When Politics Becomes Your Idol - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

David Brooks, Oct. 30, 2017, New York Times; see also, on Brooks's divorce.

Image from article, with caption: A trump rally in Forida a day before the presidential election

Excerpt:

I didn’t get to Richard Linklater’s brilliant 2014 movie, “Boyhood,” until this past
weekend. That was the movie, filmed over 12 years with the same actors, about a boy
growing up in Texas. But I did have the advantage of seeing it in the Trump era. It’s a
sadder movie now. Different themes leap out at you, which were not as prominent in
the reviews written three years ago.

What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where
bonds are attenuated — without stable families, tight communities, stable careers,
ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture. There’s just a whirl of changing
stepfathers, changing homes, changing phone distractions, changing pop-culture
references, financial stress and chronic drinking, which make it harder to sink down
roots into something, or to even have a spiritual narrative that gives meaning to life.

You can see why, in the disrupted landscape depicted in the film, people would
form the sort of partisan attachments that are common today. Today, partisanship
for many people is not about which party has the better policies, as it was, say, in the
days of Eisenhower and Kennedy. It’s not even about which party has the better
philosophy, as it was in the Reagan era. These days, partisanship is often totalistic.
People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments
wither away — religious, ethnic, communal and familial. ...

The excessive dependence on politics has to be displaced by the expulsive power of more important dependencies, whether family, friendship, neighborhood, community, faith or basic life creed. ...

How to Fix Facebook? We Asked 9 Experts - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

By FARHAD MANJOO and KEVIN ROOSE OCT. 31, 2017, New York Times [Original article contains photos of the commentators and links.]

image from article [caption not included]

Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook, will appear on Tuesday before
senators who are investigating how Russia spread misinformation online during the
2016 presidential campaign. Along with Google and Twitter, Facebook has been
blamed for helping Russian agents influence the outcome of the election.

But the cloud over Facebook extends far beyond Russia. Critics say the
company’s central role in modern communication has undermined the news
business, split Americans into partisan echo chambers and “hijacked” our minds
with a product designed to keep us addicted to the social network.

Of course, criticism of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is easy to
come by; solutions aren’t as clear. We asked nine technologists, academics,
politicians and journalists to propose the steps they would take to improve Facebook
— as a product, a company or both.

Their responses, edited slightly for length and clarity, are below.

Jonathan Albright
Research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

With a recent Facebook change that algorithmically prioritizes “reactions” in the
news feed over the standard “like,” the company appears to be pushing further into
the realm of emotion-centered engagement. As they stand, and especially with
algorithmic reinforcement, “reactions” and “likes” are like megaphones for echo
chambers and news outrage.

The single most important step Facebook — and its subsidiary Instagram, which I
view as equally important in terms of countering misinformation, hate speech and
propaganda — can take is to abandon the focus on emotional signaling-as-engagement.

This is a tough proposition, of course, as billions of users have been trained to
do exactly this: “react.”

What if there were a “trust emoji”? Or respect-based emojis? If a palette of six
emoji-faced angry-love-sad-haha emotional buttons continues to be the way we
engage with one another — and how we respond to the news — then it’s going to be
an uphill battle.

Negative emotion, click bait and viral outrage are how the platform is “being
used to divide.” Given this problem, Facebook needs to help us unite by building new
sharing tools based on trust and respect.

Kevin Kelly
Co-founder of Wired magazine.

Facebook should reduce anonymity by requiring real verification of real names
for real people, with the aim of having 100 percent of individuals verified.

Companies would need additional levels of verification, and should have a label
and scrutiny different from those of people. (Whistle-blowers and dissidents might
need to use a different platform.)

Facebook could also offer an optional filter that would keep any post (or share)
of an unverified account from showing up. I’d use that filter.

Ro Khanna
Democrat representing California’s 17th Congressional District, which includes
sections of Silicon Valley.

Ultimately, whether from tech companies or Congress, what people want is
more transparency.

Facebook should expand on its Hard Questions blog to explain how its news
feed algorithms work, how it uses data in targeting and how it makes decisions about
third-party verification and removing offensive content. It should make it simple for
users to provide feedback and be responsive to their concerns.

The company also should make its executives readily available to the press, and
they should spend time on Capitol Hill to explain their decision-making.

Everyone understands that new technology platforms are not perfect, and that
bad actors find ways to abuse them. The key is for Facebook to be upfront about
technical challenges, open about its mistakes and willing to answer the tough
questions honestly. If it does that, it will continue to earn the public’s trust.

Kate Losse
Early Facebook employee who recounted her time at the company in her book,
“The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network.”

It would be interesting if Facebook offered a “vintage Facebook” setting that
users could toggle to, without News Feed ads and “like” buttons. (Before “likes,”
users wrote comments, which made interactions more unique and memorable.)

A “vintage Facebook” setting not only would be less cluttered, it would refocus
the experience of using Facebook on the people using it, and their intentions for
communication and interaction.

Somehow, no matter how “smart” the Facebook algorithms and behind-the-scenes
data processing get, the site felt more engaging as a tool for human
communication when interaction was primarily driven by what users wanted to do
and say, rather than where the algorithms want people to look.

Alice Marwick
Assistant professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.

