Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The museum has an extraordinary collection of spy gadgets, weapons and espionage memorabilia from before World War II to the present—more than 28,000 items, of which 18,000 have been cataloged—and hundreds are on display.

“The CIA has a rich history, and our museum is where we touch that history.”

While the Musmanno collection, comprising 1,000 linear feet of photographs, papers and artifacts, came to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh several years after the judge's death, the recordings remained inaccessible until the mid-2000s, around the time that Thomas White, Duquesne's archivist and curator of special collections, began working at the school. We spoke with White about the interviews.

The collection was given by the Musmanno family to Duquesne in 1980. Literally, they had everything that was his. We were aware that the films existed, but the canisters were unlabeled, and of course they’re on old reel film, so we had no way to play them.

Refugee vetting has an excellent record. Of 785,000 refugees admitted to the United States since 9/11, just three have been arrested for terrorism-related charges, according to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this.

just as we saw in the summer with immigration writ large, the progression doesn't end with Trump. We've had three presidential elections since the 9/11 terror attacks and no presidential candidate has ever proposed shutting down mosques in the United States or creating a special registry and identification cards for Muslims living in the United States.

So yesterday Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio whether he'd shut down radical mosques like Trump. He tried to deflect the question by saying that it wasn't about mosques but closing down any facility that was promoting radicalism. In other words, Rubio, while clearly not eager to answer the question, pointedly refused to rule out following Trump's lead.

It is a very good example of how Trump is not only shaping the debate on the right but rapidly mainstreaming ideas that were as recently as a week ago considered entirely outside the realm of mainstream political discourse.

It's particularly effective with the less sophisticated and principled candidates like Rubio. Jeb Bush said flatly this morning that Trump's database proposal is "just wrong." But Ben Carson quickly took Trump's lead comparing Syrian refugees to "mad dogs." The difference is that Marco Rubio could very well be president in 18 months. Jeb Bush won't be.

this is no longer a matter of Trump yakking on about building a gilded 100-foot wall along the southern border and having Mexico agree to pay for it. Trump is now proposing things that sound like they put millions of American citizens and resident aliens on a road to something like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The workers I interviewed after the recession for my book on unemployment—less-educated factory workers—offer some tentative clues about what might be driving the disquieting trends described by the Case and Deaton study.

This is one of the groups hit hardest by the rising inequality and greater risk of unemployment and financial insecurity that have become features of today’s economy, and their experiences put in concrete terms how the economy and culture have become more hostile to workers not lucky enough to be working in posh offices on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

When it comes to explaining American economic trends, it is important to remember how critical a role manufacturing and unions have played in the building—and now dismantling—of a strong middle class.

or generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to college, allowing families—first white ethnic immigrants, and then others—to be upwardly mobile.

But in the late ’90s—the beginning of the crisis period that Case and Deaton identify—the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. dropped dramatically.

Political leaders, bankrolled by the wealthy, rolled back the interventionist policies of the New Deal and postwar period.

Corporations, once relatively tolerant of unions, tapped a cottage industry of anti-union consultants and adopted unseemly tactics to crush any organizing drives in their workplaces.

the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree

Certainly, it cannot be said enough that African Americans and Latinos continue to fare significantly worse than whites in terms of their overall rates of death and disease, even if the racial gap has narrowed.

. In the decades after World War II, racial minorities were denied many of the jobs, loans, and other resources that allowed the white majority to buy homes and accrue wealth.

If the gains of economic growth have gone largely to the rich in recent years, in that earlier period the white working class could count on hefty rises in living standards from generation to generation, and they grew accustomed to that upward trajectory of growing prosperity.

For example, while the disappearance of high-paying jobs for those with little education is a large part of the overall story of a shrinking middle class, it can’t wholly account for the uptick of mortality identified in the Case and Deaton study.

Likewise, the groups that have been affected most viciously by these market trends in the U.S., African Americans and Latinos, have not suffered the dramatic increases in death by suicide or substance abuse that whites have.

When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too).

