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Justice Ginsburg, who died in September, argued six cases in the Supreme Court. In the first, Frontiero v. Richardson in 1973, she persuaded the court that the Air Force’s unequal treatment of the husbands of female officers, who were denied housing and medical benefits, violated equal protection principles.

In 1981, in Rostker v. Goldberg, the Supreme Court rejected a sex-discrimination challenge to the registration requirement, reasoning that it was justified because women could not at that time serve in combat.

In 2019, Judge Gray H. Miller, of the Federal District Court in Houston, ruled that since women can now serve in combat, the men-only registration requirement was no longer justified.

The government has not drafted anyone since the Vietnam War, and there is no reason to think that will change.

“Should the court declare the men-only registration requirement unconstitutional,” their brief said, “Congress has considerable latitude to decide how to respond. It could require everyone between the ages of 18 and 26, regardless of sex, to register; it could rescind the registration requirement entirely; or it could adopt a new approach altogether, such as replacing” the registration requirement “with a more expansive national service requirement.”

Trump’s pardon, a one-page document bearing a Justice Department seal, clears Bannon of “offenses charged” in the border-wall donation drive and “for any other offenses” that could be charged in connection to it.

Presidential pardons do not apply to state investigations.

Such collaboration between the attorney general and the district attorney is rare. The two law enforcement officials are overseeing separate inquiries into Trump and his business dealings, investigations focused on whether the values of certain assets were manipulated to gain tax benefits and favorable loan rates in violation of the state law, but it is not believed the two agencies are coordinating.

As state attorney general, James has original jurisdiction over money laundering cases in New York, one person familiar with the collaboration between her office and Vance’s said, while the district attorney can prosecute any criminal offense suspected of occurring in Manhattan. It is possible Bannon could face criminal prosecution and potential civil action, although it is not clear whether such a consideration has been discussed.

“I remember shaking in that moment,” Manns, who is Black, told CNN. “That happened right down the hall from where I sleep, from where I’m supposed to be safe. … The thought that it could be someone I’ve lived with all these months really terrified me.”

“It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” said the lead author of the report, Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong.”

The opioid epidemic is a major driver of the worrisome numbers, but far from the sole cause. The study found that improvements in life expectancy, largely because of lower rates of infant mortality, began to slow in the 1980s, long before the opioid epidemic became a national tragedy

Some of it may be due to obesity, some of it may be due to drug addiction, some of it may be due to distracted driving from cellphones

Given the breadth and pervasiveness of the trend, “it suggests that the cause has to be systemic, that there’s some root cause that’s causing adverse health across many different dimensions for working-age adults.”

The risk of death from drug overdoses increased 486 percent for midlife women between 1999 and 2017; the risk increased 351 percent for men in that same period. Women also experienced a bigger relative increase in risk of suicide and alcohol-related liver disease.

The all-cause death rate — meaning deaths per 100,000 people — rose 6 percent from 2010 to 2017 among working-age people in the United States

There’s something more fundamental about how people are feeling at some level — whether it’s economic, whether it’s stress, whether it’s deterioration of family,” she said. “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that’s leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.”

. The general trend: Life expectancy improved a great deal for several decades, particularly in the 1970s, then slowed down, leveled off, and finally reversed course after 2014, decreasing three years in a row.

Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in America today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more

Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose much-publicized report in 2015 highlighted the death rates in middle-aged whites, published a paper in 2017 pointing to a widening gap in health associated with levels of education, a trend dating to the 1970s. Case told reporters their research showed a “sea of despair” in the United States among people with only a high school diploma or less. She declined to comment on the new report.

“When they get up into their 20s, 30s and 40s, they’re carrying the risk factors of obesity that were acquired when they were children. We didn’t see that in previous generations.”

Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population ages 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population ages 2 to 19 is obese.

The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998 and since then, the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as America’s “health disadvantage.”

Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data.

The 33,000 excess deaths are an estimate based on the number of all-cause midlife deaths from 2010 to 2017 that would be expected if mortality was unchanged vs. the number of deaths actually recorded by medical examiners.

Outside researchers praised the study for knitting together so much research into a sweeping look at U.S. mortality trends.“This report has universal relevance. It has broad implications for all of society,” said Howard Koh, a professor of public health at Harvard University who was not part of the research team.

