Q. Where Is The Nearest Black Hole Located? A. Look Inside The Skull Of The Current Occupant Of The Oval Office

Today, Alia Wong examines a recent manifestation of the Yuge ignorance that resides between the ears of the current occupant of the Oval Office. The occupant is a living demonstration of the hoary aphorism that "It's better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and dispel all doubt." And every time the current occupant opens his mouth, ignorance and stupidity follow. Just this past week, he bleated that “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” and preened in his bloated stupidity early in a stream-of-consciousness speech about his vaunted infrastructure initiative to construction workers in Richfield, OH on March 29, 2018. IF this is a (fair & balanced) discovery of a new black hole, so be it.

[x The Atlantic]
Donald Trump Doesn't Understand Community Colleges
By Alia Wong

TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

aims american better colleges community community-college country crowd degree difference education effort enrolled established federal growing higher industries infrastructure institutions jobs latter millions offered opportunities percent practice president role roughly schools seems selingo serve speech states students substantial suggest support term told training trump two-year typically underappreciated vocational workforce year

created at TagCrowd.com

During a speech on Thursday, President Trump revealed a striking ignorance of one of the pillars of his country’s educational system. In the course of promoting his infrastructure plan, he, a bit perplexingly, dismissed the country’s community colleges, suggesting he doesn’t know what purpose they serve. “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” he told the crowd in an Ohio training facility for construction apprentices, moments after expressing nostalgia for the vocational schools that flourished when he was growing up—schools that offered hands-on training in fields such as welding and cosmetology.

He seemed to have a better grasp on these latter schools, analogizing them to the apprenticeship programs he was promoting in his effort to create 400,000 high-paying infrastructure jobs. The implication, as he brushed aside one form of higher education and lauded another, was that he’d like to resuscitate short-term training opportunities and phase out community colleges in the name of workforce development.

One of Trump’s stated goals is to ensure that every American knows “the dignity of work, the pride of a paycheck, and the satisfaction of a job well done”—but he seems to be unaware of the vital role that community colleges play in realizing that vision. As Jeffrey Selingo wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year, the fastest-growing jobs in the United States require candidates to have training and education beyond high school, and community colleges, which typically offer associate’s degrees, will be key to filling those openings.

Community colleges are not just a substantial part of the future of American education—they are also a substantial part of its present. More than 40 percent of the country’s undergraduates are currently enrolled in community colleges [PDF], according to the College Board, the higher-education research firm and test administrator. Preliminary federal data suggest [PDF] that roughly 9 million undergraduates were enrolled in community colleges in the 2015-2016 school year. And with their low tuition (typically costing less than what federal Pell grants provide) and practice of letting in all applicants, community colleges serve as a pathway to the middle class for low-income and first-generation students. Further, one in three community-college students transfers to a bachelor’s-granting institution within six years.

Enrolling in a community college certainly doesn’t guarantee a steady, well paid job. As my colleague Ann Hulbert has pointed out, too many community-college students never earn a degree. But that’s largely because two-year institutions serve a disproportionate percentage of students whose life circumstances—many have families to support and are working full-time jobs to pay their bills—make completing a degree particularly difficult. (Community colleges are acutely aware of this challenge and have implemented programs to better support such students; many are even evolving from learning and training institutions into holistic support systems, establishing food pantries on campus and offering subsidized daycare.)

On Thursday, Trump said the vocational schools of yore “were not called community colleges, because I don’t know what that means.” The president was right that there’s a difference between vocational schools and community colleges: Historically, the former were offered at the secondary level and seen as an alternative to a college degree, designed to prepare students for careers in industries like manufacturing. The latter took a broader approach, giving students skills that might apply across industries. Indeed, the term community college is unambiguous. As one administrator of a community college in Oregon told my colleague James Fallows back in 2015, “When we say we are a ‘community college,’ we really mean that we are for and of this community.” Replacing community colleges with vocational schools would mean doing away with institutions that have given millions of Americans the practical skills, liberal-arts background, and diploma that are considered prerequisites for a growing number of jobs—and shepherded millions of others to four-year institutions.

What’s more, Trump’s insinuation that the aims of vocational training and community colleges are mutually exclusive signals a misinterpretation of the latter’s role in today’s workforce-development initiatives; community colleges also help keep local and regional economic engines running. Community colleges were established after World War II to churn out qualified workers—a duty they’ve continued to fulfill. As Selingo noted, “Some 34 percent of the roughly $114 billion the federal government spends annually on workforce development and education goes to higher education, with much of it flowing to two-year colleges.”