Facebook should allow users to sort their news feed chronologically by default
on all platforms, rather than rely on an algorithmically sorted News Feed. This
would increase the diversity of items in the News Feed, and would make it more
likely that users were exposed to people and information that didn’t support their
own confirmation bias.

It should also greatly increase the human oversight of ad targeting systems —
specifically, oversee algorithmically generated categories (rather than basing them
solely on user-inputted interests). Political and interest-based advertising should be
under much stricter scrutiny than, say, the advertising of T-shirts or hair products.

Ellen Pao
Chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact and
a former chief executive of Reddit.

Facebook needs to replace its focus on engagement quantity with interaction
quality. To really do that means replacing at least half of the leadership team and
board with underrepresented people of color who are informed and value diversity
and inclusion — and, as my colleague Freada Kapor Klein suggested, have
journalistic principles. At Reddit, I was able to effect positive, lasting change (at least
according to this research) to content quality and interaction quality by building a
diverse executive team.

Eli Pariser
Chief executive of Upworthy and author of “The Filter Bubble.”

Facebook should open itself up for independent research. Right now, Facebook
is a black box: It’s very difficult, and in many cases impossible, for researchers to
independently look at behavior on the platform. While opening private data to
research creates risks, there’s a ton of explicitly public data on the platform that
Facebook makes difficult to query at scale. Facebook could also open up many of the
tools advertisers currently use for free use by research scientists. It would be a bold
move for transparency, and one that would help us understand much better what’s
happening on the world’s most important social platform. And it’d be wise to do this
before regulators forced them to.

The company should also optimize for “time well spent.” Facebook’s greatest
superpower is figuring out how to eat as much of our attention as possible. But as
Tristan Harris and others have pointed out, that attention often doesn’t yield much
— leaving us poorly informed and feeling worse about ourselves. Instead of
measuring clicks and likes, what if Facebook optimized for how much value an
article or video or game gave us weeks or months afterward? The company could
survey the kinds of content we’ve spent the most time on, and ask us which gave us
the most and least value, as a way to balance our impulsive present selves with our
greater aspirations.

Vivian Schiller
Adviser and former news executive at NPR, NBC News and Twitter.

The single most important thing Facebook must do is come clean. Tell us what
you know. Tell us what you know but can’t share. Tell us what you don’t know. And
tell us what you don’t know that you don’t know. Stop hiding behind bromides like
“we are not a media company.” That makes us think you don’t understand you have a
serious set of problems that need fixing. Coming clean may not be the only thing,
and may not be the main thing, but it’s the first thing.

Tim Wu
Professor at Columbia Law School and author of “The Attention Merchants:
The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.”

Facebook should become a public benefit corporation. These companies must
aim to do something that would aid the public, and board members must also take
that public benefit into account when making decisions. Mark Zuckerberg has said
that Facebook’s goals are “bringing us closer together” and “building a global
community.” Worthy, beautiful goals, but easier said than done when Facebook is
also stuck delivering ever-increasing profits and making its platform serve the needs
of advertisers.

What if Facebook were actually free to do what it says it wants to? What if it
didn’t need to devote so much energy to the evil sides of the business, whether
catering to filter bubbles, addicting and manipulating users, seizing data, bending
over backward for advertisers and destroying competitors? As a nonprofit or public
benefit corporation (like Kickstarter), Facebook could be a much better institution. It
could shed its “two masters” dilemma, truly pursue its lofty goals and become a firm
of which its users and the world could actually be proud.

On Confederate monuments, the public stands with Trump - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Christopher Ingraham, August 17, Washington Post

Image from article, with caption: The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, surrounded by Confederate and state flags, along Interstate 65 in Nashville.

President Trump came out strongly in opposition to removing Confederate statues from public places, saying it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

That appeal to “history and culture” echoes arguments made by neo-Confederate groups, who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, couch claims about the meaning of statues and other Confederate symbols in terms of “heritage and other supposedly fundamental values that modern Americans are seen to have abandoned.”

Most mainstream historians note, on the other hand, that the whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy. Most of them were erected between 1895 and World War I, “part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution,” according to University of North Carolina historian Karen Cox.

“Most monuments were created during the Jim Crow era to stand in opposition to racial equality,” according to the Atlanta History Center, formerly the Atlanta Historical Society. “Veneration of Confederates symbolized white racial dominance.” 

But the president is not a historian, and neither are most members of the American public. A survey by the Economist and YouGov earlier this week found that, by more than 2 to 1, Americans believe that Confederate monuments are symbols of Southern pride rather than of white supremacy.

Whites (66 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and Americans over age 65 (71 percent) are especially likely to say that Confederate monuments represent pride rather than supremacy. Liberals (54 percent), Hillary Clinton voters (52 percent) and black Americans (47 percent) are the groups most likely to say that the monuments stand for white supremacy.

Similar, a plurality of Americans (48 percent) say they disapprove of the decision to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville — the decision that sparked the violent rally by neo-Nazis and white supremacists last weekend. Only 30 percent say they approve of the decision.

[Why Trump may be refocusing racial politics on Confederate memorials]

In his remarks about the monuments, the president may be making a calculated attempt to motivate the approval of voters, like the ones identified in the Economist/YouGov survey, who aren't sold on the idea that monuments to the  Confederacy are monuments to racism.

