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Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant.

he frames his critique generously, stipulating that it isn’t laziness that’s destroying hillbilly culture but what the psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness” — the fatalistic belief, born of too much adversity, that nothing can be done to change your lot.

What he’s really writing about is despair.

His friends and relations are convinced that the media lies. That politicians lie. That the military, an institution they revere, is fighting two fruitless wars. Universities feel “rigged” and inaccessible; job prospects are slim. For what purpose do you live under such circumstances? When the stanchions of your life have sunk into the muck?

It’s also a culture that values physical toughness. It’s a culture that celebrates people who are willing to fight to defend their honor.

It’s also a culture with a lot of collective pride.

Sports has become the binding religion, offering identity, value, and solidarity.

From 1945 to 1995, conservative and liberal elites shared variations of the same vision of the future. Liberals emphasized multilateral institutions and conservatives emphasized free trade. Either way, the future would be global, integrated and multiethnic.

This honor code has been decimated lately. Conservatives argue that it has been decimated by cosmopolitan cultural elite

But the honor code has also been decimated by the culture of the modern meritocracy, which awards status to the individual who works with his mind, and devalues the class of people who work with their hands.

Most of all, it has been undermined by rampant consumerism, by celebrity culture, by reality-TV fantasies that tell people success comes in a quick flash of publicity, not through steady work. The sociologist Daniel Bell once argued that capitalism would undermine itself because it encouraged hedonistic short-term values for consumers while requiring self-disciplined long-term values in its workers. At least in one segment of society, Bell was absolutely correct

There’s now a rift within the working class between mostly older people who are self disciplined, respectable and, often, bigoted, and parts of a younger cohort that are more disordered, less industrious, more celebrity-obsessed, but also more tolerant and open to the world.

Much of this pride is nationalistic.

But the elites pushed too hard, and now history is moving in the opposite direction. The less-educated masses have a different conception of the future, a vision that is more closed, collective, protective and segmented.

When people feel their world is vanishing, they are easy prey for fact-free magical thinking and demagogues who blame immigrants.

We need a better form of nationalism, a vision of patriotism that gives dignity to those who have been disrespected, emphasizes that we are one nation and is confident and open to the world.

Anybody who spends time in the working-class parts of America (and, one presumes, Britain) notices the contagions of drug addiction and suicide, and the feelings of anomie, cynicism, pessimism and resentment.

The real theme is one Trump articulated clearly yesterday in his National Prayer Breakfast speech: "We have to be tough. It's time we're going to be a little tough, folks. We're taking advantage of by every nation in the world virtually. It's not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen anymore."

The Trump message was about nationalism, power and aggression against the nations of the world who are 'taking advantage of" us and laughing at us. That kind of aggression against outsiders, with their domestic counterparts, the 'elites', can overlap with economic concerns. They're quite distinct.

But a proper understanding of Trumpism is also a political opportunity for Democrats. Trump is cozying up to the Wall Street barons he campaigned against. He's about to throw 25 million Americans off their health care

“We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank, because frankly I have so many people, friends of mine, that have nice businesses and they can’t borrow money,” he said again today, while he also talks about vast tax cuts for his wealthy friends and tax increases for many ordinary working and middle class families. This is a perfect evocation of government by the richest, for the richest, by the rich - and from the President's own lips. The complete indifference to the supposed interests of the people who voted for him has so many examples it's almost comical. Democrats need to be building this storyline now.

Nationalism is not a bad word or a bad thing, in itself. I don't believe so at least. If you do, it is important to recognize that a strain of non-retributive nationalism is the default assumption of the great majority of Americans. Any politics which doesn't recognize that is doomed to fail.

But there are xenophobic and non-xenophobic breeds of nationalism.

an aggressive, defensive nationalism is in some sense natural and generally harmless for small, weak countries. They often are taken advantage of and ill-used by the nations of the world. It can be a realistic basis of national policy.

But when strong countries, even the strongest country in the history of the world, start indulging fantasies of weakness and grievance things can get dangerous quickly. Weak and small countries by definition can't do that much harm. Their grievance and sense of victimization is inextricable from their very weakness. But when grievance and rage at outsiders takes hold among the strong, they are capable of committing great evil, precisely because of their power. Victimology is a powerful drug.

female candidates are running in tough places, red states Mitt Romney won, or against entrenched incumbents. They aren't favored to win—and many may end up on the 2014 political scrap heap—but party operatives believe they give Democrats the best shot in such hostile political territory.

It's a deep problem for the Republicans," said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Democrats have made plain that the "war on women" playbook will be key to their efforts to unseat McConnell.