And even though the term vocational education isn’t used today as often as it was in the 20^th century, that doesn’t mean that community colleges have crowded out such training opportunities. In fact, they’ve seen a resurgence in recent years. The difference is primarily semantic: Nowadays, such training is typically described as “career and technical education”—the result of a rebranding effort aimed in part to counter vocational schools’ (somewhat earned) reputation for tracking disadvantaged Americans into low-wage jobs.

The incorrect assumption that Trump made in his speech on Thursday was that community colleges and vocational schools haven’t been able to and can’t exist alongside each other—a misunderstanding that further underappreciates an already underappreciated component of American education. # # #

[Alia Wong is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees the education section. She previously wrote for Honolulu Civil Beat, where she reported on K-12 and higher education. She graduated summa cum laude (both degrees) from Boston University with both a BS (journalism) and BA (Latin American studies).]

Copyright &!69; 2018 The Atlantic Monthly Group




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Today, Eags Teaches A Homily On Our Civil Religion

In January 2017, the women marched wearing pink crochet hats and then, in March 2018, K-12 students marched — bearing scorn for the cowardly adults who were craven cowards in the face of gun-ignorance. Let the current occupant of the Oval Office attempt to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller because the march that follows will roll right over the occupant. If this is a (fair & balanced) call of our civil religion, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Actually, You Can Fix Stupid
By Eags (Timothy Egan)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

adults americans century citizens civics class country critical democracy demonstrators education empty fake feel fox friends generation getting government graduation helping kids largely leading learn news obvious opened people percent political powerless president recent school seattle shooting single sotomayor states stress student stupid support system teach trump universal vote young

created at TagCrowd.com

Pope Francis opened the holiest week of the Christian calendar with an admonition to the generation that will own the 21^st century. “Dear young people, you have it in you to shout,” he said in his homily. “It is up to you not to keep quiet.”

Other voices were more censorious. On “Fox & Friends,” which provides President Trump with steady ration of half-truths and hatreds to fill an empty head and an empty schedule, a co-host had some advice for younger citizens just now learning how to use the wings of democracy.

“These 17-year-olds should go back to civics class,” said [co-host] Pete Hegseth, scowling at the March for Our Lives demonstrators.

Actually, civics class has come to them, in the form of a hail of bullets from a weapon of war that is legal because of a broken political system. They’ve been forced, by triage, to learn how to use the tools of democracy that were largely denied them by passive educators.

It’s no secret that in the rush to produce adults who are adept at applying science and technology to modern life, we left them ill-trained in the basic duties of citizenship. Nearly a third of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, and almost 40 percent are unable to cite a right guaranteed by the First Amendment.

But it’s not the kids who are the doofuses. “There’s a big difference between being ignorant and being stupid,” said Sonia Sotomayor, associate justice of the Supreme Court. She’s been touring the country — 38 states so far — promoting civic competence among the young, a virtue that used to be a bedrock part of American education.

“No one is born a citizen,” she said during a stopover in Seattle. “You have to be taught what that means.”

The teaching, for a generation that has come of age since the 1999 Columbine massacre, for the 187,000 students who have experienced a shooting on campus during school since then, has been largely do-it-yourself. Only a handful of states require proficiency in civics and government as a condition of graduation. The educational system, with its fear of confrontational topics and its corporate-driven emphasis on STEM, has failed them.

But one of the great surprises of the Trump era is the renaissance of civic engagement — at a level of urgency not seen in half a century. It’s a reaction to severe stress on democracy; Trump is both the cause, and leading symptom, of that stress.

The awakening started with the revulsion of women — at a president who is credibly accused of sleeping with porn stars while his wife nursed their newborn child and who bragged of sexual assault, and at his daily slights to truth, dignity and other values that mothers teach their children.

And now it’s the young’s turn. Critical thinking has arrived at a critical time. They’re not afraid of trolls; they grew up with snark from a screen. So after Laura Ingraham at Fox taunted a Parkland shooting survivor for not getting into his college of choice, the student immediately tweeted out a list of her advertisers. When they threatened to bail, she apologized.

“These self-righteous kids screaming at you on television over the weekend aren’t helping out at all,” said Tucker Carlson, another Fox scold. As he knows, they are helping — but just not his side. “First we march, then we vote,” was a leading slogan of the demonstrations.

The problem is that Americans are among the least-active voters in developed countries — another consequence, I would argue, of not teaching the manual of democracy in school. And young people are the least likely to vote.

“Adults mess up a lot,” Sotomayor told the high school kids in her audience in Seattle. “We don’t have all the answers. We need you to come up with fresher and better ideas.”

So today, these young people wonder why even the most obvious legislation, universal background checks on all gun purchases, can’t pass in Congress despite support from 90 percent of the public. They learn quickly that it’s because a single lobby owns the politicians. The obvious solution, which jaded political minds often forget, is to vote the bums out. It’s not complicated.