The president's chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, made that calculus explicit in an interview with the New York Times this week. “Just give me more,” Bannon said. “Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I can’t get enough of it.”

But that calculation could backfire. Trump remains a historically unpopular president, with approval ratings in the mid-30s. Given that unpopularity, taking a strong stand in favor of Confederate monuments could simply motivate public opinion in opposition to them.

We've seen Trump's “inverse Midas touch” in action many times before, on a variety of issues — Obamacare, transgender troops, the border wall, the Mueller investigation.

“It's almost as if the best way to make something popular is for President Trump to take the opposite position,” The Washington Post's Aaron Blake wrote this month.

By taking a strong stand in support of Confederate monuments, Trump may ironically end up ushering in their removal.

6 secrets of U.S. ambassador residence in Moscow that sound like myths

rbth.com; via PF on Facebook

HISTORY

JUL 04, 2017

ANNA SOROKINA

Spaso House became the residence of the U.S. Ambassador in 1933.

Valeriy Yevseyev/U.S. Embassy Moscow

The mansion on Spasopeskovskaya Square was not chosen as the scene of Satan’s ball in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “Master and Margarita” by coincidence. If the building’s walls could speak, they would reveal many secrets and legends.

Spaso House is tucked away near Arbat. Since 1933, each U.S. ambassador to Russia has lived there, but this was not always the case.

1. Bulgakov was hugely influenced by the 1935 Spring Festival

1935 party influenced Bulgakov to rewrite the 'Satan's ball.

Kinopoisk.ru

The Spring Festival held on April 24, 1935 at Spaso House is legendary for being one of the most lavish parties ever held by the U.S. mission abroad. Prominent figures from the arts world were invited and Bulgakov was among the guests. According to his wife, after the party he radically rewrote the chapter entitled “The Spring Ball of the Full Moon” ("Satan’s ball") in his famous novel Master and Margarita. In reality, there were fountains of wine and champagne, the finest orchestra, and birdsong, so those familiar with the book will be reminded of Woland’s infamous party.

2. A bust of Kennedy was hidden from Reagan

U.S. President Ronald Reagan, his wife Nancy Reagan, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa Gorbacheva attend a lunch organized in the U.S. ambassador's residence in Moscow, May 31, 1988. / Yulia Lizunova/TASS

Upon entering the building, guests can see flags and a fireplace with a bust of former President John. F. Kennedy above it.

In May 1988, Spaso House welcomed President Ronald W. Reagan, who traveled to Moscow for a meeting with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. In addition to arranging extensive and time-consuming renovations of the house, the Department of State also airlifted all food and china to Moscow that would be used during the official dinner. As observant reporters noted, the bust of Kennedy was “moved to a more discreet corner.”

3. Spying state emblem at the ambassador’s office

United States Representative to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, points to the spot on the seal where it has been bugged. / Getty Images

There are many spy stories related to Spaso House. The most famous is the story of a "bug" inside the wooden U.S. state emblem. The Soviet Union learned that Ambassador William Harriman was a passionate collector of crafts made from rare woods, and in 1945 he was presented with an elaborate replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood.

The souvenir was so beautiful that the U.S. ambassador hung it on the wall of his office. Of course, he didn’t know that inside was a bug called Chrysostom (also known as Golden Mouth).

Chrysostom survived - and eavesdropped on - four ambassadors. The furniture changed, but the bug kept its place on the wall. The Americans finally discovered it in 1952, when its radio signal was detected. Now the emblem is kept in the CIA Museum.

4. Uncontrollable seals in the Chandelier Room

Guest attend the reception at the Spaso House. / AP

During the Christmas season of 1934, the first U.S. ambassador in the Soviet Union - William Christian Bullitt - instructed his interpreter Charles Thayer to organize “a real shindig” for all of the American citizens in Moscow. The Moscow Circus lent him three seals. In the evening guests gathered in the Chandelier Room, and the seals entered with a Christmas tree, a tray of glasses, and a bottle of champagne balanced on their noses. The seals then performed a variety of tricks, after which their trainer, who had been drinking, suddenly fainted. Without his control, the seals ran amok throughout the house, while the embassy staff attempted to corral them. Fortunately for Thayer’s career, Ambassador Bullitt was not in attendance, as he had been temporarily recalled to Washington, D.C.

5. The mansion was home to the ‘Siberian American’

Nikolay Vtorov. / Archive Photo

Nikolay Vtorov moved to Moscow from Siberia in the early 20th century. By that time he was already a successful entrepreneur and owned a number of industrial enterprises and banks.

In February 2017, with the help of archive materials, Forbes magazine compiled a list of the wealthiest people to have lived in Tsarist Russia. Vtorov topped the bill with more than 60 million golden rubles ($720 million). 

Due to his knack of making money, Vtorov was coined "the Siberian American."

After the 1917 Revolution, according to some historians, Vtorov pledged allegiance to the new authorities, but in May 1918 he was killed under mysterious circumstances in his office. Vtorov’s descendants went abroad, and his mansion in downtown Moscow was seized by the state and occupied by high-ranking officials. It eventually became the residence of the U.S. Ambassador in 1933, when the United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations.