"Kentucky's first female United States senator."

They need to have legislation that has a positive [message] that will help female voters in an attempt to soften their image going into the elections," he said.

According to one study, enrollment fell by one-fifth, and students were 30 percent less likely to major in one of these subjects. Yale and Harvard, while making noises about grade inflation, have never instituted tough rules to stem it.

Overall, graded students are less interested in the topic at hand and — and, for obvious, common-sense reasons — more inclined to pick the easiest possible task when given the chance.

Grades should motivate certain students: those afraid of the stigma of a bad grade or those ambitious, by temperament or conditioning, to succeed in measurable ways.

Although recent research on the effects of grades is limited, several studies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s measured how students related to a task or a class when it was graded compared to when it was ungraded.

Our goal should be ending the centrality of grades altogether. For years, I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades; today, I’m certain of it. But what’s so bad about that?

Yes, the student who gets a 100 on a calculus exam probably grasps the material better than the student with a 60 — but only if she retains the knowledge, which grades can’t show.

We need to move to a post-grading world. Maybe that means a world where there are no grades — or one where, if they remain, we rely more on better kinds of evaluation.

According to a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, GPA was seventh out of eight factors employers considered in hiring, behind internships, extracurricular activities and previous employment.

To top humanities PhD programs, letters of reference and writing samples matter more than overall GPA (although students are surely expected to have received good grades in their intended areas of study).

Right now, students end up being evaluated twice: once with an inflated and meaningless letter grade, then again by teachers asked to write letters of recommendation.

They said employers want a GPA of 3.0 or even 3.5. But again, that standard would include almost every Harvard student — which suggests that GPAs serve not to validate students from elite schools but to keep out those from less-prestigious schools and large public universities, where grades are less inflated. Grades at community colleges “have actually dropped” over the years, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a co-author of the 2012 grade-inflation study.

That means we have two systems: one for students at elite schools, who get jobs based on references, prestige and connections, and another for students everywhere else, who had better maintain a 3.0.

Students can compare evaluations from different classes, too, “read across all of them, see what they need improvement on.” And when they graduate, they — and employers or grad-school admission offices — get far more than a printed page of grades.

The trouble is that, while it’s relatively easy for smaller colleges to go grade-free, with their low student-to-teacher ratios, it’s tough for professors at larger schools, who must evaluate more students, more quickly, with fewer resources.

teaching five classes for poverty wages can’t write substantial term-end comments, so grades are a necessity if they want to give any feedback at all.

perhaps the small, progressive colleges can inspire other schools to follow, as they have in, say, abolishing the SAT as an admissions requirement

It would mean hiring more teachers and paying them better (which schools should do anyway). And if transcripts become more textured, graduate-school admission offices and employers will have to devote more resources to reading them, and to getting to know applicants through interviews and letters of reference

When I think about getting rid of grades, I think of happier students, with whom I have more open, democratic relationships.

Even in my Yale classrooms filled with overachievers, most of whom want to learn for the sake of learning, some respond well to the clarity of a grade.

In the European Union, a tough new data protection law called the General Data Protection Regulation now requires companies to obtain explicit and “freely given” consent before collecting sensitive information like facial data. Some critics, including the former government official who originally proposed the new law, contend that Facebook tried to improperly influence user consent by promoting facial recognition as an identity protection tool.

People could turn it off. But privacy experts said Facebook had neither obtained users’ opt-in consent for the technology nor explicitly informed them that the company could benefit from scanning their photos

Separately, privacy and consumer groups lodged a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in April saying Facebook added facial recognition services, like the feature to help identify impersonators, without obtaining prior consent from people before turning it on. The groups argued that Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree that prohibits it from deceptive privacy practices

Critics said Facebook took an early lead in consumer facial recognition services partly by turning on the technology as the default option for users. In 2010, it introduced a photo-labeling feature called Tag Suggestions that used face-matching software to suggest the names of people in users’ photos.

“Facebook is somehow threatening me that, if I do not buy into face recognition, I will be in danger,” said Viviane Reding, the former justice commissioner of the European Commission who is now a member of the European Parliament. “It goes completely against the European law because it tries to manipulate consent.”

“When Tag Suggestions asks you ‘Is this Jill?’ you don’t think you are annotating faces to improve Facebook’s face recognition algorithm,” said Brian Brackeen, the chief executive of Kairos, a facial recognition company. “Even the premise is an unfair use of people’s time and labor.”

The huge trove of identified faces, he added, enabled Facebook to quickly develop one of the world’s most powerful commercial facial recognition engines. In 2014, Facebook researchers said they had trained face-matching software “on the largest facial dataset to date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images.”

Facebook may only be getting started with its facial recognition services. The social network has applied for various patents, many of them still under consideration, which show how it could use the technology to track its online users in the real world.

One patent application, published last November, described a system that could detect consumers within stores and match those shoppers’ faces with their social networking profiles. Then it could analyze the characteristics of their friends, and other details, using the information to determine a “trust level” for each shopper. Consumers deemed “trustworthy” could be eligible for special treatment, like automatic access to merchandise in locked display cases, the document said.

Another Facebook patent filing described how cameras near checkout counters could capture shoppers’ faces, match them with their social networking profiles and then send purchase confirmation messages to their phones

But legal filings in the class-action suit hint at the technology’s importance to Facebook’s business.

If the suit were to move forward, Facebook’s lawyers argued in a recent court document, “the reputational and economic costs to Facebook will be irreparable.”

the strong bipartisan vote would be support for the proposition that the courts must halt the president’s usurpation of congressional authority, which the National Emergencies Act never contemplated.

Mensing said the group was prepared to wait outside the port of entry and was willing to risk the hurdles ahead because they were fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Many of the migrants are from Central America, predominantly Honduras.“No one is asking for some sort of immediate citizenship — the people on this caravan know that the most likely thing for them is that they will be detained indefinitely, they may be separated from their children,” said Mensing. “They’re not coming here because they think it’s easy, they’re coming here because they’re fearing for their lives.

The asylum seekers began their trek together near the Guatemalan border on March 25, making their way on foot, by train and by bus north through Mexico before coming to their destination at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. At one point the caravan numbered roughly 1,200, but its numbers have dwindled after some chose to seek asylum in Mexico and others decided not to risk turning themselves in to immigration authorities.

Immigration judges vary in whether they accept claims based on fear of violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Some judges permit asylum for women and children targeted by criminal gangs for recruitment, finding that they are persecuted due to "membership in a particular social group," but other judges do not

With the consciousness of a threat comes the awareness of a vulnerability. The police can only protect the people you love in the most limited of circumstances (with those limits growing ever-more-severe the farther you live from a city center.) You want to stand in that gap.

So you take a big step. You walk into a gun store. Unless you’re the kind of person who grew up shooting, this is where you begin your encounter with American gun culture. The first thing you’ll notice—and I’ve seen this without fail—is that the person behind that counter is ready to listen.

Next, you realize that you want that sense of safety to travel with you. So you sign up for a concealed-carry permit class. You gather one night with friends and neighbors and spend the next eight hours combining a self-defense class with a dash of world-view training.

something else happens to you, something that’s deeper than the fun of shooting a paper target. Your thought-process starts to change. Yes, if someone tried to break into your house, you know that you’d call 911 and pray for the police to come quickly, but you also start to think of exactly what else you’d do. If you heard that “bump” in the night, how would you protect yourself until the police arrived?  You’re surprised at how much safer you feel with the gun in the house.

Often the person behind the counter is a veteran. Often they’re a retired cop. Always they’re well-informed. Always they’re ready to teach.

nd when you carry your weapon, you don’t feel intimidated, you feel empowered. In a way that’s tough to explain, the fact that you’re so much less dependent on the state for your personal security and safety makes you feel more “free” than you’ve ever felt before.  

And as your worldview changes, you expand your knowledge. You learn that people defend themselves with guns all the time, usually without pulling the trigger.

At the end of this process, your life has changed for the better. Your community has expanded to include people you truly like, who’ve perhaps helped you through a tough time in your life, and you treasure these relationships

It’s a myth that gun owners despise regulation. Instead, they tend to believe that government regulation should have two purposes—deny guns to the dangerous while protecting rights of access for the law-abiding. The formula is simple: Criminals and the dangerously mentally ill make our nation more violent. Law-abiding gun owners save and protect lives.

Thus the overwhelming support for background checks, the insistence from gun-rights supporters that the government enforce existing laws and lock up violent offenders, and the openness to solutions—like so-called “gun violence restraining orders” that specifically target troubled individuals for intervention.

Progressive policy prescriptions, like assault-weapons bans and bans on large-capacity magazines, are opposed because they’re perceived to have exactly the wrong effect. They’ll present only the most minor of hurdles for the lawless, while the law-abiding experience the law’s full effect. It’s a form of collective punishment for the innocent, a mere annoyance—at best—for the lawless.

Because of the threats against my family—and because I don’t want to be dependent on a sometimes shockingly incompetent government for my family’s security—I carry a weapon. My wife does as well. We’re not scared. We’re prepared, and that sense of preparation is contagious. Confidence is contagious. People want to be empowered. That’s how gun culture is built. Not by the NRA and not by Congress, but by gun owners, one free citizen at a time.

he country has already tried an aggressive enforcement approach to drug crimes — the four-decade-plus war on drugs — and among experts and law enforcement officers , it is almost universally acknowledged as a massive failure in economic and practical terms

Even more concerning, the war on drugs has been disproportionately waged against black and brown people . Escalating the possible sentence for drug crimes to death would just amplify the many injustices already present in a broken system.

He doesn’t recognize that most of our opioid deaths result from drugs that are made in the United States or shipped in from China 

And that self-centered self-assuredness is the slender framework supporting his enthusiasm for adopting the bloodthirsty edicts of a genuine despot and a notoriously repressive quasi-police state

hese policy proposals (such as they are) are terrible ideas considered on their own. But it’s something of an accomplishment to have them combine quite as gruesomely as “more firearms in schools” and “shoot all drug dealers” might — at least Singapore’s tougher gun-control laws prevent the kind of “good guy with a gun” vigilantism that Trump regularly invokes

the government has got to teach children that they’ll die if they take drugs and they’ve got to make drug dealers fear for their lives.”

A former senior official in the George W. Bush administration who is sympathetic to Bolton on some issues told me that Trump is so wrapped up in the image of a dealmaker, yet so ignorant of the issues, that he will “sign on to half-assed deals that he does not understand.”

It was obvious in Osaka that his heart is with other authoritarian leaders. He embraced Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and joked with Putin about Russian election interference. He did not know what Putin meant by his comment that Western liberalism is obsolete, and didn’t care to find out.

Meanwhile, U.S. relations with the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan are at post–Cold War lows

It is often, and rightly, said of Trump that he is undisciplined and loses interest in subjects quickly. But he has slowly and steadily chipped away at the pillars of the free world and used the rubble to lay the foundations of an illiberal alternative.

For Bolton, leaving because he’s too tough for Trump is the perfect way to save face. Otherwise, he may be remembered as the man who presided over one of the weakest national-security teams in modern American history and someone whose myopic obsessions—such as international treaties and communism in Venezuela—meant the United States lost precious time in preparing for the national-security challenges of the future

One way or another, Trump seems determined to present an image of himself in 2020 as a dealmaker who is getting tough with allies who have taken advantage of the United States and making peace with the country’s enemies. The risks are enormous. Trump may strike bad deals. He could permanently weaken America’s influence and encourage aggression against allies. But it may work for him politically, throwing the Democrats off balance and setting the stage for a second term

“We’ve got this monster down on the mat and we’re trying to keep him down. We can’t let up too soon or he’s coming at us,” Mr. DeWine said.

the clampdown on economic activity has already reduced the expected impact on the state’s health system by 50% to 75%. Ohio currently has 1,137 confirmed cases, 276 hospitalizations and 19 deaths. For now, these numbers are lower than numbers from the neighboring states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

In one of his daily public news briefings last week and a subsequent interview, he said the economy and people’s health aren’t mutually exclusive considerations.

“You’ve got to take care of people first,” he said. “If people are dying at a high rate and hospitals are overflowing, that’s not going to do anything for your economy.”

If the worst-case scenario comes true, are there still things we can do to minimise the pandemic’s impact?Absolutely. We can mobilise more health officials and keep engaging the public, implementing sensible travel controls and ensuring that frontline health workers have ready access to diagnostic tests and are vigilant – that they don’t send anyone who may have been exposed home without testing them, for example

Was an epidemic like that of Covid-19 inevitable?From a biological standpoint an outbreak of a novel pathogen was inevitable, but this one happened in the worst place at the worst time. Wuhan is a big city and a crossroads,

is in people’s minds – even though the risk of another one is real. I’ve written about a hypothetical situation in which a new and dangerous pathogen emerges, a vaccine is developed, and you still get a pandemic, because large numbers of millennials refuse the vaccine. In the US, 20% of millennials believe that vaccines cause autism.

You have said that time and trust are critical to good epidemic management. What do you mean?The delay between the frontline health workers noticing something unusual, in the form of an emerging disease, and that information travelling up the line to central decision-makers is critical. To illustrate that, a 2018 simulation that the Gates Foundation conducted of a flu pandemic estimated that there would be 28,000 after one month, 10 million after three months, and 33 million after six months. The virus used in that simulation was more contagious and deadly than Covid-19 – though they are both respiratory viruses – but the example shows how all epidemics grow exponentially. So if you can catch an epidemic in the first few weeks, it makes all the difference.