And again, it shouldn’t be a DIY thing. Let’s teach people how to tell fake news from real news. They do this in Italy, and many universities in the United States have taken it up as well. It should be, like learning road signs before you can get a driver’s license, one of the courses that everyone takes before getting out of high school.

Democracies die when citizens feel powerless. The biggest stress test will come if Trump fires the special counsel Robert Mueller. Then, all the people new to the process will see what a constitutional crisis looks like. But thanks to recent, real-life lessons, they’ll recognize it for what it is. And they won’t feel powerless to do something about it. # # #

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

This Blogger Has The IRS Blues

'Twas the Ides of March 2017 and this blogger went to office of the CPA firm that had prepared his tax returns for more than 10 years. Not typically, the 2017 tax return was not presented by the staff member of the firm who had done the work on the 2017 taxes. Uh, oh. The receptionist handed the blogger the tax papers he had submitted along with a single page memo that informed the blogger that he had gone from a refund recipient of nearly $500 for 2016 to a tax bill of nearly $1500 for 2017. The aftershocks still rumble through the blogger as he writes this bleak account of taxes in the year of the Great Tax Cut engineered by the current occupant of the Oval Office in behalf of his base of adoring 1%ers. When the blogger encountered the droll set of suggestions for taxpayers like the blogger who will not receive a tax refund for 2017, it struck a chord of some sort. If this is a (fair & balanced) account of the real March Madness, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
What To Expect When You’re Not Expecting A Tax Refund
By Julie Vick



TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

avocado avoid awful baby becoming buying chinchilla confidently different doctor dread eighteen exhaustion expect fact feel fingernail frequent getting hard headed inches jealousy judith keep lack learn magical money month nausea normal others owe pay people probably question range refund sads size someone something tax ten-year vick week yacht year

created at TagCrowd.com

Tax season is a time of big wins and losses. You probably went into it confidently this year, since it seemed like even five-year-old lemonade-stand proprietors would be getting a refund. But then you saw the numbers on TurboTax plummet and you faced the facts: you will owe money. Keep reading to learn more about what to expect during this challenging time.

THE FIRST MONTH: AN OVERVIEW

Week 1: Your dread is just the size of your small, unmanicured fingernail. The money you owe doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal.

Week 2: The dread now measures five inches, about the size of an avocado toast. It’s becoming hard to ignore.

Week 3: The dread is the size of a Judith Leiber couture evening bag shaped like a martini glass—the kind that even someone with a sizable refund shouldn’t buy.

Week 4: It’s basically the size of a full-grown baby who keeps you up at night. You’ll probably be managing it for at least the next eighteen years.

WHAT YOU MAY BE FEELING

Physically

• Fatigue: Your body may feel sluggish, but that probably has more to do with your avoidance of your treadmill desk than your lack of a refund.

• Nausea: Owing money can turn your stomach sour. You may want to avoid buying eight-dollar lattes because of the smell, and the fact that the barista just cut your credit card in half.

• Frequent urination: That is not about a lack of a tax refund. Call your doctor.

Emotionally

• Jealousy: Why are your friends heading out to a hot-tub party on a yacht while you are headed back to the plasma bank?

• Anger: Couldn’t you have done something different in 2017? Something other than buying a ten-year membership to a goat-yoga studio?

• Confusion: Don’t you actually believe in taxes to pay for things like education and making the U.S. more like the magical land of Norway? Why does contributing to society make you feel the sads?

• Frustration: The world is awful. If you had received a tax refund, you could have bought another pet chinchilla, and that would have raised your spirits.

WHAT YOU MAY BE WONDERING

“Is it OK for me to drink alcohol when I’m not expecting a tax refund?”

Yes, but you’ll want to stick to a bottom-shelf vodka for the next few months. Perhaps the awful taste will help remind you to put aside more money for taxes next year.

“Is it normal to feel tired all the time when I’m not experiencing bouts of rage?”

Yes.

“How will I feel once I actually pay off the money I owe?”

You may experience a range of emotions, including joy, exhaustion, and a craving for a pitcher of margaritas.

“What are quarterly taxes?”

That’s a question that many people are still working hard to better understand.

“When will the nausea go away?”

For some people it only lasts a few weeks. Others may find that it persists until they learn about someone who owes even more money than they do.

“How can I make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

Why not try having an actual baby or two? # # #

[Julie Vick is s a writer and teacher. I primarily write non-fiction including humor, parenting, and travel. My work has appeared in Parents magazine, Salon, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Washington Post, Paste, AFAR.com, Brain, Child, and this first contribution to The New Yorker. She also teaches undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses at the University of Colorado at Denver. Courses I teach include Business Writing, Composition, Advanced Rhetorical Analysis, and Technical Writing. Vick received both a BS (journalism) and a BA (English) from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MA (English) from the University of Colorado at Denver.]