6. The biggest chandelier in Moscow

Before a reception at the Spaso House. / Mikhail Fomichev/RIA Novosti

The mansion was built from 1913 to 1915  and equipped with the latest technology of the era. The designers also didn’t hold back when it came to the interior. The main hall is 25 meters long and crowned with a high vaulted ceiling and huge chandelier. It’s believed that this chandelier, made of Russian crystal, is the still the largest chandelier in Moscow today.

James Madison’s Lessons in Racism - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

By NOAH FELDMAN OCT. 28, 2017, New York Times

Image from article, with caption: A painting of James Madison at the National Portrait Gallery.

Portrait by Chester Harding

When we think about the framers of the Constitution and how they handled the issue
of race, we conjure up the extremes: the hypocrites and the heroes. At one end is
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “all men are created equal” but believed Africans
were inferior and fathered children with an enslaved woman. At the other end is
Alexander Hamilton, who, at least as depicted by admirers like the biographer Ron
Chernow and the playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, was an ardent abolitionist.

This framing, however, is simplistic and misleading. It is simplistic because it
overlooks harder-to-categorize positions like that of James Madison, the lead drafter
of the Constitution, who genuinely rejected the idea of racial inferiority yet still failed
to put his beliefs in equality and liberty into practice. And it is misleading because it
implies that as long as we avoid having racist attitudes, we can succeed in avoiding
racist policies. We think that if we’re not Jefferson, we must be Hamilton. But this is
not the case.

In this respect, Madison is the founding father who can teach Americans the
most about our present contradictions on race. Madison insisted that enslaved
Africans were entitled to a right to liberty and proposed that Congress purchase all
the slaves in the United States and set them free. Yet not only did he hold slaves on
his plantation in Virginia and fail to free them upon his death, but he also originated
the notorious three-fifths compromise in the Constitution, which counted a slave as
three-fifths of a person for purposes of legislative representation.

The tension between Madison’s aspirational beliefs and his highly constrained
actions continues to be America’s own tension. Like Madison, contemporary United
States society rejects racial inequality in principle. But also like Madison, a majority
of Americans — as reflected in our democratic institutions — are ultimately unwilling
or unable to make the costly changes that would be necessary to achieve equality in
practice.

Most of what can be learned about Madison’s racial attitudes is found in letters of his
that remain largely unexplored. In one astonishing document, written in 1783, he
explained to his father that he faced a quandary with respect to an enslaved man
named Billey, whom Madison had brought with him to Philadelphia as his
manservant while he was in Congress. Madison wrote that he could not bring Billey
back to the family plantation, because after Billey had experienced the relative
freedom of Pennsylvania, “his mind is too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion
for fellow slaves in Virginia.”

Madison could not “think of punishing him,” he wrote, “merely for coveting that
liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so
often to be the right, and worthy pursuit, of every human being.” In other words,
Billey possessed the same “right” of liberty as every other human being — the right
they had fought for in the Revolutionary War.

But it was a time of economic crisis. Madison felt he could not free Billey
because he could not afford to. His compromise was to sell Billey into a term of
indentured servitude, as allowed by Pennsylvania law, at the end of which he would
become free. Madison therefore got some value for his slave, while satisfying his
conscience. At the end of his term of service, Billey was indeed freed, taking the
name William Gardener, marrying and staying in Philadelphia, where Madison
continued to have contact with him for years.

Madison understood perfectly well that slavery was morally wrong — and why.
But he also could not overcome the economic reality on which his entire livelihood
and that of the family plantation was based.

Thanks to Madison’s influence, his characteristic treatment of race — principled
ideals followed by compromise — made its way into the Constitution itself. The story
begins in 1783, four years before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The
Continental Congress had asked the states for annual contributions of money,
determined proportionally based on population. Southerners wanted to count slaves
as little as possible to reduce their share; Northerners wanted to count slaves fully so
that the South would pay more. Madison proposed counting three-fifths of slaves as
a compromise, believing it was “very near the true ratio” with respect to the taxable
wealth produced by them. All but two states approved of the proposal, but because
unanimity was required, it did not pass.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the tables were turned. Southerners
wanted to count slaves fully to increase their legislative representation, while
Northerners argued that slaves, who couldn’t vote, should not count at all. The three-fifths
compromise was adopted precisely because everyone knew that the number
had been used when both sides saw things the other way. Madison was happy to see
it adopted.

There was also the issue of the constitutional provision that preserved the slave
trade for 20 years after ratification. Madison objected strongly to it. Like other
slaveholders, he considered trade in slaves more odious than ownership. Yet when it
became clear that South Carolina and Georgia, backed by Connecticut, insisted on
protecting the slave trade as a condition for agreeing to the Constitution, Madison
went along. Reaching consensus was paramount. Without the guarantee of slavery
and the slave trade, there would have been no Constitution — and that was
Madison’s highest priority.

Further demonstrating the tension between his beliefs and his actions, Madison
called for abolition — but only in private. In 1790, just after drafting the Bill of
Rights, Madison argued in a letter for creating a colony in Africa to resettle freed
slaves. That would, he said, “afford the best hope yet presented of putting an end to
the slavery in which not less than 600,000 unhappy Negroes are now involved.”

His reason for sending former slaves to Africa was “the prejudices of the
whites,” which would make integrating freed blacks “impossible.” He thought that
because prejudice derived “principally from the difference of color,” it must be
“considered as permanent and insuperable.” Years later, Madison proposed that
Congress sell the public the Western lands included in the Louisiana Purchase to
raise $600 million to purchase and free all 1.5 million slaves.

But ultimately Madison could not afford even to free his own slaves in his will.
According to family lore, he left separate instructions to Dolley, his wife, to
emancipate his slaves upon her own death. If this message in fact existed, she was
unable or unwilling to fulfill it.

Madison’s contradictions resonate with our own vexed racial situation. From the
14th Amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and affirmative action, America, at
its best, has repeatedly aspired to establish racial equality in the face of our past of
slavery and segregation. Yet the need to accommodate the realities of economics,
politics and the prejudice of others — which is to say, the difficulty that even well-intentioned
people can have in accepting the true cost of meaningful change — has
continued to hold back equality in practice.

Madison had many remarkable qualities. He was a constitutional genius, an
accomplished statesman and a calm, rational leader, even in wartime. When it came
to race, however, he had feet of clay, as do most Americans still. Our founders can
serve as important role models for us — provided we try to learn from their mistakes
and flaws as well as their successes and virtues.

Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard, a columnist for Bloomberg View and the
author of the forthcoming book “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan,
President.”

7 jobs where salaries are skyrocketing

Kelli B. Grant, CNBC, USA Today

uncaptioned image from article

It can pay to take a long view on salary expectations in your field.

In-demand jobs like software developers, physician assistants and online sales managers have seen substantial increases in median salaries in recent years, according to a new report from job site CareerCast. 

"High salary growth rate and overall highest paying jobs are not necessarily one [and] the same," CareerCast online content editor Kyle Kensing said in the report. "Careers with high entry-point wages do not necessarily grow considerably from median to upper wage earning levels."

Of course, just because salaries are rising quickly in your field or role, doesn't mean you're poised to take advantage as a new or veteran employee.

Many of the jobs with fast-growing salaries have strong hiring outlooks, according to CareerCast. (Photo: CNBC)

"If you're already employed at a company or organization, they are generally not going to give you substantial pay raises unless they think that they have to," said business consultant Dorie Clark, author of "Entrepreneurial You."

One way to get in on the rising-salary trend: Go back on the job hunt. You may find another opportunity worth taking or be able to leverage an offer into a raise with your current employer, Clark said.

"This is a tool you should use with discretion," she warned. "You can't go to your boss all the time with competing offers, to bang your salary higher."

That won't generate goodwill — and could backfire, ending up with you needing to take that job offer even if you'd rather remain in your current role.

Employees in a field with fast-rising salaries should also look at the field to see what skills and other qualifications are driving pay boosts, Clark said. Taking on a leadership role or obtaining a useful certification can easily become a talking point in a compensation conversation.

"A boss does not want to give you a raise because you think you deserve one," Clark said. "You earn a raise by making yourself more valuable to the company."

George Washington’s Virginia church taking down his memorial

Max Greenwood, thehill.com

image from article © Getty Images

A church attended by George Washington will take down a memorial to the nation's first president, a move church leaders say is intended to make the place of worship more welcoming.

The Washington Times reported Friday that Christ Church in Alexandria, Va., will remove memorials of Washington and former Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which stand on either side of the church's altar.

“The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome," church leaders said. "Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques.”

Washington began attending the church soon after it opened in 1773, and bought a pew there. He attended for more than 20 years, though he appeared more regularly at Pohick Church, southwest of his estate at Mount Vernon.

Christ Church's decision to remove the statues comes amid a national debate over whether Confederate statues and monuments should be taken down. That debate resurfaced in August after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned violent.

While that debate has focused primarily on Confederate memorials, President Trump suggested shortly after the Charlottesville protests that taking down some memorials would eventually lead to statues of Washington or Thomas Jefferson being removed as well.

Opinions: Trump was an election surprise. Expect more. - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Roger C. Altman October 26,  The Washington Post, via LH on FB -- many thanks! [Original article contains video, with  caption: A 'My Little Pony' parody, featuring Amy Poehler as an animated alapaca, explains income inequality. (We The Economy)]

Image from article, with caption: : Election night results broadcasted Nov. 8, 2016.

Roger C. Altman, a former deputy treasury secretary and founder and senior chairman of the investment banking firm Evercore, has worked on nine Democratic presidential campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.

The election of Donald Trump was, in many respects, the greatest presidential election upset in modern U.S. history. Now, with his presidency reeling amid a special-counsel probe, multiple resignations, an absence of legislative achievements and dismal approval ratings, many Americans already seem to view his victory as the equivalent of a hundred-year flood — in other words, the type of surprise that today’s voters won’t see again.

Except they will. The Trump election likely signals a new era of extreme voter discontent and improbable national election results. Why? Because the so-called American Dream — that each generation would live better than its predecessor — has ended for most of our citizens. Half of the young adults in this country will earn less over their lifetimes than their parents did. Indeed, the whole idea of rising living standards, which defined this country for so long, is a thing of the past for most Americans [JB emphasis]. More and more voters realize this and are angry about it.

Consider the economic data. One of the best measures of national economic progress, or lack of it, is the simplest: Are wages rising? Looking back over the past 40 years, the answer is no. According to the Hamilton Project, overall U.S. wages, adjusted for inflation, are essentially flat over this period — registering about 0.2 percent growth. Which means that purchasing power, a good proxy for living standards, is flat, too.