The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998, and since then the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as the United States’ “health disadvantage.”

For example, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, cigarette companies aggressively marketed to women, and the health effects of that push may not show up for decades.

Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in the United States today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more. Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population age 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population age 2 to 19 is obese.

Many influential interest groups and lawmakers are fighting to include different ideas.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said he supported the infrastructure plan’s inclusion of the Pro Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize

The fraught politics of personal cars, SUVs and diesel trucks, meanwhile, meant some highly effective climate policies didn’t make it into Biden’s plan.

White House Deputy National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said in a phone interview. “It’s about making sure that the investments are made in a way that stretches the geography of opportunity to every Zip code, that fully avails the environmental justice upside and totally leans into the supply- chain and domestic manufacturing opportunities that all this presents.”

“The focus across the board is to try to deliver the upside in small towns and big cities and all the places in between, with an emphasis on communities that are very often left behind and left out,

“In the climate space, if we cared only about optimizing economic efficiency we’d probably only consider a carbon price,” he added. “But as we’ve learned from over 15 years of carbon-pricing around the globe, that works out better on economists’ whiteboards than it does in reality.”

Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy team at the center-left think tank Third Way, said in an email, “The 'best’ use of taxpayer funds isn’t always the one that maximizes economic efficiencies.”

Some of the biggest emissions savings in transportation would come from ending the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, followed soon after by heavy trucks. The plan avoids those politically dicey mandates.

The incentives and other policies mirror those championed by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for major rebates when drivers buy electric vehicles.

The president’s infrastructure ambitions depend on Schumer’s ability to shepherd a package through the evenly split Senate.

Even supporters of the infrastructure push say it has elements that bend to political forces. Some economists, for instance, believe the plan’s call for “Buy American” provisions to ensure infrastructure is made by American workers will drive up the cost of the measures for the federal government. But those provisions are fiercely supported by unions and other liberal groups because they boost the amount of federal spending that has to be directed to American workers.

The “replacement” demagoguery seeks to exploit fears rooted in reaction to a truism: Immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population since national origins quotas were ended in the 1960s.

But as Brownstein notes, the further “browning” of America will be caused not primarily by new immigration, but rather the higher reproduction rates of immigrants already here and their descendants, relative to slower reproduction among Whites.

That means restricting immigration, even severely, cannot halt the transition to a majority-minority country by 2060. But it would mean a smaller workforce relative to the aging population.

To fully appreciate what a despicable scam this is, however, we need to look at the darker implications of the “replacement” narrative.

The argument isn’t just that liberals want more immigration to win future elections. It’s also that elites are deliberately importing more immigrants to threaten aging Whites’ long term survival.

Prominent Republicans who have echoed Carlson’s line in a deceptively softer form also trade on this idea. They have said liberals want more immigration to “permanently transform” our “political landscape” and to “remake the demographics of America” to “stay in power forever.”

What’s unmistakable, again and again, is the dark invocation of permanent erasure and elimination

There’s an audience for this: A recent survey by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” As Anderson told Ezra Klein, there is a “real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege.”

As Ed Kilgore writes, this intimation of an “overclass-underclass alliance” that feasts parasitically on the authentic “producerist” majority of “hard-working Americans” is a decades-old right wing populist trope that trades in “paranoia” of “uncommon power.”

Third, though the world has changed since 2016, the underlying contours of the American electoral map haven’t shifted much. Four years ago, Trump triumphed over Hillary Clinton by winning swing states such as Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. This year, those same states again may be decisive: Trump’s path to a majority is narrow without Michigan and Wisconsin, and it will be extremely difficult for him to win without Florida or Pennsylvania.

Finally, remember: Like many recent races, this contest is still relatively close. We live in an era of tight elections: No candidate since Bill Clinton has won the popular vote by more than eight percentage points.

The problem echoes the country’s catastrophic stumbles early in the pandemic, when a lack of testing allowed the virus to spread widely. Currently, only a tiny fraction of all positive coronavirus tests in the United States are forwarded for further sequencing.

t if scientists don’t know what strains are moving through the population, the mutations that matter may pop up undetected.