As scholars of family life as politically distinct as Andrew Cherlin and Charles Murray have stressed, college graduates and the less educated have greatly diverged in terms of when and how they partner up and have kids.

Nowadays, well-educated couples are much more likely to marry, stay married, and have children within marriage than those with less schooling.

A large part of the explanation for this must be that society’s attitudes about the sanctity and permanence of marriage have changed. But it’s important to note that there is an economic dimension to these trends, too—as the frequent separations and divorces I saw among the long-term unemployed made plain to me.

Those struggling financially are less likely to follow the traditional path of first comes marriage, then comes a baby.

The waning of religious belief may be another trend aggravating the modern malaise of the white working class. Since the ’90s, the number of Americans who declare no religious preference on surveys has almost tripled—from 8 percent at the beginning of that decade, to 21 percent in 2014.

Many said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles, yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be around people because they were out of work.

For others, their religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a source of community.

The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame.

America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too.

hite Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree.

To this day, the supreme value of education remains one of the few things that Americans of all persuasions (presidential candidates included) can agree on.

Some of the analysis of the Case and Deaton article has focused rightly on recent developments in this country’s drug crisis—namely, the surge in abuse of prescription opioids, and the resurgence in heroin use, notably among whites.

There is clearly a pressing need to deal more vigorously with this drug problem and the epidemic of fatal overdoses and liver disease that has affected the poor and working class in particular.

At the same time, it should be said that risky individual behaviors are shaped by broader social conditions. As the researchers Bruce Link and Jo Phelan have argued, effective health interventions need to consider the underlying factors that put people “at risk of risks”—specifically, socioeconomic status and social support.

One parting observation, then, is that policies to keep people from sinking into poverty and long-term unemployment can make a huge difference.

Recent polls show that as many as 50 percent of Germans can at least imagine voting for the Green Party, particularly because of its progressive position on migration and diversity.

when anti-immigrant protesters — many of them baby boomers or older — began their wave of protest marches in 2015, most of the people in Germany and abroad were surprised. But the authoritarianism and the anger about foreigners had been there all along; as the protesters themselves said, the problem was no one listened. And no one provided hope.

In recent elections in Bavaria, the Green Party was led by Katharina Schulze, 33, and Ludwig Hartmann, 40. In the past their youth alone would have been considered disqualifying. Instead, they were able to draw in enough disaffected young Bavarians to win 17.5 percent of the vote, up from 8.6 percent in 2013 — an astonishing total for a left-leaning party in such a conservative state.

Put differently, the real challenge in Germany is not so much the left-right divide as it is a generational split. The older generations, reared on consensus, are not used to open public debate, let alone diversity. But the younger ones are opting for a new social order that includes people of other ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations. They do not fear immigrants as much as they fear the fact that they can’t afford housing or taking care of their parents once they get old.

Younger generations have always had different needs from their elders, but in the past the establishment has found ways to meet those needs without ceding power. That’s no longer acceptable to young Germans. They don’t just demand a more equitable, open society. They want to shape it. If Germany’s establishment resists them, it will set the country on the path to years of social turmoil.

That’s more than agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining combined and second only to education, health care and social assistance, which includes teachers, doctors, nurses and social service counselors. Most of those jobs are government funded.

Overall, manufacturing employs about one in eight workers in the country’s 704 entirely rural counties.

After World War II, small town prosperity relied on its contribution to the industrial economy.

agglomeration, one of the most powerful forces shaping the American economy over the last three decades. Innovative companies choose to locate where other successful, innovative companies are.

Robots and workers in China put together most of the manufactured goods that Americans buy

and the high-tech industries powering the economy today don’t have much need for the cheap labor that rural communities contributed to America’s industrial past. They mostly need highly educated workers. They find those most easily in big cities, not in small towns.

In a report published in November, Mark Muro, William Galston and Clara Hendrickson of the Brookings Institution laid out a portfolio of ideas to rescue the substantial swath of the country that they identify as “left behind.”