The trend in real median household income, a measure that incorporates increases in the number of family members who work, is similarly poor. This figure peaked right around $59,000 per household in 1999, after many years of rising female participation in the workforce. But it was also approximately $59,000 last year. This comes after a recent uptick in both wages and household income, an increase that furthermore probably reflects this late stage of the economic recovery, rather than any change in this long-term stagnation.

Then, there is the degree to which so many Americans now live on the edge of financial danger. The 2016 Federal Reserve Board survey of household well-being found that 46 percent of U.S. adults could not meet a $400 emergency expense without borrowing or selling something they owned. And a stunning one quarter of adults cannot pay their monthly bills in full.

These factors explain why income mobility has decreased so much. Profoundly important research, led by Raj Chetty of Stanford University, demonstrated this year that 50 percent of the children born in 1980, who are now well into the workforce, would not earn more than their parents. And that such mobility has been declining steadily for four decades. Which suggests, unfortunately, that it may continue downward.

A series of powerful, entrenched factors have brought the American Dream to an end. Economists generally cite globalization, accelerating technology, increased income inequality and the decline of unions. What’s noteworthy is that these are long-term pressures that show no signs of abating.

Yes, it is possible to imagine a bold policy agenda that might move wages up. It could involve elements of both the Republican and Democratic wish lists, like a huge federal infrastructure initiative; business tax reform; steps to increase college entrance and completion rates; expansion of the earned-income tax credit; and better protections against abuses in overtime pay, in work schedules and in the distinction between employees and independent contractors. But gridlock in Washington, reflecting all this voter anger, is worse than ever. And few of these policy changes are likely any time soon.

Finally, there continues to be a debate among political scientists and sociologists as to whether these income pressures or cultural factors such as a rebellion against the establishment contributed more to the Trump upset. But, in reality, the two factors are interrelated. Household financial troubles increase cultural resentment and the sense that there are two Americas. Especially with the share of national income going to the lower 80 percent of earners at a 100-year low.

There is no reason to think, with continued income weakness, that we will not see a similarly discontented electorate in upcoming elections — including because the Trump administration, like its recent predecessors, will not have delivered better household economics. Which suggests volatile voting behavior again. And with a right-wing candidate having won the presidency last year, and voters often seeking the opposite in the next election, don’t be surprised if a distinctly left-wing candidate takes the White House in 2020. President Sanders, anyone?

2017 Irving Kristol Award recipient Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ remarks - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

American Enterprise Institute

Sacks image from

Transcript of the 2017 Irving Kristol Award Annual Dinner

Free Enterprise, Religion, Society and Culture

RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS: Beloved friends, I want to thank you from the depths of my heart for your generosity tonight. I was almost about to say that I’m moved beyond words, but the truth is no rabbi ever was moved beyond words. (Laughter.) At the Burning Bush, Moses, the first rabbi of all time, said, “I am not a man of words,” and then proceeded to speak for the next 40 years. (Laughter.) So let me say briefly how grateful I am for three things.

Number one, for the company I now join of outstanding individuals and especially last year’s winner, who’s just so embarrassed me, Robbie George, who’s done so much as the voice of vision and moral courage that lies at the very heart of his and your and our vision of American life.

Second, for the American Enterprise Institute itself, one of the very greatest think tanks in the entire world and one from whom I have learned more than any other. And I salute Arthur Brooks for his wonderful leadership of this institution, and I wish all of you blessing and success. (Applause.)

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly because of the name that the award bears, the late Irving Kristol of blessed memory. Elaine and I were privileged to count Irving, of blessed memory, and his incredible wife, Bea, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who is here with us tonight, as precious and cherished friends. Whenever we were in Washington, they invited us to their home. They always encouraged me and my work. They were so kind, they were so gracious, they were so generous of spirit. I always had this cognitive dissonance because Irving was so vigorous, indeed sharp, in his writing and so gentle and loving in his personality that he and Bea were role models who lifted our hearts and expanded the horizon of our aspirations.

There’s a prayer we say whenever we say grace after meals – [Hebrew] ve’nimtzachein v’sechel tov b’einei Elokim v’adam – let us find grace and good intellect in the eyes of God and our fellow human beings. Irving had great outstanding intellect, but even before and above that, he had grace. So I dedicate my words tonight to his blessed memory, and we wish Bea and Bill and all their wonderful family long life and blessing for many years to come. (Applause.)

Friends, these are really tempestuous times. A few months ago, I asked a friend in Washington, “What’s it been like living in America today?” And he said, “Well, it’s a little bit like the man standing on the deck of the Titanic with a glass of whiskey in his hand and he’s saying, ‘I know I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous.'” (Laughter.)

So we’ve seen the emergence of what I call a politics of anger. We have seen the culture of competitive victimhood. We have seen the emergence of identity politics based on smaller and smaller identities of ethnicity and gender. We’ve seen the new politics of grievance.

We’ve seen the silencing of free speech in our universities in the name of safe spaces. Just a few weeks ago, Balliol College Oxford, Balliol College Oxford, the home of three prime ministers, of Adam Smith, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, barred a Christian union for having a stall to recruit new students on the grounds that a mere presence of a Christian in a group of students could be construed as a microaggression.

We have seen public discourse polluted by fake news and the manipulation of social media. Not by accident did the Oxford English Dictionary chooses its word that we would remember from 2016 as “post-truth.” And we’ve seen the reemergence in the West, certainly in Europe, of the far right and the far left. And today, according to the rather expert survey that Bridgewater Capital did recently, populist politics throughout the West is measurably at its highest levels since the early 1930s.

Hegel said that modern man has taken to reading the daily newspaper in place of morning prayer. Today, when you finished reading the daily newspaper, you need morning prayer. And all this is serious. Richard Weaver once said the trouble with humanity is that it forgets to read the minutes of the last meetings. And so for anyone who actually remembers history, the politics of anger that’s emerged in our time is full of danger – if not now, then certainly in the foreseeable future.

And although this is affecting the whole of the West, I want tonight, for reasons which will become quite clear, to focus my remarks on you and the United States of America. And the reason is that I want to give an analysis that I think the late Irving Kristol would have understood because a love of Judaism was absolutely central to his life. And because he knew that in America, democratic capitalism had its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage, specifically in the Hebrew Bible.

You know, we often think of the Hebrew Bible as simply a religious book, but it is actually a political text. I used to study Bible with Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street when he was prime minister. It was done under the strictest possible secrecy because God forbid the prime minister should read the Bible. And he once turned to me and said, “Jonathan, how come your book is more interesting than our book?” (Laughter.) And I replied, “Prime Minister, obviously, because there’s more politics in our book than in your book.”

So I want to just look at one little element of biblical political theory, which I think is unique and which shows remarkable relevance to the situation we’re in today. And I want to begin at a strange point, at a key moment in political history in biblical Israel. You remember when the people came to Samuel and said, “Appoint us a king.” And Samuel got really upset because he thought the people were rejecting him and God said, “That’s nothing. I’m even more upset they’re rejecting me.” They sound very much like two Jewish mothers sitting together discussing their children. But God said to Samuel, “Spell out what having a king will actually mean. He’ll seize your sons, your daughters, your produce, your land, i.e., taxes, and if they’re still willing to pay the price, give them a king,” which is what happened.

And the commentators were all puzzled by this, and rightly so because does the Bible approve of kings or not? If it does, why does God say that they’re rejecting him? And if it doesn’t, why did God say give them one if they ask for it? And the reason the biblical commentators were puzzled is because by and large, they weren’t political scientists. But, actually, the meaning of that narrative is very simple.

What happened in the days of the Prophet Samuel is precisely a social contract, exactly on the lines set out by Thomas Hobbes in “The Leviathan.” People are willing to give up certain of their rights, transfer them to a central power, a king, a government, who undertakes to ensure the rule of law internally and the defense of the realm externally. In fact, One Samuel, Chapter Eight is the first recorded instance in all of history of a social contract.

But what makes the Hebrew Bible unique and really fascinating and makes it completely different from Hobbes and Locke and Jean-Jacque[sic] Rousseau is that this wasn’t the first founding moment of Israel as a nation, as a political entity. It was in fact the second because the first took place centuries earlier in the days of Moses at Mount Sinai when the people made with God not a contract but a covenant. And those two things are often confused, but actually they’re quite different.

“The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power.”– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

In a contract, two or more people come together to make an exchange. You pay your plumber – I have a Jewish friend in Jerusalem who calls his plumber Messiah. (Laughter.) Why? Because we await him daily, and he never turns up. (Laughter.) So in a contract, you make an exchange, which is to the benefit of the self-interest of each. And so you have the commercial contract that creates the market and the social contract that creates the state.

A covenant isn’t like that. It’s more like a marriage than an exchange. In a covenant, two or more parties each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to do together what neither can do alone. A covenant isn’t about me. It’s about us. A covenant isn’t about interests. It’s about identity. A covenant isn’t about me, the voter, or me, the consumer, but about all of us together. Or in that lovely key phrase of American politics, it’s about “we, the people.”

The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power. But a covenant is about neither wealth nor power, but about the bonds of belonging and of collective responsibility. And to put it as simply as I can, the social contract creates a state but the social covenant creates a society. That is the difference. They’re different things.

Biblical Israel had a society long before it had a state, before it even crossed the Jordan and enter the land, which explains why Jews were able to keep their identity for 2,000 years in exile and dispersion because although they’d lost their state, they still had their society. Although they’d lost their contract, they still had their covenant. And there is only one nation known to me that had the same dual founding as biblical Israel, and that is the United States of America which has – (applause) – which had its social covenant in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and its social contract in the Constitution in 1787.

And the reason it did so is because the founders of this country had the Hebrew Bible engraved on their hearts. Covenant is central to the Mayflower Compact of 1620. It is central to the speech of John Winthrop aboard the Arbela in 1630. It is presupposed in the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence.