Copyright © 2018 The New Yorker/Condé Nast Digital




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! — Draw Near And Give Your Attention To John Paul Stevens, Associate Justice (Retired) Of The United States Supreme Court

We have reached a potential tipping point in the national debate over guns and gun rights. Supreme Court Justice (Retired) John Paul Stevens offers a rock-solid means to end the faux claim that the US Constitution virtually guarantees the right of any 18-year-old (and older) persons to own military weapons for self-defense or hunting and other so-called sporting pursuits. This blogger has another objective for the United States of America in addition to resisting the treasonous acts of the current occupant of the Oval Office — to repeal the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. If this is a (fair & balanced) call to RESIST & REPEAL, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Repeal The Second Amendment
By John Paul Stevens


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

adoption amendment arms bear burger chief cities concern control court debate decision demand demonstrated eliminate enact far federal firearms fraud gun justice legislation lifetime limited militia national nra organizations others overturned prohibit provided public reform regulated repeal rule schoolchildren security sellers simple state sup support supreme throughout warren weapon years

created at TagCrowd.com

Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.

That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment [emphasis supplied].

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18^th century.

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice [Warren] Burger publicly characterized the NRA as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.

That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the NRA with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the NRA’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence. # # #

[John Paul Stevens served as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court from 1975 until his retirement in 2010. In 1970, President Richard Nixon appointed Stevens to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Five years later, President Gerald Ford successfully nominated Stevens to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy caused by the retirement of Justice William O. Douglas. Stevens retired during the administration of President Barack Obama, and was succeeded by Justice Elena Kagan. Stevens's majority opinions in landmark cases include Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Apprendi v. New Jersey, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency. Stevens is also known for his dissents in Bush v. Gore, District of Columbia v. Heller, and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. He received a BA (English) from the University of Chicago and a JD magna cum laude from the School of Law of Northwestern University (IL).]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Hear, Hear For Eliot Cohen — A Present-Day Paul Revere

Professor Eliot Cohen, patriot and scholar, proclaimed resistance to the current occupant of the Oval Office in 2016, before the occupant sullied the oath of office on Friday, January 20, 2017. Cohen also proclaims the need for history, real US history, to combat the poisonous treason of the current occupant and his acolytes. If this is a (fair & balanced) call for good history for all readers, no matter what age, so be it.

[x The Atlantic]
A Modest Plea For Patriotic History
By Eliot A. Cohen


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

american benjamin best better board books century chief david days education fact fight figures fischer fought george gives heroes historical history including inspired james kids knapsack knowledge nationalism nationalists particular particularly past patriotic people perhaps president read real reminds robert rose slavery soldier sone suffering union war warner whose young

created at TagCrowd.com

It is telling that those who speak loudest about Making America Great Again tend to refer to themselves as nationalists rather than patriots. George Orwell took the measure of contemporary nationalism in a 1945 essay on the subject. Nationalism, he noted, is “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects.” Patriotism, on the other hand, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world.” The United States could do with more patriots and fewer nationalists.

One of the ways to grow patriots is through engagement with the past. Self-described white nationalists do not need to know anything—in fact, it is easier if they do not. It is not surprising that the chief American nationalist these days has proudly noted that he has not read a book for half a century. To understand and truly appreciate one’s own requires knowledge; to cruise the world inflaming your supporters, looking for trade fights with allies and murmuring soft words for dictators, on the other hand, ignorance does the job quite nicely.

Unsurprisingly, the events of the last two years have evoked a resurgence of interest in civic education, and particularly historical education. This is a good thing. Amid all the dismal statistics about American kids being unable to describe what is in the Bill of Rights, from which country the US won its independence, and whether Benjamin Franklin was president, there is good news. Even the usually wary Thomas B. Fordham Institute cheered the revamping of the Advanced Placement US History program by the College Board in 2014. At a grass-roots level there are a lot of teachers, school boards, and anxious parents who realize that the kids need to learn about who Americans are, how to think critically, and how democracy works.

In large measure Americans do engage with the past: They troop to Civil War battlefields and compelling historical museums. They watch New York musicals about historical figures whom previously they only vaguely recalled from the ten dollar bill. With a bit more energy they pick up books by great popular historians like David McCullough and biographers like Ron Chernow, or by academic scholars with graceful pens and vivid imaginations like James McPherson and David Hackett Fischer.