They identify critical shortages bedeviling declining communities: workers with digital skills, broadband connections, capital. And they have plans to address them: I.T. training and education initiatives, regulatory changes to boost lending to small businesses, incentives to invest in broadband.

even the authors concede that they may not be up to the task. “I don’t know if these ideas are going to work,” Mr. Galston acknowledged when I pressed him on the issue. “But it is worth making the effort.”

But factory jobs can no longer keep small-town America afloat. Even after a robust eight-year growth spell, there are fewer than 13 million workers in manufacturing across the entire economy

That’s where they can find lots of highly skilled workers. The more densely packed these pools of talent are, the more workers can learn from each other and the more productive they become. This dynamic feeds on itself,

“We have a spatial reorganization of the economy,” said Mr. Muro. “We have an archipelago of superstars in an ocean of low-productivity sectors.”

what are the odds that, say, a small town like Amory, Miss., where 14 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree and a quarter of its 2,500 workers work in small-scale manufacturing, have a chance to attract well-paid tech jobs?

Consider a recent Brookings Institution study by Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence Summers

After examining a range of potential policy interventions, they conclude that a targeted employment subsidy, such as the earned-income tax credit, is probably the most powerful tool available to revive employment. But they, too, are not sure it will work. “Our call for a wage subsidy is us saying, ‘We can’t figure this out, and we hope the private sector will,’ ”

Excluding these places, the United States is still left with 50 to 55 million people living in rural communities that no longer have much to offer them economically.

Instead of so-called place-based policies to revitalize small towns, why not help their residents take advantage of opportunities where the opportunities are

Geographic mobility hit a historical low in 2017, when only 11 percent of Americans picked up shop and moved — half the rate of 1951. One of the key reasons is that housing in the prosperous cities that offer the most opportunities has become too expensive.

Even if moving people might prove more efficient on paper than restoring places, many people — especially older people and the family members who care for them — may choose to remain in rural area

What’s more, the costs of rural poverty are looming over American society. Think of the opioid addiction taking over rural America, of the spike in crime, of the wasted human resources in places where only a third of adults hold a job.

if today’s polarized politics are noxious, what might they look like in a country perpetually divided between diverse, prosperous liberal cities and a largely white rural America in decline? As Mr. Galston warned: “Think through the political consequences of saying to a substantial portion of Americans, which is even more substantial in political terms, ‘We think you’re toast.’ ”

Marriage was often arranged.

The largest shift happened after World War II.

Family lineage is more important than marriage.

(1602-1868), women did not legally exist

Wives could be returned to her family if she failed to produce an heir.

All were heads of the household. Now, should could be the head of the household (Sato, 1987)

Japanese men average only 30 minutes of housework, child care, and elder care each day (North, 2009).

Women are entitled to not much beyond motherhood; men are not entitled to much beyond work (Bae, 2010).

The Civil Code of 1947 granted woman every possible legal right:

Marriage and children are synonymous

women are expected to submit to male authority in three ways

Motherhood is adulthood in many regards.

Equality benefits men as much as it does women.

Many men want to be present fathers rather than distant father figures.

Increasingly, families want to have daughters rather than sons.

The preference for daughters points to a continuation of tradition in regards to women and a more liberal view with men.

the equality is the option to continue traditional ways if she chooses

Women are demure; men are assertive. These are traditional traits in both Japanese and American societies.

Men are able to shed the silliness of masculinity (Big boys don’t cry. Men must be strong, etc)

A time traveler from the Reagan era would no longer recognize the Republican Party, but most Republican politicians feel no embarrassment supporting policies they once condemned.

Since World War II, Republicans have styled themselves the party of national defense. Yet under President Trump, they have unsettled our alliances and professed a strange new respect for Vladimir Putin.

The Republicans were once the party of global free trade, a system with major flaws but one that requires reform, not ham-handed overthrow. Yet the president believes he can bully longtime allies and force them to accept bilateral trade deals on his terms.

An enduring caricature of the old-time Republican is the penny-pinching deficit hawk.

But the president’s high-decibel smear campaign against the professionals of the F.B.I. destroys the party’s pretense of being a friend of law enforcement

the deficit, thanks partly to the tax cut, is projected after years of decline to explode to a trillion dollars annually.