For months, scientists have been sounding alarms and trying to ramp up genetic sequencing of test samples, but the effort has been plagued by a lack of funding, political will and federal coordination

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the government is increasing the level of sequencing nationwide.“We have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we’ve done so far,”

Ultimately, the country needs real-time data — similar to the dashboards now used to track daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths — to track variants and their prevalence across the country

“None of that exists right now. We’re incredibly behind compared to other countries,”

The U.S. effort is so underdeveloped that it’s impossible to say exactly how many virus cases are sequenced daily.

The CDC has warned that the variant found in the United Kingdom — which British scientists said could be up to 70 percent more transmissible — could become dominant in the United States by March.

It also recently contracted with four private companies — Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix — to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said.

Illumina estimates that the country needs to sequence 5 percent of its coronavirus cases to detect a new variant when the variant represents about 0.1 percent to 1.0 percent of the country’s case

However, the United States so far has only sequenced about 0.32 percent of its total cases

the country ranks 38th out of 130 countries reporting whole-genome sequencing data.

The United States has sequenced 84,177 samples out of 25.7 million cases as of Friday, according to a Washington Post analysis. By comparison, the United Kingdom, in ninth place, has sequenced 214,000 genomes — almost 6 percent — of the country’s 3.7 million cases.

Unlike the United States, the U.K. invested in genetic sequencing early on in the pandemic, launching its genomics consortium in March with a $27 million investment and a multimillion-dollar boost late last year.

Even before the emergence of mutations such as the variants first discovered in South Africa and the United Kingdom, U.S. experts had been warning for months about the need for a national standard for genetic surveillance.

In May, the CDC launched a surveillance program for the coronavirus called SPHERES (SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing for Public Health Emergency Response, Epidemiology, and Surveillance). But, in practice, the program relied on a haphazard patchwork of academic labs contributing genetic sequencing on a volunteer basis.

A July report by the National Academies of Science said that “poor funding, coordination, and capacity” had led to a “patchy, typically passive, and reactive” U.S. sequencing effort.

this approach to emotional development neglects the full, complicated range of unhappy feelings that are just as valid a part of human life as happiness is — from sadness to frustration, from anger to fear, from guilt to disappointment, boredom or disgust.

Much research on well-being makes clear that Americans’ typical approaches to the pursuit of happiness is far from helpful to our kids. Anxiety and mental health problems in children and teens have been steadily increasing

In fact, the more we teach our kids to stay positive, at the expense of helping them accept occasional difficult feelings, the less we equip them with tools to manage such feelings when life inevitably gets hard

We tend to have a similar disdain for negative thoughts. Americans like to believe that our thoughts define us: that we need to control that running commentary, shape it and aggressively avoid the “bad” thoughts that supposedly doom us to unhappiness

Research into mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy reveals that it’s not negative thoughts that cause depression, anxiety, amotivation or any other mental rut we’re afraid of. It is when negative thoughts become sticky that we are more prone to those problems.

The more we fight with our thoughts, the more we give them the power to stick.

Being fixated on having only the “right” kind of thoughts breeds the cognitive rigidity that creates tunnel vision, locks us into unhelpful patterns, increases our risk of rumination, obsessions and compulsions, and decreases our ability to adapt to setbacks.

Commit to teaching and practicing the pause.

forced happiness, happiness as a sole goal without a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, or the pretense of happiness that stems from the expectation that anything less is toxic, can turn such “happiness” harmful in its own right.

If you can help your child develop meta-cognition — the ability to think about their thoughts and keep from getting stuck within them — and mindfulness, which helps them become a gentle, nonjudgmental observer of their thoughts and feelings, attuned in the moment to their experience, then you are giving them psychological tools to help them for a lifetime.

ADEncourage turning anxious thought patterns into characters.

What better time to begin teaching our kids that unhappiness has a rightful place in a full and — yes — truly happy life? It is often the difficult emotions that have the most to teach us about ourselves, and that give us the opportunity to find meaning and connect with others.

Encourage labeling distressing thoughts like “I’m having the thought no one likes me” rather than “No one likes me,” which helps your child separate from them.

a child with social anxiety may call their negative self-talk “The Stage-Fright Bully” and decide that it has nothing important to say — and that the show can go on.