Listen to the sentence. See how odd it might sound to anyone but an American. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those truths are anything but self-evident. They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hierarchical society the world has ever known. They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible. And that is what made G. K. Chesterton call America “a nation with the soul of a church.”[JB emphasis]

Now, what is more, every covenant comes with a story. And the interesting thing is the Hebrew Bible and America have the same story. It’s about what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom or, by any other name, what we know as an exodus. The only difference is, in America, instead of the wicked Egyptians, you had the wicked English. (Laughter.) Instead of a tyrant called Pharaoh, you had one called King George III, and instead of crossing the Red Sea, you crossed the Atlantic. But it’s OK. As a Brit, I want to say, after 241 years, we forgive you. (Laughter.)

But that is why Jefferson drew as his design for the great seal of America the Israelites following a pillar of cloud through the wilderness. It is why Lincoln called Americans the “almost chosen people.” It is what led Martin Luther King on the last night of his life to see himself as Moses and to say, “I’ve been to the mountaintop and I have seen the Promised Land.”

Now, why does this matter to America and to the American Enterprise Institute? Because America understands more clearly than any other Western nation that freedom requires not just a state, but also and even more importantly a society, a society built of strong covenantal institutions, of marriages, families, congregations, communities, charities, and voluntary associations.

Alexis de Tocqueville rightly saw that these were the buffers between the individual and the state and that what essentially thought to democratic freedom, he thought all that exercise of responsibility and families and communities was in his lovely phrase our “apprenticeship in liberty.” And we can now say exactly what has been going wrong in American life in recent times and indeed throughout Europe.

But, in America, the social contract is still there, but the social covenant is being lost. Today, one half of America is losing all those covenantal institutions. It’s losing strong marriages and families and communities. It’s losing a strong sense of the American narrative. It’s even losing e pluribus unum because today everyone prefers pluribus to unum. So in place of the single collective identity, you find a myriad of ever smaller identities, local ones based on gender, whatever it is next week.

Instead of a culture of freedom and responsibility, we have a culture of grievances that are always someone else’s responsibility. Because we no longer share a moral code that allows us, in Isaiah’s words, to reason together, in its place has come something called emotivism, which says, I know I’m right because I feel it. And as for those who disagree, we will shout down or ban all those dissenting voices because we each have a right not to feel we’re wrong.

“We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free.”– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

And because half of America doesn’t have strong families and communities standing between the individual and the state, people begin to think that all political problems can be solved by the state. But they can’t. And when you think they can, politics begins to indulge in magical thinking. So you get the far right dreaming of a golden past that never was and the far left yearning for a utopian future that never will be. And then comes populism, the belief that a strong leader can solve all our problems for us. And that is the first step down the road to tyranny, whether of the right or of the left.

But there is good news, which is that covenants can be renewed. That’s what happened in the Bible in the days of Joshua and Josepha [sic] and Ezekiel and Josiah and Ezra and Nehemiah. It happened in America several times. Nations with covenants can renew themselves, and that has to be our project now and for the foreseeable future. We need to renew the covenant, which means standing with Robbie George and friends and strengthening marriage and the family. It means rebuilding communities.

And I don’t know if you noticed, significantly, just recently, Mark Zuckerberg has changed the mission statement of Facebook from connecting friends to building communities. And, of course, you need communities if you ever are to have friends. You know, a British charity six years ago did a survey – medical charity, called Macmillan Nurses, did a survey six years ago, in 2011, and it came up with the discovery that the average Brit between the ages of 18 and 30 has 237 Facebook friends. When asked on how many of those could you count in an emergency, the average answer was two. When you belong to a church or a synagogue or a real community, you have real friends, not just Facebook friends. And now, Facebook itself is beginning to realize this.

It means – and forgive me for saying this – but it means teaching every American child the American story without embarrassment. (Applause.) Because you and I remember what people forget – namely, the distinction made by George Orwell between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is about power. Patriotism is about pride. Nationalism leads to war. Patriotism works for peace. We can be patriotic without being nationalistic. (Applause.)

It means enlisting not just our cultural heroes but our children and grandchildren’s cultural heroes. I mean, you know why we have grandchildren: because they tell us how these [smartphones] things work. And they have icons, and we need to find their peers of stage or screen or sports who are willing to say, we believe in e pluribus unum. We believe, like the University of Chicago, in free speech on campus because we believe that the only safe space there is is one in which we give a respectful hearing to views unlike our own. That is what a safe space actually is. (Applause.)

We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free. (Applause.) We have to have people to have the courage to get up and say that earned self-respect counts for more than unearned self-esteem. And we have to say the fundamental truth that is at the heart of the Hebrew Bible and of American politics that the state exists to serve the people. The people don’t exist to serve the state. (Applause.)

Friends, those are the values that made America great. And they are still what make America the last best hope of freedom in a dark, dangerous, and sometimes despairing world riven by those who fear and fight against freedom.

Friends, you have been so generous to me tonight. The American Enterprise Institute has given an award to someone who is not American, not terribly enterprising, and in the words of the great philosopher Marx – I mean, of course, Groucho, not Karl – I’m not yet ready to be an institution. (Laughter.)

So, therefore, let me as an entirely unworthy outsider beg you, don’t lose the American covenant. It’s the most precious thing you have. Renew it now before it’s too late. Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

"His arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures."

John Brown [from facebook]

31 mins · 

" 'At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures,' the spokesman said in a statement supplied to media outlets."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41766987… [article via AA]

Bush Sr apology for new sex assault claim

The 93-year-old says he was simply trying to put people "at ease" during photo calls.

BBC.COM