There are plenty of places to go, things to see, and books to read. But what Americans need more of is the embrace of the American past that helped them through the turmoil of the 1960’s and the sour politics and economics of the 1970’s. What is missing is, for example, the kind of writing for young people that Bennett Cerf of Random House solicited for the Landmark series that he founded in 1948, and that ran for some twenty years. He recruited top notch writers, including novelists like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, C. S. Forester, and Robert Penn Warren, and war correspondents like William Shirer, Quentin Reynolds, and Richard Tregaskis to write about epic events and personalities. It was formative reading for a lot of teens then, what a recent article in the American Historical Association’s newsmagazine, Perspectives on History, called an “icon of American history.”

Patriotic history enters through historical novels as well—old standbys like Drums Along the Mohawk (1936, 1997), or Johnny Tremaine (1943, 2011). Nor did those novels of the last century always follow a conventional or unproblematic story line. Perhaps the best historical novelist of the 1930’s, whose grip I have never shaken, was Kenneth Roberts, whose Arundel and Rabble in Arms (1935) celebrated Benedict Arnold (pre-treason), and whose Oliver Wiswell (1940, 1999) told a sympathetic tale of the American Loyalists.

Patriotic history does not have to cover up the dark pages of the American past—the cruelties and suffering of slavery and Jim Crow, the violence and injustice of the Trail of Tears or the massacre at Wounded Knee, the corruption of Tammany Hall, the follies of the Red Scares or Charles Lindbergh’s creepy America Firstism. But patriotic histories have a way of reminding us of what there is to celebrate in the American past—as when David Hackett Fischer reminds us that George Washington broke with British military practice in abjuring the floggings that could turn into death sentences, or when James McPherson points out that, in fact, the Cause—be it preservation of the Union or hostility to slavery—really did matter to many Union soldiers.

Above all, patriotic history provides us heroes. The president, early in his tenure in office, blithered a bit about Frederick Douglass, clearly clueless about the identity let alone the greatness of a man who escaped slavery and then fought unremittingly against it. Patriotic biography gives us John Quincy Adams in every phase of his life, to include its end, when he took a lonely and principled vote on the Mexican War just before suffering a fatal cerebral hemorrhage on the floor of the House of Representatives. It gives readers Davy Crockett on the frontier and Audie Murphy at Anzio, and it also gives them Harriet Tubman rescuing men and women from bondage, or Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce fighting a hopeless fight for his people. It gives them complicated figures like Andrew Carnegie—strikebreaker and extraordinary philanthropist committed to building libraries across the country to give young people the keys to better futures.

All of us, but young people especially, need heroes, including the really complicated ones, and particularly these days, when character is in such short supply. Knowledge of what real heroes put up with makes it less likely that one will fall for the kind of nonsense purveyed by a stylish hysteric who wrote about the 2016 election as if a vote for Donald Trump were the equivalent of being one of the passengers—again, real heroes—who charged the hijackers of Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. To know what heroes look like is also to know what craven or spineless or obsequious or merely unserious persons are.

American history is littered with heroes, and some of the humblest are the most inspiring. In the cemetery of Crown Point, New York—a dozen miles from Fort Ticonderoga, a beautiful place to explore patriotic history if ever there was one—is the grave of Benjamin Warner, who died in 1846 at age ninety. The inscription on his tombstone is simple: “A Revolutionary Soldier and a friend of the slave.” In the museum at Fort Ticonderoga (where I serve as a member of the Board of Trustees), is a battered old knapsack that belonged to him. Like many of his generation, Warner rose and fought, came home, and rose and fought again, from the beginning of the Revolution to its very end. Next to the knapsack is a card with these words:

This Napsack I caryd

Through the war of the

Revolution to achieve the

Merican Independence

I transmit it to my olest sone

To keep it an transmit it to his

Oldest sone and so on to the latest posterity

And whilst one shred of it shall remane

Never surrender your libertys to ye foren

Invador or an aspiring Demygog

Not very well spelled, perhaps, but shrewd even so. If Americans knew their Benjamin Warners better and were thereby inspired, they would find themselves better prepared to deal with the threats that the simple farmer, a patriot if ever there was one, understood all too well. # # #

[Eliot A. Cohen is the Director of the Strategic Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University (MD). Most recently, he has written The Big Stick: the Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (2017). See his other books here. Cohen received both a BA (government) and a PhD (political science) from Harvard University (MA).]

Copyright © 2018 The Atlantic Monthly Group




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Dr. Wilbur von Philbert (Tom Tomorrow's Nutty Professor) Has Discovered A Black Hole In The Oval Office

Yesterday, Tom/Dan wrote a comment about today's 'toon:

Disclaimer: the probable subjective experience of being trapped in an event horizon has been fictionalized for the purposes of satire. But since someone will inevitably feel compelled to write and point out the ways in which the science is wrong, let me just say: I know!