Take the stance that feelings, even big ones, are always okay.

Emphasize that it’s how we handle emotions that matters most, and we can choose those actions mindfully

Teach your kids that their thoughts don’t define them. Encourage your children to observe their thoughts with curiosity rather than fear, in a nonjudgmental way rather than with shame.

teach them that the anger is okay, but we must think through our actions carefully, noticing our thoughts and bodily sensations without launching into autopilot.

Every time they fully engage with a feeling and choose functional behavior, they strengthen their emotional intelligence and make it more likely that that feeling won’t impel them toward unhealthy habits in the future.

Enlarge your vocabulary about emotions

From “I” statements (“I was sad when you said that to me” rather than “You are being mean!”) to encouraging your kids to write or draw their feelings in a journal, research shows that the mere act of labeling a feeling can help us feel more in control and allow it to pass more quickly.

Observe and adjust your own habits of talking about feelings.

Pay particular attention to the times you invalidate your child’s emotions or try to force a different internal reaction: “You’re okay,”

Instead, choose empathy: “Sounds like that’s really upsetting; let’s think about how we can work through this.”

Talk about true happiness as more than just pleasure or ease.

We all want our kids to be happy. But what they absorb about what that means is crucial. By opening them up to the idea of a sense of purpose, finding meaning in their life, or defining the values important to them, they will have a better understanding of how even challenging, difficult times can cultivate happiness.

“The central paradox at the heart of U-Va. is also the central paradox of the nation, the unresolved paradox of American liberty,” McInnis said. “How is it that the nation that defined the natural rights of humankind did so within a system that denied those same rights to millions of people?”

efferson insisted, the up-and-coming generation should fix the problem by “emancipating the enslaved and deporting them to Africa,” Taylor said

Instead, early U-Va. graduates became “leading voices in the pro-slavery movement, soldiers in the Confederate Army, and political leaders in the Confederate States of America,” McInnis wrote in “Educated in Tyranny.”

The vast majority of the student body — numbering between 100 and 150 people each year — hailed from wealthy, Southern slaveholding families. Plantation-owning parents clamored to send their sons to U-Va., lauded as a prestigious alternative to the Northern schools they feared as dangerous hotbeds of anti-slavery sentiment, according to Taylor.

Ultrarich Southerners were also some of the only Americans able to afford tuition at U-Va., then “the most expensive college” in the country, Taylor said.

“Jefferson physically designed a campus that internalized everything he had learned living on plantations,” McInnis said. “It is architecturally set up to be a landscape of slavery.”

Enslaved people also catered to students’ daily whims. “Every afternoon, an enslaved servant called on his assigned student,” Taylor wrote in “Thomas Jefferson’s Education.” The enslaved person then “[took] orders for errands on the grounds or in town.”

At U-Va. — as at every Southern university in America during this era — bullying the enslaved formed “part of daily existence,” McInnis said. It was also performance art, Taylor added: a way for rich young men to prove their mettle to their peers.

“The episodes we do know of, other students are watching and applauding,” Taylor said. “This was a whole generation of men who just behaved monstrously.”

There’s a broad understanding that 'slavery is bad, people got whipped,’ but there’s also an urge to compartmentalize it: ‘That was bad, but it’s over with, and we should focus on the good stuff like U-Va.’s cutting-edge education and science,’ ” he said.“We’re not trying to ruin people’s day — but if you want to understand society, you’ve got to understand how everything is woven together, the good with the bad.”

Several developments over the past week seemed to add fuel to the protests: Wildfires ravaged parts of the country, but two firefighting helicopters were deemed inoperable because of government negligence; the minister of information announced plans to enforce a 20-cents-a-day fee for Internet phone calls, including on WhatsApp and Facebook; and there was a proposal to raise the value-added tax to 15 percent by 2022.

Thousands rushed to the streets, filling the capital, Beirut, with bonfires, destroying construction sites and advertisement boards, and tearing down politicians’ banners.

At least two prominent Lebanese politicians have publicly asked Hariri to resign. In his televised address, Hariri said that although the people have given the government many chances over the past three years, complacency and internal politics continued to stymie efforts to solve the country’s economic problems.