Tax cuts, regardless of the deficit, are an obsession with Republicans and a source of shameless hypocrisy.

Under Mr. Trump, who has extolled leveraging other people’s money while declaring that debt is good, the party is no longer even half pregnant. His tax act, passed exclusively with Republican votes in both the House and the Senate, increases the national debt by over a trillion dollars and awards 62 percent of its monetary benefits to the richest 1 percent of Americans.

Now the E.P.A. is being systematically gutted. Its administrator, Scott Pruitt, has named as chairman of its science advisory board a person who criticizes the E.P.A.’s standards for exposure to mercury (a neurotoxin causing severe brain damage) and believes ozone pollution rules are unnecessary because Americans spend most of their time indoors.

Republicans always counted themselves as strong supporters of law and order.

Republicans were once the party of conservation and the environment: from Abraham Lincoln, who set aside Yosemite for what later became a national park, to Theodore Roosevelt, preserving 230 million acres of public land, to Richard Nixon, who signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

So what do Republicans have left? The tax cut, the sole important legislation from the Republican Congress, shows that catering to its rich contributors is the party’s only policy. The rest of its agenda is simply tactics and trickery.

As the party has become unmoored from positive belief, it has grown manipulative, demagogic and contemptuous of truth.

It has culminated in the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway’s appealing to “alternative facts,” meaning lies, on behalf of her boss, who has made an average of 5.6 false or misleading claims a day since his inauguration.

Today’s Republican Party is incapable of honest and coherent governance, with “right” or “wrong” reduced to a question of whether it helps the party.

A few Republicans protest the president’s disgraceful behavior, but never in a way that matters. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona has become famous for sanctimonious speeches denouncing the latest outrage, but he votes with machine-like consistency in favor of the president’s destructive agenda and unqualified nominees.

Ultimately, the party’s spiritual sickness isn’t about Mr. Trump. Eight years ago, did Republican officeholders shut down the nonsense that Mr. Obama was a secret Muslim? For that matter, a quarter-century ago, did they quash the idiotic charge that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster?

Though scientists weren’t allowed to take samples from the skull, they noted in the study, its shape seemed “totally comparable” to radiographies of Hitler’s skull taken a year before his death.

The analysis corroborated frequently-cited claims that Hitler was a vegetarian, but could not conclusively prove whether he took cyanide before the gunshot. Bluish deposits on his false teeth, the researchers wrote, suggest a variety of different hypotheses—did some chemical reaction take place between his fake teeth and the cyanide at the moment of death, during his cremation, or while the remains were buried?

Economists focus not on the absolute level of the debt, but on the interest costs to service it relative to the size of the economy. So a prolonged recession tends to be worse for the debt picture than some extra spending. Moreover, signals from financial markets suggest that the government should have little trouble borrowing vast sums of money on favorable terms

The exact numbers are still unknowable. The $2 trillion stimulus package has come together so quickly that the budget office has not had time to do its customary modeling of its fiscal impact. (Parts of the legislation are designed as loans, so the hit to the Treasury will be less than the headline number.) G.D.P. is a guessing game at this point.

As the economic outlook dimmed over the last month, interest rates plunged to unprecedented lows. The United States government can issue 30-year bonds at only a 1.44 percent interest rate at Thursday’s close — and in inflation-adjusted terms, borrowing costs are negative.

Simple math shows why. If the national debt were to rise by $2 trillion compared with what had been forecast, and the government paid for it by issuing 30-year bonds at current rates, the debt service cost would be about $29 billion a year, a trivial amount in a $20 trillion economy. And unlike a private borrower, the government never need pay down its debt; theoretically the debt can remain on the books indefinitely so long as the cost of interest payments is manageable, which in turn depends on economic growth.

The Fed may one day need to raise interest rates and sell off its holdings of Treasury bonds to prevent inflation. But that would most likely occur at a time when the economy had returned to its pre-coronavirus trajectory and was seeing higher inflation levels than have been evident over the last decade.All evidence now suggests that day is far away. Currently deflation, or falling prices, is more likely to be a problem. The price of oil, at around $23 a barrel, is roughly one-third the level at which it started the year, and bond prices imply that inflation will average only about 1.07 percent annually over the coming decade.

In looking at the political implications of this horror show, one need only recall the 2008 Great Recession. The causes of that financial collapse — e.g., unregulated financial instruments, negligence from ratings companies, lender deception, the Federal Reserve’s failure to act — were complicated.

the politicians who resisted warnings (from then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, among other people) and favored a Wild West deregulated financial industry have unique culpability. And the party in charge at the time — the Republicans — bore the brunt of the voters wrath at the polls. Do we imagine this domestic debacle will play out differently?

Trump and his Republicans are vulnerable on three counts: failure to act to head off the pandemic, failure to respond adequately to the crisis and corruption in the response

Perhaps most important, Pelosi will set up a House select committee to oversee the entire coronavirus effort, much like then-Sen. Harry Truman did for World War II funding, to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.

Trump will faces three major challenges: Did he do everything to head off a deep recession? Did he do enough to help those hurt? Did he prevent profiteering and corruption that diverted and from the needy? Unless the answer to all three is “yes,” Trump will have a hard time persuading Americans to leave him in charge of mitigation and recovery.

there is no evidence that Wall Street’s mega-expansion made the rest of the economy more efficient. On the contrary, growth in family incomes slowed down as finance rose — although a few people became immensely rich

the famous Bloomberg Terminal, a proprietary computer system that gives subscribers real-time access to large quantities of financial data. This access is incredibly expensive — a subscription costs around $24,000 a year. But it’s a must-have in the financial industry, because traders with Bloomberg Terminals can react to market events a few minutes faster than those without.It’s an extremely profitable business. But is it good for the economy? No

Bloomberg has, in effect, made his billions off a financial arms race that costs vast sums but leaves everyone pretty much back where they started.

Warren had made a name for herself as a crusader against financial industry fraud and excess.It wasn’t just talk. One key piece of the reforms instituted after the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was Warren’s brainchild. Furthermore, by all accounts the bureau was wildly successful, saving ordinary families billions, until the Trump administration set about eviscerating it.

I have no idea how or if Wednesday’s debate will affect the Democratic race. But it may have helped remind Democrats that corruption, fraud and the excesses of Wall Street in particular can be potent political issues — especially against a president who is both personally corrupt and so obviously a friend to fraudsters.

“As the memory of World War II, the Holocaust and the Gulag fades, so too does the antipathy to the illiberal ideologies that spawned Europe’s past horrors,” writes James Kirchick in his superb if dismaying book “The End of Europe”: “This is evidenced in the rising electoral success of populist authoritarian parties of the extreme left and right, none of which have anything new to say, yet claim the mantle of ideological innovation and moral virtue.”

It took three generations to lose the lessons of prewar isolationism. It took two to ignore the benefits of postwar European integration. If Corbyn’s rise is something to go by, it has taken just a single generation to forget the sins of the far left: anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism; anti-Americanism masquerading as pacifism; fellow-traveling with dictators and terrorists masquerading as sympathy for the wretched of the earth.

democracy is a system in which people are only accountable to themselves. The recklessness of their leaders is a result of personal choices at the ballot box, not impersonal social or economic forces.

All of this is explored in If I Forget, a poignant, powerful drama by Steven Levenson that explores the erosion of Jewish identity in America since World War II in the middle of a scorching family drama in which everybody threatens to tear everybody else to pieces.

Still, Sharma’s broader point remains: The real threat of the economic slowdown is to political stability. For decades, advanced democracies, including the United States, have adopted a similar political model. It assumed that economic growth could deliver social peace and loyalty to democratic values.

The system’s victims and critics could be bought off. But the model required — and most people took for granted — a dynamic economy that could boost living standards and expand welfare benefits. This assurance has now gone missing. At best, the model desperately needs repair; at worst, it is busted.