong and vigilant protectors, defending the sacred homeland from alien menace.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Holmes was lionized as the greatest legal thinker of his time by progressives who celebrated his dissenting opinions arguing for the protection of free speech and the upholding of economic regulations.

Christian theologians and conservative political activists denounced Holmes’s moral relativism in insisting that law could be separated from God’s will.

Holmes has been out of fashion among both conservative originalists and progressive living-constitutionalists, who dislike his rejection of the idea that the Constitution contains absolute principles that can be invoked to protect minorities against mob rule.

But all these questions miss the point, the Buddha tells his disciple. What is important is pulling out that poison arrow, and tending to the wound.

“We need to be moved by the pain of all of the suffering. But it is important that we are not paralyzed by it,” Ms. Han said. “It makes us value life because we understand life is very precious, life is very brief, it can be extinguished in a single instant.”

Recent days have revealed an arrow lodged deep in the heart of America. It was exposed in the slaughter of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, and when a gunman steeped in white supremacist ideology killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket. The United States is a nation that has learned to live with mass shooting after mass shooting.

Note also that we have moved beyond the age of tolerance into the age of affirmation. It is not enough that Forbes pledges to protect the right to same-sex marriage in law. She is expected to affirm other people’s beliefs, even their marriages. This is not a healthy development for freedom of conscience and, just as worrying, implies that elected officials should be moral arbiters of the nation’s relationships and private affairs

She has simply stated what her creed teaches while separating its doctrines from her job as a maker of law and policy. Kate Forbes believes that same-sex marriage is explicitly forbidden by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and yet she is still determined to protect its status in law. That, to my mind, is leadership in action. 

Forbes hasn’t said or done anything to suggest she would harm people in same-sex relationships. Indeed, she has reminded interviewers that she is bound by the Scriptural injunction to love her neighbour. She hasn’t expressed hatred of gay or lesbian people, of transgender people, of unmarried couples, or of the children produced by those unions

Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.

This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past

It’s why the “good war” of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression.

All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict in the past six months. UN data shows that in the first month of the war alone, 1,340 families suffered multiple losses, with 312 families losing more than 10 members.

Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.

The internal probe was meant to find out who leaked information related to a planned podcast episode about that article. But its intensity and scope suggests the Times’s leadership, after years of fights with its workforce over a variety of issues involving journalistic integrity, is sending a signal: Enough.

“The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn said in an interview. “I haven’t seen that happen before.”

while its business hums along, the Times’s culture has been under strain.

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive.

Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

check this section out from the study he cites: Marijuana intoxication can cause distorted perceptions, impaired coordination, difficulty with thinking and problem solving, and problems with learning and memory. Research has shown that, in chronic users, marijuana's adverse impact on learning and memory can last for days or weeks after the acute effects of the drug wear off. As a result, someone who smokes marijuana every day may be functioning at a suboptimal intellectual level all of the time.

At what point could this not be said of alcohol as well? And yet alcohol is far more addictive, far more related to social problems and violence, and daily drinking of large amounts can be dreadful for the liver (see graph above).

There's also what the study does not analyze: the whole point of marijuana use is to disrupt settled ways of thinking and feeling, to offer a respite, like alcohol, from the deadliness of doing. But for  reasons we don't quite yet understand, marijuana, like other essentially harmless drugs in moderation, can prompt imaginative breakthroughs, creative serendipity, deeper personal understanding, and greater social empathy and connection.

The temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern America. Three decades ago, one “none” named Sheila Larson told the sociologist Robert Bellah and his collaborators that she called her faith “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Americans are drifting out of the grip of institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional authority in general.

If individual impiety flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to traditional Christian morality. They question the Protestant civil religion that has undergirded our common life for so long

The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.

In the 16 presidential elections between 1952 and 2012, only one Democratic candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, won a majority of the white vote

Obama’s track record with white voters is not very different from that of other Democratic candidates.

In the aftermath of Obama’s election, white support for Congressional Democrats collapsed to its lowest level in the history of House exit polling, 38 percent in 2010 —  at once driving and driven by the emerging Tea Party.

BO: There’s a wonderful quote that I thought was L.B.J.’s, but I could never verify it: “Every man is either trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.

I had the benefit of a great relationship with my mom, and she taught me the essential elements of parenting: unconditional love and explaining your values to your kids, having high expectations.

I live above the store. We’ve been able to schedule, pretty religiously, dinner at 6:30 every night for the last eight years. If I had a trip, I might be gone for a few days. But as busy as I was, I was able to go upstairs, have dinner. They don’t want you for more than an hour once they hit teenage.

Exclude Hungary from EU, says Luxembourg's Asselborn

Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn has called for Hungary to be suspended or even expelled from the European Union because of its "massive violation" of EU fundamental values.

"Hungary is not far away from issuing orders to open fire on refugees," he suggested.

The issue is not just whether the French model, which emphasizes integration or assimilation into a single identity, is succeeding or not these days. The question is also why the British and American experience with immigration is viewed through such a skewed lens.

Both countries have long traditions of tolerating multiple identities and community-based politics, which produces candidates who represent ethnic groups and their concerns.

what is it that makes the Anglo-Saxon model so scary to the French today? Emile Chabal, a professor of modern French history at the University of Edinburgh, traces it to France’s deeply held faith in a single, indivisible republic that makes no distinction among its citizens.