In my understanding as a layperson, if it were possible to observe someone trapped in the event horizon, it would appear *from the outside* as if time had slowed to a standstill for the person being sucked into the black hole. To that person, however, time would still appear to pass normally. So I’m playing with that idea but fudging it a bit. That’s why I included the professor’s line in the fourth panel: “Until now, no one knew what that experience would be like from the inside.” Just trying to tip my hat to the inaccuracy, and my awareness of it.

Also, nothing can survive the event horizon — you’d be ripped apart and crushed by the gravitational forces.

Also, black holes don’t form in people’s heads, no matter how dense that person may be.

Until next week,

Dan/Tom

Black holes are accepted science thanks to the contributions of James Bardeen, Jacob Bekenstein, Brandon Carter, and Stephen Hawking. and now, we have Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) speaking as Dr. Wilbur von Philbert, a theoretical physicist who discovered how to mine reality for energy. His name suggests a relationship to the hazlenut. In all of the pseudo-scientific verbiage, this blogger liked the suggestion that the brain of the current occupant of the Oval Office was a black hole best of all. If this is a (fair & balanced) elegant explanation of stupidity, so be it.

[x TMW]
The Black Hole
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]


Copyright © 2018 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) Exposes The Taking Of The White House Oval Office 123

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd's nickname, courtesy of POTUS 43) manages to strike three idiots simultaneously in today's Op-Ed essay: George W. Bush (43), the current occupant of the Oval Office (45), and John Bolton. The first two idiots are at the bottom of any presidential rating list and the would-be presidential adviser freely offers misguided advice until there is a confirmation vote of his appointment. If this is a (fair & balanced) tale of the gang who couldn't/can't govern straight, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Bolt The Oval Against Bolton
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

administration ago american analysts believes best bolton bush campaign case change cheney comments continue covering department distort donald dowd ends far feb foreign george iraq kagan man mar matter maureen minutes neocon policy politics pre-emption president promise pushed republican rumsfeld son style support syria treated trump vessel vote war watched

created at TagCrowd.com

It’s unnerving covering a president who is treated like a boy king, requiring minders; who is easily swayed because he is underinformed; who can sit still only long enough for short oral briefings; who swaggers and mocks to mask his insecurities; who tries to replace real news with faux; and who can’t seem to fathom that distorting reality to suit political ends is dangerous.

It’s even more unsettling covering two Republican presidents who fit this description: George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

I watched in alarm as W, who had promised a “humble” foreign policy with no nation-building and who had been a bipartisan, genial Texas governor, shape-shifted into a hyperaggressive and belligerently unilateral president. His ego and inadequacies were expertly manipulated by his regents, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, bureaucratic samurai with their own rapacious agendas.

A prodigal son who floated around drinking and partying until he was 40, W was an empty vessel filled up by the wrong people, iron-asses, to use his father’s epithet about the counselors and neocons he felt hijacked his son’s presidency — “real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything and use force to get our way in the Middle East.”

Because the Dr. Strangeloves treated W like a host body, we ended up in two tragically unending wars.

In the bitter contest between the Rumsfeld Defense Department and the Colin Powell State Department, John Bolton was a Rummy person who was a fifth column at State, along with Liz Cheney. Like a walrus version of Wile E. Coyote, he lived to dynamite treaties, alliances and anything with “global” or “multilateral” in the title.

He was known as the most undiplomatic diplomat ever, with a rip-their-eyeballs-out, foaming-at-the-mouth style.

W nominated Bolton as UN ambassador, even though Bolton had once remarked that if the UN lost 10 stories, “it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” and even though the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was reviewing charges that he was using intimidation to distort key intelligence and buttress his hard-line positions on Cuba and North Korea. He was accused of trying to fire intelligence analysts and buoying the phony case on WMDs in Iraq.

Bolton rejected the neocon label, preferring to see himself as a Goldwater conservative, but he helped the neocons and Cheney’s henchmen when they shoveled distortions into Secretary Powell’s UN speech making the case for war.

His mistreatment of underlings was so legendary — one claimed that he had thrown objects — that I once dubbed him the Naomi Campbell of the Bush administration.

By far the best thing about the Trump campaign was watching many of those culpable for the Iraq war go ballistic trying to stop the neophyte, who kept pointing out that Americans had been deceived into the historic debacle with Iraq. He even went where no one else had dared to go and correctly pointed out that W and his administration had dropped the ball before 9/11.

Bill Kristol, Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan and Max Boot, all of whom pushed to “liberate” Iraq, denounced Trump, saying he would be a foreign policy disaster. Kagan and Boot said they would vote for Hillary Clinton.

After lukewarm support for the invasion, Trump often criticized W on Iraq. “No matter how long we stay in Iraq, no matter how many soldiers we send, the day we leave, the meanest, most vicious, most brilliant man in the country, a man who makes Saddam Hussein look like a baby, will take over and spit on the American flag,” he told me in 2006. “Bush will go down as the worst and by far the dumbest president in history.”