The problem is bad information. As my students often remind me, news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free.

y (GHS) Index – that scores countries on six dimensions: prevention, detection, response, health system, risk environment and compliance with international standards. No country scores perfectly on all six. China has detected and responded to this epidemic pretty well, though its health system is now stretched beyond capacity, but it is weak on prevention

How well is the US prepared?The US ranks high on the GHS index, but is still unprepared for a severe pandemic, should one happen. Malfunctioning coronavirus tests have frustrated public health labs and delayed outbreak monitoring. Supplies of masks, suits and other protective material for health workers are running low in the midst of a moderately severe flu season.

Since the creation of a much-needed public health emergency preparedness fund in the aftermath of 9/11, its budget and the public health functions it supports have been steadily reduced. This is the mentality that left the world vulnerable to the devastating 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa – that is, close the fire department and cancel the fire insurance as nobody’s house or factory has burned down lately. It’s time we learned that the bugs never stop mutating and crossing over to humans.

What exactly should we be doing faster?Fewer than one in three countries are close to being prepared to confront an epidemic, which leaves the vast majority of the world’s population vulnerable.

"We want to negotiate quickly, we want to stick to the time plan, and so at this point I don't think there is anything to suggest these negotiations cannot start as was agreed."

"Maybe, this is a chance that we can come up to a more reasonable Brexit negotiations because in the last time (recently) I really had the feeling that everything was just being very tough and it doesn't make sense to be tough.

Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, said he wanted discussions to proceed without delay, while Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator for Brexit, said "negotiations should start when UK is ready".

As part of Trump's U.S.-Taliban deal, U.S. forces immediately began drawing down and closing bases, while the Taliban committed to no longer provide safe haven to al-Qaida and to negotiate with government representatives on a political settlement and ceasefire.

Biden is still weighing options presented to him by the Pentagon that include withdrawing all U.S. troops by or close to the May 1 deadline, keeping the troops there indefinitely, or keeping them there for another six months into November, according to a U.S. official.

Still, there has been some movement in the last week. After a high-level summit in Moscow, the government and Taliban agreed to "accelerate the (peace) process," according to Abdullah Abdullah, the government's lead negotiator. The same meetings brought consensus among the U.S., Russia, China and Pakistan, who issued a joint statement that called on the sides to "engage immediately," urged the Taliban not to launch a spring offensive and agreed Afghanistan should not become an Islamic emirate again.

"The diplomacy on Afghanistan has been moving forward," Blinken said Wednesday, pointing to a second summit to be hosted by Turkey next month. The top U.S. diplomat wrapped up two days of meetings with NATO allies in Brussels, where he stressed the administration's consultations with those partner forces and said, "That's going to be an important factor in informing his (Biden's) thinking" on withdrawal.

As CNN's KFile reported, in the years before taking office, many of the administration's top officials harshly criticized President Donald Trump's lack of action against Saudi Arabia and bin Salman.

Sanctioning the crown prince, known as MBS, would have been "too complicated," according to two administration officials, and could have jeopardized US military interests in the kingdom.

One central reason: MBS has near complete control over all the country's levers of power. He is not only the crown prince, he is the deputy prime minister, defense minister, chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, chairman of the Council of Political and Security Affairs and the head of Aramco, the state-owned oil and natural gas company.

The White House has stood its ground over the last few days, defending its decision to spare MBS, though struggling at times to explain its rationale.

Psaki added that as President, Biden's role "is to act in the national interest of the United States. And that's exactly what he's doing."

"I don't think he does go far enough, although you have to give him credit because he's actually increased sanctions and he's increased the travel bans on those individuals who were directly responsible," Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week."

That's all done little to appease angry lawmakers, including many Democrats, who have lashed out at the Biden team's decision not to sanction MBS. Despite the Biden administration's tough talk, the full recalibration that they promised "did not happen," said a Democratic aide on Capitol Hill.

The Biden administration also failed to keep Congress informed in the run-up to the actions they planned to take, two congressional aides said.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers immediately announced last week that more needed to be done to hold MBS accountable, and some are working up legislation.

"We are working to put the US Saudi relationship on the right footing," Price told reporters on Monday.

"I don't think anybody thinks that the crown prince was not responsible, in other words, that he knew about it and that he approved of it," Portman added. "So, I do think there ought to be something additional that focuses on him."

"There's obviously a difficult balance that the Biden administration is trying to strike here," she added. "The administration is doing a really good balancing act where Biden is saying they are not going to condone the transactional approach or Whatsapp diplomacy."

"There's no question he and other top advisors view Saudi Arabia as far too important to justify" MBS sanctions, the former administration official said.