He suggested that anyone with a solution for the economic crisis should step up. But he did not offer any himself.

“The climate crisis is already here,” Iceland’s Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, told the crowd. “It is not just this glacier that has disappeared. We see the heat waves in Europe. We see floods. We see droughts.” Film crews pointed their cameras, while the wind whipped Jakobsdóttir’s hair and the paper on which she had written her remarks. “The time has come not for words, not necessarily for declarations, but for action,” she said.

“Some of the students who are here today are twenty years old,” he said, his voice shaking. “You may live to be a healthy ninety-year-old, and at that time you might have a favorite young person—a great-grandchild, maybe—who is the age you are now. When that person is a healthy ninety-year-old, the year will be 2160, and this event today will be in the order of direct memory from you to your grandchild

Sigurðsson, the glaciologist, insisted to Howe and Boyer that, even though Okjökull was the smallest named glacier in Iceland, its death was a major loss.

“A good friend has left us,” Sigurðsson said.

“Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.

When Sigurðsson conducted a glacier inventory in the early two-thousands, he found more than three hundred glaciers in Iceland; a repeat inventory, in 2017, revealed that fifty-six had disappeared. Many of them were small glaciers in the highlands, which had spent their lives almost entirely unseen. “Most of them didn’t even have names,” he told me. “But we have been working with local people to name every glacier so that they will not go unbaptized.”

in the past several years alone, we have witnessed not only an acceleration of the great thaw but also the sudden bleaching of the coral reefs, the rapid spread of the Sahara desert, continuous sea-level rise, the warming of the oceans, and record-breaking hurricanes each season and every year. This is one of the most distressing things about being alive today: we are witnessing geologic time collapse on a human scale.

Then the mountainside levelled, and the sight of the crater purged all thoughts from my head. The ice was gray, lifeless, uncanny.

“The age of this glacier was about three hundred years,” he said. “Its death was caused by excessive summer heat. Nothing was done to save it.”

Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.

Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.

ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

“It was not a party of privilege or white supremacy. Those dubious honors belonged to the Democratic Party,” he said, which remained predominantly in the Southern states until the 1960s civil rights movement, when a major political realignment occurred.

Six weeks before his death, Lincoln addressed a crowd outside the Capitol, prepared to begin his second term in office. The country was emerging from the worst crisis in American history — a war that had killed hundreds of thousands and divided the North and South.He concluded the address, saying: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

In that polarized moment, Holzer said, Lincoln didn’t blame fake news and enemies of the people. He emphasized humility, talked openly about his flaws and used a brilliance of language not to punish and humiliate but to inspire.

The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people’s activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize.

“Graduates will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems,” one commenter on the Slashdot message board said. “Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984.”

Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day.

The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed

“These administrators have made a justification for surveilling a student population because it serves their interests, in terms of the scholarships that come out of their budget, the reputation of their programs, the statistics for the school,”

one feeling is almost universally shared, according to interviews with more than a dozen students and faculty members: that the technology is becoming ubiquitous, and that the people being monitored — their peers, and themselves — can’t really do anything about it.

“We’re reinforcing this sense of powerlessness … when we could be asking harder questions, like: Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?”

SpotterEDU chief Rick Carter, a former college basketball coach, said he founded the app in 2015 as a way to watch over student athletes: Many schools already pay “class checkers” to make sure athletes remain eligible to play.

“Students today have so many distractions,” said Tami Chievous, an associate athletic director at the University of Missouri, where advisers text some freshmen athletes if they don’t show up within five minutes of class. “We have to make sure they’re doing the right thing.”

Students’ attendance and tardiness are scored into a point system that some professors use for grading, Carter said, and schools can use the data to “take action” against truant students, such as grabbing back scholarship funds

For even more data, schools can turn to the Austin-based start-up Degree Analytics, which uses WiFi check-ins to track the movements of roughly 200,000 students across 19 state universities, private colleges and other schools.

Benz tells school administrators that his system can solve “a real lack of understanding about the student experience”: By analyzing campus WiFi data, he said, 98 percent of their students can be measured and analyzed.

A classifier algorithm divides the student body into peer groups — “full-time freshmen,” say, or “commuter students” — and the system then compares each student to “normal” behavior, as defined by their peers. It also generates a “risk score” for students based around factors such as how much time they spent in community centers or at the gym.

Some administrators love the avalanche of data these kinds of WiFi-based systems bring. “Forget that old ominous line, ‘We know where you live.’ These days, it’s, ‘We know where you are,’ ” Purdue University president Mitch Daniels wrote last year about his school’s location-tracking software. “Isn’t technology wonderful?”

If these systems work so well in college, administrators might argue, why not high school or anywhere else?

He now says he wishes schools would share the data with parents, too. “I just cut you a $30,000 check,” he said, “and I can’t find out if my kid’s going to class or not?”

Some parents, however, wish their children faced even closer supervision. Wes Grandstaff, who said his son, Austin, transformed from a struggling student to college graduate with SpotterEDU’s help, said the added surveillance was worth it: “When you’re a college athlete, they basically own you, so it didn’t matter what he felt: You’re going to get watched and babysat whether you like it or not.”

Joanna Grama, an information-security consultant and higher-education specialist who has advised the Department of Homeland Security on data privacy, said she doubted most students knew they were signing up for long-term monitoring when they clicked to connect to the campus WiFi.

“At what point in time do we start crippling a whole generation of adults, human beings, who have been so tracked and told what to do all the time that they don’t know how to fend for themselves?” she said. “Is that cruel? Or is that kind?”

Her argument can be summarized as follows:

• The pandemic has made Medicare for All more substantively necessary — and politically possible — than ever before.

• Although AOC argues that the “opportunity cost” is “too high to waste on a floor vote for a bill that wouldn’t ultimately pass,” the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID pandemic make this the best chance that progressives are going to get to win Medicare for All for the foreseeable future

• Even if the vote fails, forcing the debate “could spark a referendum on our failing health-care system at a moment when no other issue takes credible priority,” heightening the salience of the left’s signature policy demand — and the contradictions between a corrupt Democratic leadership and its base,

• Ultimately, “the moral case for action requires no strategic justification.

If one posits that the strategic wisdom of a political tactic has no bearing on the morality of pursuing it, then whether Dore’s proposal would achieve what he says it would is immaterial. But that’s a strange thing to stipulate!

Like most ardent Sanders supporters, they draw their moral fervor from a consequentialist analysis of public policy. Time and again, Berniecrats have accused opponents of universal health care of complicity in preventable deaths, as such loss of life is a predictable consequence of failing to extend health coverage to all Americans

But if Gray and Kulinski are indeed consequentialists, then they should recognize that “strategic justification” is the only measure of a political tactic’s moral worth. If politics is a tool for minimizing needless suffering — rather than a theater for performing one’s personal convictions — then a tactic is only as morally sound as it is likely to succeed.

whether it is in AOC’s power to effect the outcome Kulinski demands is precisely the object of contention! And that question can only be answered by a debate over strategy.

The core premise of Gray’s column is that single-payer health care enjoys overwhelming popular support

Lamentably, support for single-payer simply is neither as widespread nor intense as Gray suggests. Medicare for All does poll well — but it polls best when respondents are given few details about what the policy actually entails.

Even when pollsters spell out the meaning of single-payer in explicit terms, voters still have a tendency to interpret the proposal as a strong public option

This point is made plain by a KFF survey from September 2019, which found a majority of Democrats voicing approval for single-payer — but also favoring “building on the Affordable Care Act” over “replacing the Affordable Care Act with Medicare for All.”

Big money can corrupt Democratic politicians. But it can also buy off public opinion.

Democratic voters were treated to a nationally televised debate over Medicare for All about a dozen times during the 2020 primary — and they proceeded to vote for the candidate with the least progressive health-care policy in the field

Progressives may argue that the primary debates over Medicare for All were distorted by the biases of corporate media (I would argue this). But where do we think most voters are going to get their information about a House vote on Medicare for All if not from corporate-media entities?

This gets at a conspicuous tension in progressive electoral analysis. Some left-wing pundits posit that (1) big money exerts a profound influence on American politics, (2) corporate media influences how voters see the world, (3) big money and corporate media are profoundly hostile to left-wing policies, and yet (4) Democrats have no electoral incentive to spurn left-wing policies, and only do so because they are personally reactionary or corrupt.

he left’s critique of corporate media implies that it is not necessarily irrational for Democrats to believe that antagonizing powerful interest groups might cost them elections

they can also influence voter behavior through propaganda campaigns. And on Medicare for All specifically, the health-care industry has demonstrated success in turning voters against the policy.

In Colorado four years ago, progressives and health-care lobbies did battle over a ballot referendum that would have brought a single-payer health-care system to the Rocky Mountain State. The referendum went down by a margin of 79 to 21 percent.

the collapse of Vermont’s attempt to establish single-payer through legislative action – and the subsequent election of a Republican to its governorship –lends further credence to this notion.

The reality that big money can thwart progressive aims — even when Democratic officials are supportive — was made plain by some of this year’s ballot measures. In Illinois, Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker backed a referendum that would have lifted the state’s constitutional prohibition on progressive taxation. Specifically, the measure would have enabled the state to raise taxes on residents who earn over $250,000 so as to limit budget cuts in the midst of a fiscal crisis. Opponents spent over $100 million propagandizing against the policy. Supporters spent roughly as much, but the combination of well-funded propaganda and the public’s aversion to higher taxes led to 53 percent of the deep-blue state’s voters opting to make it impossible for their representatives to tax the rich at a higher rate than the poor.

Biden, who said his decision to run came in the aftermath of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, instead viewed the race as “a battle for the soul of the nation,” as he put it, and tried not to deviate from the singular message that Trump was unfit to lead the country.

Trump kept returning to a faulty strategy of trying to wish, tweet and riff away the deadly virus. He forced his team to create an alternate reality in which he held massive rallies — supporters packed together, few sporting masks — and said that the coronavirus was only a modest threat and was going to disappear any day.

Biden, again, took a different tack. He and his team focused on coronavirus precautions, going beyond the basic Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. At first, the former vice president rarely left his house, paring back his schedule and moving everything to Zoom. In addition to protecting the 77-year-old Biden, the strategy conveyed that, unlike Trump, 74, Biden took the virus seriously.

Josh Holmes, a longtime McConnell adviser, said that for Trump, “the pandemic is the difference between him winning and losing.“The better question is: Could he have still won during the pandemic?” Holmes continued. “I think we’ve seen a number of times when America has had great challenges, when you have leadership that’s rewarded. That just didn’t happen here.”

Armed residents offer a variety of reasons for their presence. Some say they aim to keep the peace. Others are there to counterprotest, announcing their allegiances by flying the Confederate flag.

In Enterprise, Ore., in the northeastern corner of the state, 18-year-old Gianna Espinoza said the presence of as many as 70 armed men dissuaded some people from joining a recent protest. As a result, she is unlikely to help plan another one.ADAD“In urban areas, you’re part of a huge crowd,” she said. “But here, everyone knows everyone. And it could be your neighbor who looks you in the eye and shoots you.”

Militia groups have shifted their focus from the federal government — now that its operations are in the hands of Trump, a perceived ally — to more local adversaries, including antifa, Muslims and immigrants, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism

Local residents who say they have been threatened by members of the group view its activities differently. RJ Rueben, the owner of a downtown cafe, said he briefly went into hiding after a post on his personal Facebook page raising concerns about the armed presence brought death threats to him and his staff.

Another resident, who has been at the forefront of the local protests and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared harassment, said he received a private message from Surplus telling him — in what he viewed as a threat — that “you all are done with protests.” The protester asked what gave him the “right to say so,” according to an image of the exchange, to which Surplus replied: “Only thing you should be saying is yes sir.”

it comes at an enormous toll. It’s the sort of situation that we’re advising governments to try and avoid.“We don’t have another example of where for the moment it is looking bleaker.”

By early June, less than 3 percent of the population had covid-19 antibodies. In Rio, where 5,000 people have died, the rate was less than 8 percent.

“From the point of view of public health, it’s incomprehensible that more rigorous measures weren’t adopted,” he said. “We could have avoided many of the deaths and cases and everything else that is happening in Rio de Janeiro.”

“It was an opportunity lost.”