Trump was a Hillary supporter in those days and said that although her vote to authorize the Iraq war was “horrendous,” she should be forgiven because “that decision was based on lies given to her.”

“She’s very smart and has a major chance to be our next president,” he told me.

In 2013, Trump tweeted: “All former Bush administration officials should have zero standing on Syria. Iraq was a waste of blood & treasure.”

When he ran for president against Jeb Bush, he continued attacking W and presenting himself as a noninterventionist, focus-on-America candidate.

But somehow, in his King George madness, Trump has circled back to elevate one of the chief Iraq war hawks to be his national security adviser.

That move sent a shiver through the capital, among both Democrats and Republicans, who whispered, “Anyone but Bolton!”

Bolton is a clever infighter. He learned from the best. He pushed to go to war in Iraq and still thinks it was a good idea, just as he has pushed to go to war in North Korea and get regime change in Iran and Syria. He is a fervent believer in pre-emptive war.

(Like other war hawks, Bolton didn’t want to serve himself, enlisting in the National Guard in 1970 to ensure he wouldn’t “die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy” in Vietnam.)

The president who loves to push hot buttons and hire Fox analysts must really get a kick out of Bolton’s tempestuous style if he is now willing to overlook the 69-year-old’s unruly mustache and frightening faith in pre-emption.

After all those years of criticizing W on war, Trump is now letting himself be guided by W’s most hawkish adviser. And the president, whose curiosity only extends to himself, seems determined to stay an empty vessel. That makes him, like W, a magnet for extremists who want to hijack the Oval. # # #

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Note To Curmudgeons Who Resent Curators: This Virtual Reserve Room Has A Virtual Door That Permits Both Entries As Well As Exits

It has been written that the Web is the world's largest library, except all of the books are scattered on the virtual floor. And this blogger has written, more than once, that his blog is a Reserve Reading Room in the messy cyberspace library. And that blogger claimed to be the curator of this collection of more than 5,000 essays and articles that grows daily. This collection, will include with today's posting, an essay that offers genteel snark at pretentious language. Caught up in all of this, Professor Wilfred McClay takes aim at notion of a collection of anything that is overseen by a "curator. Sorry, there is no apology here over word choice. A Reserve Room collection is curated overseen by a curator. If this is a (fair & balanced) defense of word-choice, so be it.

[x The Hedgehog Review]
Curate
By Wilfred M. McClay

TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

able adopt air assortment belief better books bookstore care change curation deep described enough everyone feel force independent language life lined longer lot lovers means museum notion offering organizing palace perhaps plain proprietors public rather reflects running saying selection social something sort spontaneous store sure taste things turn wisdom wrong

created at TagCrowd.com

I last encountered the “c” word on a visit to a recently opened independent bookstore, an immensely agreeable place where a lover of books could wile away many delightful hours. Like any bibliophile, I am inclined to hail the mere survival of such stores with a champagne toast, and to greet the creation of new ones as a token, however faint, of civilizational recovery. I also tend to rate the people running such establishments among the real heroes of our time. So at the risk of sounding even the least bit ungracious toward the owners of this particular store, I must confess to being somewhat taken aback by publicity materials that described their inventory as “thoughtfully curated.” Those slightly smug and self-congratulatory words made me wince. Book lovers ought to be word lovers too, and this usage felt all wrong, its intrusion into this happy scene a microbetrayal.

I suspect that my strong reaction was spurred by a more general problem. In the demimonde of Facebook and the like, everyone is in the public relations racket, and everyday life takes on the texture of a real-estate commercial, with constant inflation of language and imagery in the service of self-presentation. Why is it no longer enough to say that a store stocks a fine assortment of important and interesting titles? Is “selection” not a fancy enough word anymore? Does it not convey in plain and accessible English the central idea—that this is not a Barnes and Noble or any other cookie-cutter franchise operation, but that the proprietors have instead exercised independent taste and judgment in assembling their offerings? Why do we need to have the pretentious and mystifying notion of “curation” drifting in and fogging up the air?

“Curation” lends to the proceedings a certain air of quasi-professionalism. It seeks to claim for the proprietors an exquisitely refined faculty of discrimination, a sense that “objective” higher standards are being enacted and adhered to. The selection that has been made, we are being assured, was not a product of whim or fancy, let alone crass commercialism. It reflects deep wisdom and heightened competence, a sensibility like that of the museum curator or wealthy collector, or the sommelier who truly knows his wines, rather than the all-too-human idiosyncrasy of enthusiastic but uncredentialed amateurs offering the reading public an assortment of “books we like, and that we hope you will like too.” And, as the word’s allusion to museums and museum work subtly suggests, the use of “curate” carries overtones of social climbing, of seeking to associate oneself with the “better sort” of people—tasteful, knowledgeable, attractive, suave, well-to-do.

Perhaps this reaction seems petty and ungenerous. But the sudden ubiquity of the verb “curate” gives one the feeling that a sort of linguistic occupation force crept in and took over in the dead of night. It is as if everyone else went to a workshop on the subject while you were fast asleep, and then you awoke, like Rip Van Winkle, to a changed world, full of new locutions you were expected to adopt instantly, without the benefit of explanation or justification. When, and why, did break-ins become “home invasions”? When, and why, did the weatherman begin referring to rain and snow as “precipitation events”? When and how did hotel rooms come to be described as “breakout”? (And should one take extra care to secure one’s possessions if one stays in such a room?) To live in this century is to be asking such questions all the time.

I am all for the vitality of spontaneous linguistic creativity, as we see it in the constant adaption and development of slang. That fountain of invention is the energy of life itself. But there is nothing spontaneous or winsome about this other kind of change. It is prescriptivism with a vengeance. These awkward and abstract ways of expressing things are impositions upon the language. They have the same feel to them as the array of politically correct euphemisms—“differently abled,” or “visually impaired,” or “sanitation engineer,” or pick your own—with which we are constantly being badgered. These days, the breaking wheel of language revision never seems to stop turning. Whether these innovations proceed from a cultural-political agenda desirous of controlling discourse, or merely from a modern compulsion to invent jargon as a way of marking off social territory and driving away poachers, one always feels, when forced to adopt them, as if one is being fitted for braces, or lined up dutifully for a third-grade class photo.

But “curate” is a little different. It is not a word imposed, but one adopted eagerly, even anxiously, by those who use it, because it bestows the prestige of cultivation, learning, and esprit de finesse upon activities that might otherwise seem plain and unexceptional, even vulgar. This is a game that more and more want to play. Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas recently announced the renovation of its Palace Tower, featuring décor “curated by top designers.” “Curation” is a dressing-up intensifier, serving the same function in our current speech as the adjectival heel lift supplied by “artisanal” cheeses or “craft” coffee.

Sprinkle the fairy dust of high-sounding words over the ungainly contours of something quite ordinary, and you may be able to transform it into something special, in the way that a gentle snowfall can turn an ugly tool shed into a dreamy cottage, inhabited by elves. Even if you are running a thrift shop—and yes, it is not hard to find proprietors of thrift shops who identify themselves as “curators” of their establishments—you too can boast that your shop’s contents are “thoughtfully curated.” That sounds a whole lot better than saying “We don’t take used underwear or stuff that has holes in it.” But there is a lot to be said for respecting and loving ordinary things on their own terms, seeing that they are beautiful even without makeup, rather than always trying to tart them up into something grand and gilded.

But to be fair, there is another element folded into the meaning of “curate,” one running deep but not readily visible, that may also explain some of its appeal. The word derives from the Latin curare, to take care, and has in its historical ancestry the notion of a “curate” as one who is charged with the care of souls. This more spiritual meaning survives here and there, as for example in the “curate” of an Anglican parish church; and the faint aura of it surely still remains a part of the word we use to describe the museum professional. The religion of art persists, after all, as witness the flocks of culture-vultures that stream into our galleries on Sundays, standing in long lines to perform their spiritual duties. Perhaps in some instances, such as that of the independent bookstore, it can even be said that the “thoughtful curation” of the inventory reflects an attentiveness to the needs of the soul. One earnestly wants it to be so.

But the word “curate” itself may be too corrupted by misuse to be able to carry such larger meanings much longer. As in so many other respects, Silicon Valley leads the way. It is now commonplace to speak of “social curation,” which means something akin to “the wisdom of the crowd,” the belief that the most meaningful way of sorting through and selecting and organizing masses of data is by the aggregation of the opinions and tastes of millions of completely independent individuals. There is a good deal to be said for this view, but the process it describes is the very opposite of curation itself, a word that, if it is to mean anything at all, means the application of a conscious sensibility and organizing intelligence. The spirit of curation resides in the saying that one man plus the truth makes a majority. The spirit of “social” curation is the belief, well captured in the title of a best-selling 1959 record album, that 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.

Which may well be true. But when we start calling all those Elvis fans curators, then that’s a sure sign that “curation” has left the building. # # #

[Wilfred M. McClay is G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty and director of the Center for the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. Prior to that appointment, McClay held the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities and was Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His book, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994), won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. McClay received a BA cum laude from St. John’s College (MD) and a PhD (history) from the Johns Hopkins University (MD).]

Copyright *#169; 2018 Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC)




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves