Reality is finally catching up with our reality TV star President. Faced with an unprecedented economic collapse triggered by his own clear failure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic (something other industrialized nations have managed to pull off), the Donald tweeted hopefully last week that the November election might need to be rescheduled.

No one really knows if Trump is hoping to emulate the strongmen he admires and name himself president-for-life, or if he was just trying to create a distraction from the awful jobs numbers that show what a mess hes made of the U.S. economy.

"Trump has lied so much for so long, people are finally just tuning him out."

Either way, its clear he sees the writing on the wall. The American people have had enough of malignant narcissism and feckless governing. They are tired of living with the disastrous results of this Presidents non-leadership. Joe Biden is ahead of Trump by double digits, and is leading in swing states including Wisconsin. Unless the Republicans up their voter suppression game to previously unimagined heightsor, as Trump suggested, call off the electionTrump is toast.

As terrible as these times areand as terrifying as it is to see things devolve so far so fastthere is something hopeful about Trumps failure.

For one thing, Trump himself is losing the one thing that is most precious to himour undivided attention. The fact that Trumps election gambit failed to elicit a big reaction from either side of the aisle in Congress or from the public shows that weve entered a new phase of politics. Call it Trump fatigue. Trump has lied so much for so long, people are finally just tuning him out. No amount of posturing, preening and shock-jock showmanship can distract people forever from their own circumstances.

Even better, Trumps efforts to start a race war are falling flat. Americans have awakened to the struggle against systemic racism and favor the police reform measures Republicans in Congress have resisted. They dont want federal troops called in to defend their cities against Black Lives Matter protesters. Federal troops who were grabbing protesters off the streets in Portland are quietly retreating. And Trumps fear-mongering campaign doesnt seem to be working, either. Thats partly because the so-called suburban housewives he is trying to appeal to are not the frightened shut-ins he imagines and partly because things are so damn bad already. Its hard to win by warning that if you are not reelected the result will be chaos and collapse while presiding over chaos and collapse.

Trump is so godawful, you would think more Republicans would be jumping ship already. But apart from Mitt Romney, Charlie Sykes, and a handful of other principled conservatives, GOP politicians appear to be willing to go all the way to the bottom with their epic failure of a president.

Dont kid yourself about those principled conservatives, though. While Trump is uniquely bad, he is also a product of the Republican Party. He yells out loud what more respectable politicians used a dog-whistle to convey. The basic outline of Trumpismthe greed-is-good, step-on-the-poor, racist, sexist, rich white male triumphalismhave been baked into the party for a long, long time.

Its no big surprise that Trumps chief enabler is Wisconsins own U.S. Senator Ron Johnson. Johnson, a Republican and one of the richest men in the Senate, who has reportedly doubled his net worth of tens of millions of dollars since taking office, proposed last week that jobless Americans receiving emergency unemployment benefits during the pandemic should take a haircutfrom $600 per week to $200. This would solve the problem, Johnson suggested, of creating an incentive for the unemployed not to go back to worksince $600 a week is more than a lot of American workers earn in their regular jobs.

Never mind that that incentive doesnt existas Marty Schladen reports, a group of Yale economists studying unemployed workers concluded the expanded benefits neither encouraged layoffs during the pandemics onset nor deterred people from returning to work once businesses began reopening. Furthermore, states that had waived work search requirements have started to reinstate them.

Johnson is an Ayn Rand acolyte like his fellow Wisconsin Republican, former House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan was often contrasted with Trump. He was lauded as a deep thinker and a man of principle who was serious about balancing the budget. His signature budget proposal would have turned Medicare into a voucher program and he warned that the safety net could become a hammock for lazy jobless people (this in a district where middle class families saw their futures go up in smoke when the GM plant closed).

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Ryan was Trump-litea rich white guy who dreamed up ways of making life harder for struggling workers as a kind of moral improvement program, used racially coded language about welfare and food stamps, and defended the interests of big business and the wealthy.

Like Ryan, Johnson has the soothing aura of money about him, which seems to explain why he is taken seriously, despite spouting jaw-dropping nonsense about how we shouldnt worry too much about COVID-19 and his touting of rightwing conspiracy theories.

Johnsons tolerance for nonsense has earned him a spot as Trumps wingman. As chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, Johnson has been busy issuing subpoenas in the Obamagate investigation of wingnut conspiracy theories involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Good luck with that.

If Trump cant distract voters with his threats to cancel the election and let blood flow in the streets, it seems unlikely that Johnson will get big ratings with his cockamamie investigation.

Heres the good news: Trumps failure is a sign of weakness in the Southern Strategy, trickle down economics, and the whole antisocial Republican program.

Thats a good thing.

The question is what comes next?

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee is not exactly the face of the future. He will no doubt run a more competent administration, and will appoint people who actually care about governing. Thats a good start. But going back to the past is not going to solve our worst problems. The bandages have been ripped off of some deep wounds in our country, and its going to take tremendous energy and creativity to heal. Biden would do well to listen to his more progressive rivals from the primary campaign, who tapped into deep generational angst about inequality, college debt, systemic racism and the fact that we are teetering on the tipping point of total climate destruction.

And, of course, unless the Democrats take back the Senate, there will be no progress at all.

Progressive ideas that Biden himself used to brush off are going to have to get a serious hearing, and urgent actionincluding taking on the brutal, racist system of policing and mass incarceration, providing high-quality health care to every American, radically re-regulating Wall Street, guaranteeing Americans a living wage and access to college, and criminalizing the sociopathic behavior of fossil fuel company executives who are literally killing the planet.

The curtain is coming down on the Trump show. We need to make sure it rises on a better day.

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The GOP Are Standing on Trump's Sinking Ship, But Democrats Need a Vision Beyond Electing Biden - Common Dreams

Historically, conservative political parties face the problem Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls the conservative dilemma. How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win elections in a democracy? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens: The more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who will vote to tax them.

This is not mere ivory-tower theorizing. Conservative politicians know the bind theyre in. When Mitt Romney told a room of donors during the 2012 election that there were 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what because they believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it, even though they pay no income tax, he was describing the conservative dilemma. Our message of low taxes doesnt connect, he said, a bit sadly.

If anything, Romney understated the case. Sure, 47 percent of Americans, in 2011, didnt pay federal income taxes though they paid a variety of other taxes, ranging from federal payroll taxes to state sales taxes. But slicing the electorate by income tax burden only makes sense if youre wealthy enough for income taxes to be your primary economic irritant. Thats not true for most people. Romneys 53 percent versus 47 percent split was a gentle rendering of an economy where the rich were siphoning off startling quantities of wealth.

Occupy Wall Streets rallying cry We are the 99%! framed the math behind the conservative dilemma more directly: How do you keep winning elections and cutting taxes for the rich in a (putative) democracy where the top 1 percent went from 11 percent of national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, and the bottom 50 percent fell from 21 percent of national income in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016? How do you keep your party from being buried by the 99 percent banding together to vote that income share back into their own pockets?

In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer three possible answers. You can cease being a party built around tax cuts for the rich and try to develop an economic agenda that will appeal to the middle class. You can try to change the political topic, centering politics on racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. Or you can try to undermine democracy itself.

Despite endless calls for the GOP to choose door No. 1 and poll after poll showing their voting base desperate for leaders who would represent their economic interests while reflecting their cultural grievances Republican elites have refused. Take the 2017 tax cuts. Donald Trump might have run as a populist prepared to raise taxes on plutocrats like, well, him, but according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the bill he signed gave more than 20 percent of its benefits over the first 10 years, and more than 80 percent of the benefits that last beyond the first 10 years, to the top 1 percent. For that reason, its one of the most unpopular bills ever to be signed into law. Its not the kind of accomplishment you can run for reelection on.

Thats left Republicans reliant on the second and third strategies. Hacker and Pierson call the resulting ideology plutocratic populism, and their book is sharp and thoughtful on how the GOP got here and the dangers of the path theyve chosen. Where its less convincing is in its description of where here is: Does Trump represent the culmination of the Republican coalition or the contradictions that will ultimately tear it apart?

Plutocratic populism presents as a contradiction like shouted silence or carnivorous vegan. The key to Hacker and Piersons formulation is that, in the GOP, plutocracy and populism operate on different axes. The plutocrats control economic policy, and the populists win elections by deepening racial, religious, and nationalist grievances.

To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash and, increasingly, undermined democracy, Hacker and Pierson write. In the United States, then, plutocracy and right-wing populism have not been opposing forces. Instead, they have been locked in a doom loop of escalating extremism that must be disrupted.

This is their synthesis of the great economic anxiety versus racial resentment debate. Republican elites weaponize racial resentment to win voters who would otherwise vote their economic self-interest. Hacker and Pierson are careful to sidestep the crude version that holds that ethnic and religious division are mere distractions. Voters see racial and religious dominance as political interests as compelling and legitimate as tax benefits, and the demand for politicians to reflect those underlying resentments and fears is real.

This is a key point in Hacker and Piersons analysis: They focus on the decisions made by GOP elites, not the desires of conservative voters. Their fundamental claim is that if Republican elites had chosen a more politically sellable economic agenda, they would have or at least could have resisted the lure of white resentment and still won elections. But once they made tax cuts for the rich and opposition to universal health care the immovable lodestones of their governance, they had little political choice save to power their movement with the dirty, but abundant, energy offered by ethnonationalism.

The most compelling evidence Hacker and Pierson cite for this argument comes from a study conducted by political scientists Margit Tavits and Joshua Potter, which looked at party platforms from 450 parties in 41 countries between 1945 and 2010. Tavits and Potter find that as inequality rises, conservative parties ratchet up their emphasis on religious and racial grievances particularly in countries with deep racial and religious fractures. The pivot only works, Tavits and Potter say, when there is high social demand for ethnonationalist conflict.

The question this raises, and which Hacker and Pierson dont really answer, is what would happen to this demand in the absence of conservative politicians willing to meet it particularly in an age of weakened political parties, demographic change, and identitarian social media? Trumps rise, which Hacker and Pierson present as the culmination of plutocratic populism, can also be read as a symptom of its mounting internal contradictions, and of the way Republicans voters are increasingly capable of demanding the representation they want.

It may be that the uneasy coalition that married white identitarians to Davos Man is breaking apart. Indeed, reading Hacker and Piersons book, I found myself wondering whether inequality was, itself, the cause of the coalitions collapse: Perhaps the plutocratic agenda is becoming too unpopular to even survive Republican presidential primaries. And if thats so, is the future of the Republican Party more moderate on all fronts, or more purely ethnonationalist?

If you survey the modern Republican Party, the figures most intent on turning it into a vehicle for ethnonationalist resentment are the least committed to the plutocratic agenda. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Hawley, and 2016 candidate Donald Trump are all examples of the trend: They are, or were, explicit in their desire to sever the ties that yoke angry nationalism and a desire for a whiter America to Paul Ryans budget.

Conversely, the Republican figures most committed to plutocracy like Ryan or the Koch brothers or the Chamber of Commerce tend to back immigration reform and recoil from ethnonationalist rhetoric, and in 2016, they opposed Trump in favor of Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio. They just lost on all those fronts.

Hacker and Pierson emphasize the fact that once in office, Trump abandoned populist pretense and gave the Chamber of Commerce everything it had ever wanted and more. But, as with so much else with Trump, it can be hard to distinguish decision-making from disinterest. Trump outsourced the staffing of his White House to the Koch-soaked Mike Pence and his agenda to congressional Republicans. The question, then, is whether the dissonance of his administration represents an inevitability of Republican Party politics or simply a lag between Trump demonstrating the bases prioritization of ethnonationalist resentment and a politician who will both win and govern on those terms.

This is the central unanswered question of Hacker and Piersons book: If you cut the plutocrats out of the party, either because bigotry drove them out or campaign finance reform neutered them or the Ayn Rand rapture ascended them, would their absence lead to a Republican Party that moderates on economics and eases off the ethnonationalism, or would it lead to a Republican Party that moderates on economics so it can more effectively pursue social division? Put differently, do you get 2000-era John McCain or 2020-era Tucker Carlson? I suspect the latter.

Hacker and Pierson admit they are assessing the GOP as an elite-led institution, and quite often, thats probably the right way to look at it. But they end up virtually ignoring the power that Republican voters actually hold and, when they are sufficiently offended, wield.

Bush and Rubio and Christie were humiliated in 2016. GOP-led efforts at immigration reform failed in 2007 and 2013. Majority Leader Eric Cantor was deposed by Rep. Dave Brat. The Republican autopsy, which recommended that the GOP become more racially and generationally inclusive, was ignored. At key moments, Fox News tried to support immigration reform and deflate Trump, and it lost those fights and remade itself in Trumps image. There are lines even conservative media cant cross.

Hacker and Pierson marshal data showing the very rich are more economically conservative than the median voter, but also more socially liberal. As the GOP becomes more crudely identitarian, theres some evidence that its losing the economic elites who George W. Bush once called my base: Contributions from the Forbes 400 have been tipping toward the Democratic Party in recent decades, and theres reason to believe thats accelerated under Trump. Hillary Clinton won the countrys richest zip codes in 2016 a change from past Democratic performance while Trumps Electoral College win relied on gains among lower-income whites.

Hacker and Pierson dont assess the Democratic Party much in their book, but the future of plutocratic populism likely depends on the direction that coalition takes. Joe Bidens Democratic Party is a tent restive billionaires might feel comfortable in. Yes, theyll pay higher taxes, but theyll also receive competent protection from pandemics and wont have to explain away the white nationalists in their ranks. If Bernie Sanderss vision is the future of the Democratic Party, billionaires will remain in the Republican Party, where they are at least seen as allies.

The most chilling argument in Hacker and Piersons book is that Trumps rhetoric has focused us on the wrong authoritarian threat. The fear that he would entrench himself as an individual strongman has distracted from the reality that his party is insulating itself from democracy:

As their goals have become more extreme, Republicans and their organized allies have increasingly exploited long-standing but worsening vulnerabilities in our political system to lock in narrow priorities, even in the face of majority opposition. The specter we face is not just a strongman bending a party and our political institutions to his will; it is also a minority faction entrenching itself in power, beyond the ambitions and careers of any individual leader. Whether Trump can break through the barriers against autocracy, he and his partywith plutocratic and right-wing backingare breaking majoritarian democracy.

A useful thought experiment in American politics is simply to imagine what would happen if the system worked the way we tend to tell our children it works: Whoever wins the most votes wins the election. In that case, George W. Bush would never have passed his tax cuts nor made his Supreme Court nominations, and neither would Donald Trump. The Republican Party would likely have had to moderate its approach on both economics and social and racial issues, as thered be no viable path forward that combines an economic agenda that repels most voters and a social agenda that offends the rising demographic majority. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said in 2012, before becoming first Trumps most slashing critic and then one of his most sycophantic defenders, Were not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.

As I argue in my book on polarization, which similarly ends with a call for democratization, if Trump had won exactly as many votes in 2016 but lost the election because of it, he and his followers would be blamed for blowing a clearly winnable contest and handing the Supreme Court to the Democrats for a generation. In that world, the toxic tendencies he represents would be weakened, and the Republican Party, having lost three presidential elections in a row, would have been far likelier to reform itself. Its ability to keep traveling the path of plutocratic populism stems entirely from the minoritarian possibilities embedded in Americas political institutions.

As Hacker and Pierson show, this is a point of true convergence between the identitarians and the plutocrats: Both have lost confidence that they can win elections democratically, so they have sought to rewrite the rules in their favor. What hold on power they retain comes from the way American politics amplifies the power of whiter, more rural, more conservative areas and thats given the conservative coalition a closing window in which to rig the system such that they can retain control.

America does not exist in a steady state of tension between majoritarian and minoritarian institutions. Those institutions can be changed, and they are being changed. A party in power can rewrite the rules in its own favor, and the Republican Party, at every level, is trying to do just that using power won through white identity politics and geographic advantage, but deploying strategies patiently funded by plutocrats. As Hacker and Pierson write:

Recent GOP moves in North Carolina show whats possible in a closely balanced state. Republicans first took the statehouse in 2010. They quickly enlisted the leading Republican architect of extreme partisan gerrymanders, Thomas Hofeller. A mostly anonymous figure until his death in 2018, Hofeller liked to describe gerrymandering as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States. He once told an audience of state legislators, Redistricting is like an election in reverse. Its a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters. In 2018, North Carolina Republicans won their election in reverse, keeping hold of the statehouse even while losing the statewide popular vote. In North Carolinas races for the US House, Republicans won half the statewide votes and 77 percent of the seats. A global elections watchdog ranked North Carolinas electoral integrity alongside that of Cuba, Indonesia, and Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to reword the census so Hispanics fear filling it out, in the hope that the political representation theyd normally receive flows to white, Republican voters instead. So far, the White House has been too clumsily explicit about the aims of this strategy for courts to clear it, but thats a mistake that can easily be remedied by savvier successors.

Hacker and Pierson argue that the conservative dilemma matters because conservative parties matter. History shows that democratic systems thrive amid responsible conservative parties parties that make their peace with democracy and build agendas that can successfully compete for votes and they collapse when conservative parties back themselves into defending constituencies and agendas so narrow that their only path to victory is to rig the system in their favor.

This is the cliff on which American democracy now teeters. The threat isnt that Donald Trump will carve his face onto Mount Rushmore and engrave his name across the White House. Its that the awkward coalition that nominated and sustains him will entrench itself, not their bumbling standard-bearer, by turning America into a government by the ethnonationalist minority, for the plutocratic minority.

I spoke with Hacker and Pierson about their book, and the questions it raised for me, on my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. Listen here, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods.

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Is Donald Trump the Republican Partys future, or its past? - Vox.com

In the United States, if you are conservative theologically, you will tend to be conservative politically. Thats certainly the case with me. But it doesnt have to be that way.

Growing up in the Bible belt of rural Oklahoma, I knew lots of fundamentalists and evangelicals, all of whom were New Deal liberal Democrats. I dont think I had ever met a Republican until college, a party I was brought up to associate with virtue of selfishness atheists like Ayn Rand.

What happened to make Oklahoma and evangelicals in general rock-ribbed Republican, as is the case today? Well, the Sixties happened, with the counter culture, the various liberation movements, and radical politics. Conservative Christians no longer felt at home in the Democratic party. Roe v. Wade happened. Conservative Christians saw in the liberals who championed abortion a great moral evil. Ronald Reagan happened. His coalition gave conservative Christians a place at the table. In this climate, conservative Christians learned more about conservative politics and free market economics and made themselves at home.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the alliance of conservative religion and progressive politics had long manifested itself in the Christian Democracy movement.The evangelicals and confessional Lutherans I have met in Scandinavia tend to belong to the Christian Democratic Party and, as such, are pro-national health care, pro-immigrant, and pro-other social programs.

Ive recently read two articles on this movement and its impact in Europe. To be sure, the specific Christian Democracy parties have become less distinctly Christian as they used to be, in line with the secularization of Europe. But not completely. The Finnish medical doctor and member of parliament Pivi Rsnen, who got herself in legal trouble for writing against the LGBT agenda, is a Christian Democrat. (Probably the most well-known Christian Democrat today is Germanys president Angela Merkel.)

Michel Gurfinkiel has just published a history of Christian Democracyin Europe for First Things,including its rise and then its fall into secularism.

And Texas A&M political scientist James Rogers, a Lutheran Christian (LCMS), has published Lessons for America from Europes Christian Democracy.

It is evident from these articles that orthodox Christians working through these parties played a huge role in the construction of modern Europe. They promoted democracy and liberty in countries long controlled by monarchies and the aristocracy. And the democratic governments they established had as a purpose promoting the common good, giving rise to universal health care and the other social benefits of the so-called welfare state.

Prof. Rogers uses the example of the Christian Democrats to challenge common criticisms of religion in the public square. Contrary to the critics, the history and influence of Christian Democracy shows that the influence of Christianity is not illiberalthat is, opposed to freedombut quite the contrary:

Contrary to the common liberal conceit, however, not only is serious (and orthodox) religious belief consistent with robust forms of liberal polity, one can argue that liberal polities can flourish only in societies that embrace Christian absolutes. Conversely, a liberalism that rejects metaphysical absolutes has rejected the very grounds that sustain liberalism.

At the very least, it is spurious to claim that commitment to religious tolerance, and liberty more generally, can derive only from anti-foundationalism or some pragmaticmodus vivendibetween conflicting religious parties.

Prof. Rogers then raises the question of why a Christian Democratic movement didnt arise in the United States. The reason, he provocatively argues, is baptism.

Christian Democracy arose in Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist countries, in churches that all practice infant baptism. If Christians are those who have been baptized, countries in which nearly everyone is baptized can be considered a Christian nation, so that Christian concepts can be promoted for the entire country. In America, where evangelicalism reigns, a Christian is someone who has converted as an adult, so that most people cannot really be considered Christians at all. This promotes an individualistic approach to religion, which undercuts the possibility of social solidarity. As a result, American Christians tend to be attracted to the individual autonomy of free market, limited government conservatism.

According to Prof. Rogers,

The central political feature of Christian Democracy is its recognition thatbothfreedom and solidarity are essential to human flourishing. This recognition in turns derives from Christianitys essential sacramental core. It derives from the both/and of individual identity and corporate identity created by and reflected in baptism and the Eucharist. Without this sacramental and ecclesial center, there is no image for the polity to reflect, and ideologies resolve into the one or the other: the anomie of individualism or the despotism of collectivism.

I am greatly intrigued by his analysis, but I would add some considerations. Conservatism means different things in Europe and in the United States. The question is always, what do you want to conserve?

In Europe, to be conservative historically has meant supporting the monarchy, with its strong central government and elitism. In the United States, conservatives want to conserve Constitutional government, with its limited government, equality, individual rights, and freedom.

By the same token, liberalism means something different in the two contexts. In Europe, liberal, which again derives from the Latin word for freedom, means free market economics and liberty in general. Which is why the Liberal Party in Australia is actually what Americans would describe as the conservative party. Whereas in the United States, liberal has come to mean progressivism, openness to change of every sort, and left-leaning ideologies. Including, ironically, support for strong central governments and opposition to free market capitalism. Which in Europe would imply conservatism.

There is, by the way, a third-party calledthe American Solidarity Partythat is committed to Christian Democracy ideology.

But, given the different definitions of both conservative and liberal, American Christian conservatives are arguably not that different from European Christian liberals.

Illustration: Logo of the Italian Christian Democratic Party by Danrolo / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

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Conservative Theologically, but Liberal Politically | Gene Veith - Patheos

Michael, I couldnt help but notice the reporter grilling president Donald Trump in the White House this week had a peculiar accent. Is he one of yours?

Hi Matthew! Very perceptive of you. The Axios reporter with the furrowed brow and comically perplexed expression is Jonathan Swan, a former Sydney Morning Herald journalist. After making his name as a political reporter here in Australia, Swan moved to the US in 2014 to work as a Congressional aide as part of an academic fellowship. Since then hes worked as a reporter at the Hill before moving to Axios in 2016. Since the Trump interview he has become a hugely popular meme thanks to his quizzical response to the presidents insistence the US was doing better than any other country in tackling Covid-19.

So hes sort of adopted the US as his home country. Has he ever been involved in any particularly Australian stories?

Here in Australia, Swan is best remembered for his scoops about politicians abusing their parliamentary entitlements. Oh, and a story about a senator throwing kangaroo faeces at his brother.

Sorry, what?

The kangaroo poo story. You dont know about it?

No

Weird! Well, in 2013, thanks to a bizarre trick of electoral maths, a bunch of candidates from so-called micro parties found themselves elected to the Australian Senate despite receiving a minuscule number of votes. One of those lucky few was Ricky Muir, a candidate for the Motoring Enthusiasts party. While the rest of the country was still figuring out how the hell it had happened, Swan went digging into Muirs past and unearthed a video of the soon-to-be senator running around a campsite hurling kangaroo faeces at his brother while laughing hysterically.

Not all his stories were so, um, faecal, though. In 2014 Swan was awarded the prestigious Wallace Brown young achiever award for journalism after a string of scoops about the questionable use of taxpayer funds by politicians, which led to an overhaul of the rules governing parliamentary entitlements and expenses.

So, sounds as though he was well prepared for interviewing our president.

It certainly seems like it. Things didnt go so well the last time he interviewed Trump, though. Swan faced a ferocious backlash in 2018 and was labelled a bootlicker and called grotesque for the way he handled the presidents admission that he wanted to end automatic citizenship for immigrant children born in the US. In the interview, Swan smiled widely as Trump confirmed the news, and, as the New York Times put it, his tone-deaf delivery on Twitter (excited to share) left him open to criticism that he favours access over accountability. Despite landing a string of exclusives, including being the first to reveal the US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Swan was pigeonholed as the kind of inside-the-beltway reporter who cares more about the scoop than the audience.

This time, though, he treated Trump respectfully without bowing down as youd treat a friend who decides theyre a libertarian after reading Ayn Rand. His running commentary (what manuals?, who are you talking about?) felt like an echo of my own internal monologue whenever I listen to that guy.

Swans big insider guy energy seemed to help this time around. To me, the whole interview felt a little bit like being a fly on the wall in the kind of on background conversations journalists have all the time with sources. Swan is not a TV host, so his delivery was sort of ambling and chatty, which seemed to help. He pushed back, but he also got on Trumps level and gave the president all the rope he needed.

But, OK, lets get to the serious stuff. Is Jonathan Swan his real name? He sounds like an 18th-century poet or a 90s heartthrob.

Its real! In fact, hes from a famous line of Australian journalist Swans. His father, Norman Swan, is a physician and health reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is a celebrity in his own right. Norman has become ubiquitous during the pandemic, hosting a wildly popular podcast and showing up on our televisions to explain important subjects such as why we should wear face masks and whether our farts can spread Covid-19.

OK. Im starting to get a weird vibe from your countrys news cycle.

Right back at you!

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Who is Jonathan Swan, the reporter who grilled Trump? And what do kangaroos have to do with it? - The Guardian

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio -- These days, many of us are experiencing online meetings via Zoom. Weve had concerts brought to us online in recent months, too. So, why not a play?

Thats what the Shaker Arts Council is figuring as it gets ready to bring to us the play Love Letters via Zoom.

The two-person play stars Shaker residents and married couple Anaya Farrell and Donald Carrier. The play involves letters exchanged between two people over a lifetime. It takes place beginning at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 8 and is a part of Stay-in-Place Productions, the arts councils response to COVID-19.

The performance is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. For more information and to register, visit shakerartscouncil.org.

Carrier is an actor, teacher and director who has worked extensively in theater and film across North America. He is the director of the Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Play House MFA Acting Program.

His career includes leading performances at the Stratford Festival, the Old Globe, the Shaw Festival and at Cleveland Play House. Carrier has appeared in Lincolnesque, Noises Off!, Ten Chimneys, In The Next Room, Yentl, The Little Foxes, The Crucible, Luna Gale, All The Way and Shakespeare in Love.

His many film and TV credits include Twice in a Lifetime, The Passion Of Ayn Rand, Hollywood Off-Ramp, The Wives of Windsor, Ready or Not, Dead By Monday and Earth: Final Conflict.

His directorial resume includes work at numerous theaters nationally and local work at CWRU, Dobama Theatre, The Cleveland Orchestra and the Beck Center.

Farrell is a professional actor and teacher with extensive film and theater experience. Her credits include leading roles at the Grand Theatre, the Neptune Theatre, The National Arts Center and The Ford Center for the Performing Arts, among many others.

As a writer and composer, Farrell has had a number of her works performed, including the musical Evangeline, for which she wrote the music and co-wrote the book and lyrics. Evangeline was developed and presented in concert form by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Her Jessie-nominated play The Love Stories has been performed in Canada and the USA. Farrell has performed in over 70 film, television, radio and commercial projects and has worked opposite such actors as Brian Dennehy, Treat Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Christopher Plummer and Sam Waterston.

Farrell is a lecturer in the Case Western Reserve University Department of Theater.

Drive-in ballet: Above, we talked about Zoom theater, so lets take it another coronavirus-inspired step further and discuss drive-in ballet.

Arts in August has re-conceived its annual festival into a drive-in performance featuring Shaker Heights Verb Ballets. It will take place at 7 p.m. Aug. 8 at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, 2187 W. 14th St. in Clevelands Tremont neighborhood.

Being that the Zoom theater production of Love Letters is taking place at virtually the same time as drive-in ballet, you may have a choice to make.

The free community ballet performance will feature audience favorite Bolero, delivered with the energy, propulsion and intensity of Ravels famous crescendo.

In addition, Verb will remount Tommie-Waheed Evans Surge.Capacity.Force., a moving work with a fierce, physical language that communicates relevant statements about social justice. Plus, there will be a new work by company dancer Kate Webb that was created as a response to the isolation of COVID-19 and showcases the power of art to get us through this time.

Arts in August performances are free and open to the public. A free ticket is required per car through Eventbrite.

Vehicles will be directed to parking to allow for social distancing. If guests sit outside of a car, they are required to wear a mask and maintain at least 6 feet social distance from other audiences members.

If guests are sick with COVID-19, have symptoms or have been in contact with someone who has COVID-19, it is important to stay home for the safety of all.

Arts in August is presented in partnership by Tremont West Development Corporation, LAND Studio, Cleveland Public Theatre and Cleveland Ward 3 Councilman Kerry McCormack.

Get your lectures here: CWRU Lifelong Learning has announced some of its upcoming lectures for August and September. The lectures are being held these days remotely but, as always, they cover varied topics. Here they are:

-- From 7 to 8:30 p.m. Aug. 18, Lifelong Learning will present From the 19th Amendment to the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter: 100 Years of Womens Social Movement Activism.

-- Light for the Dead in Ancient Egypt will be presented from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Aug. 19.

-- From noon to 1 p.m. Aug. 22, the presentation will be Is That Photo for Real?

-- At 7 p.m. Sept. 2, the topic will be Fall Kick-Off: Isaac, Ishmael, and Jesus: Jews, Christians and Muslims on the Binding of Isaac.

-- The Nineteenth Amendment: 100 Years of Women in Politics will be presented at 7 p.m. Sept. 9.

For more information and to learn about additional courses, visit case.edu/lifelonglearning, or call 216-368-2091.

College news: In news from colleges about our local students, we note that three Sun Press coverage area students made the deans list for the 2019-20 academic year at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. They are Beachwoods Olivia Hahnemann-Gilber, Shaker Heights Lily Roth and from Cleveland Heights, Lucy Feldman.

Also, over at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, Shaker Heights residents Sam Poulos and Elliott Vahey earned deans list recognition for the fall semester.

Masks on campaign in University Heights: In his daily COVID-19 update of July 30, Mayor Michael Dylan Brennan wrote that University Heights residents are encouraged to show that they care about their neighbors and that they want to end this pandemic by wearing masks.

Pictures of residents wearing masks are being featured in our #MasksOnUniversityHeights campaign. Photos are being shared on social media and in a future issue of the Heights Observer and (the citys) Mosaic magazine, Brennan said.

If you live in UH and would like to be featured in the campaign, send a photo of yourself wearing a mask to info@universityheights.com. If youd like the city to take the photo for you, theyll do it. Just let them know via the same email address.

Playtime for adults: The City of Shaker Heights offers a #ShakerPlays program, but it isnt only for the kids. Thats right, the city offers free adult fitness classes twice a week.

Join Dawn Rivers from 6 to 7 p.m. every Thursday for Yoga in the Park. Classes rotate between Gridley Triangle Park and Horseshoe Lake Park.

Or, if yoga isnt your thing, you can join Agata Wojno from 7 to 8 p.m. every Wednesday at Sussex Park for Boot Camp Conditioning.

COVID-19 protocols require registration and participation be limited to nine people. You can reserve your spot for this free program by going to bit.ly/shakerplaysfitness, clicking on catalog, then on #ShakerPlays.

You can also follow Shaker Rec on Facebook and Instagram to see the schedule of #ShakerPlays youth programs, including DIY sidewalk chalk and upcycled T-shirt bracelets. Weekly schedules are posted every Monday afternoon.

Noble Gardeners Market: Noble Gardeners Market will again host its hyper-local market this year from 10 a.m. to noon Saturdays beginning Aug. 1 and continuing through Sept. 19 at the Roanoke Mini Park, located at the corner of Noble and Roanoke roads in Cleveland Heights.

The market will be following all safe practice guidelines, and requests that all who attend wear a mask and bring change and small bills.

Only fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers will be sold. For details about being a seller, visit nobleneighbors.com/noble-gardeners-market.html.

School substitutes wanted: The Cleveland Heights-University Heights Schools are hiring substitutes for the 2020-21 school year.

Available positions include custodians, cleaners, lunchroom monitors, security monitors, educational aides, teachers and administrative assistants. Registration is preferred, but not required. Call 216-767-5611 to register.

If you would like to see an item appear in Press Run, send me an email, at least 12 days prior to an event, at jeff.piorkowski@att.net.

Read more from the Sun Press.

Continue reading here:

Shaker Heights actors to star in Zoom play: Press Run - cleveland.com

When a friend first told me that he wanted the government to compel wearing face masks in public areas even before the prime minister announced it he joked that I would find it fascist.

As a libertarian, I find State intervention in the economy and in most social issues distasteful, as personal freedom is the most sacred facet of human life that is equally bestowed upon every person, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual, to quote objectivism philosopher Ayn Rand.

Unfortunately, government intervention, bordering on authoritarianism, has reached dizzying new heights during the Covid-19 pandemic that shows no signs of slowing down globally, as multiple countries report new waves of infections.

I have always advocated education over enforcement in issues related to health because I believe that the will of the State is secondary to ones personal bodily autonomy. This applies to a contagion like Covid-19 that the World Health Organization (WHO) chief says will have effects lasting for decades. The key to long-lasting behavioural change in health is consistent education because state-sanctioned punishment is not sustainable.

For example, we do not mandate the use of condoms on punishment of fines or incarceration to prevent HIV infection we educate people about how the virus that causes AIDS is transmitted and why safe sex is important. We wear seatbelts when driving not so much because of the law, but because we know well likely die in a car crash if we dont.

Although my friend correctly pointed out that many other countries have made face masks mandatory in public places, my fear back then which proved correct the first day the mask regulation came into effect in Malaysia was that, unlike other nations, Malaysian authorities would be overzealous in imposing the law and interpret vague rules as they saw fit.

True enough, 127 people were arrested and fined for not wearing face masks in public on August 1. The police even fined 26 people the maximum compound of RM1,000 for failing to wear face coverings on a beach in Kota Tinggi, Johor, with a news report depicting a police officer standing in front of five people sitting on a mat with food and drink.

Social media has also surfaced disturbing anecdotal reports of police harassment, like a woman who was fined RM1,000 for not wearing a face mask even though she was walking back towards her car in an open-air car park, near a market, after realising she had forgotten to retrieve it (she refused to pay the summons and filed a police report instead).

Health Minister Dr Adham Babas statement on July 30 simply listed the use of face masks in public transport, workplaces, grocery stores, and crowded environments, without defining the size of a crowd. Beaches were not mentioned as a place that required face masks.

The National Security Council (NSC) said in a message on August 1 at 10.38am on its Telegram account that wearing face masks is mandatory in public transport (including e-hailing services) and crowded public areas like wet markets, supermarkets, recreational parks, and tourist spots.

Is it fair to slap the maximum fine on people hanging out in an open environment like the beach, who are most likely sitting down at least 1 metre away from other groups, when the announcement on the mandatory use of face masks in tourist spots just came out on the first day the mask rule came into effect? Even then, it was only posted on NSCs Telegram account that only has about 1.1 million subscribers in Malaysias 32-million population.

Both the NSC and Ministry of Health (MOH) websites contain no details on where exactly the mask rule applies or exceptions to the regulation. The only people exempted from the rule are children aged below two years, and people with disabilities or who cannot remove their face mask without assistance.

This is in stark contrast to the state of Victoria in Australia which requires residents to wear a face covering when leaving home that lists on the state governments website various lawful exceptions to the rule, such as infants and children below 12 years; people with medical conditions, including breathing problems like asthma (no medical cert required); people with past traumatic experiences; people who are deaf and need to see ones mouth for communicating; when jogging or running (face coverings must be worn when one finishes exercising); when consuming food, drink or medication; during emergencies like domestic violence; or a person travelling in a vehicle by themselves or with other members of their household.

People who do not wear face coverings and do not have a lawful excuse can be fined A$200 (RM605), a considerably low sum in Australia with a national minimum wage of about A$3,000 (RM9,087) a month (A$753.80 per 38-hour week), compared to the RM1,000 fine in Malaysia with a monthly minimum wage of RM1,200. The Melbourne authorities website even lists face mask businesses and invites such businesses to email them to get featured.

It is also unclear if Malaysian police have the power to issue fines against people who do not wear face masks in public, as a regulation specific to face coverings has yet to be gazetted and published on the Attorney-General Chambers federal gazette portal. The latest regulation on the Recovery Movement Control Order the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases (Measures within Infected Local Areas) (No 7) Regulations 2020 from June 10 to August 31 simply states under Clause 10 that the Health director-general may issue any direction to people carrying out any activity. Clause 11 states that anyone who contravenes any provision of the regulation or any direction of the Director General commits an offence punishable by a maximum fine of RM1,000, up to six months jail, or both.

If the authorities have been issuing compounds under Clause 10 of the regulation, it is extremely unjust to do so when the rules are vague. Most Malaysians are law-abiding citizens, but how can they obey the law when the rules are unclear, haphazard, and subject to arbitrary interpretation by officials on the ground?

The government also doesnt empower Malaysians to follow the mandatory mask rule, simply saying that the general public should wear a 3-ply fabric mask according to WHO specifications or that we should make our own. The state of Victoria in Australia, on the other hand, has published simple written instructions and even a video on how to make a face mask.

The Malaysian government should make it easy for people to follow the law by making the mask rule as clear as possible, listing specific venues that require the use of face coverings and exemptions of certain situations or people. Children below the age of 12, not just toddlers below two, should also be exempted; otherwise, we might see enforcement against teachers or parents across primary schools, kindergartens, or day care centres, as most young children might find it difficult to wear face masks for long hours.

Instead of angrily issuing compounds over the slightest perceived infraction, the police should act with professionalism and courtesy and politely remind people to wear face masks and how to don them properly. Treat ordinary Malaysians like how you would treat a YB, many of whom wear face masks incorrectly too, if at all.

As the coronavirus rages on with the end not yet in sight as long as we dont have a vaccine, which could be years away the Malaysian government must change its narrative so that the new norms will continue to be practiced even in the absence of enforcement. We cannot remain in a state of perpetual MCO for years.

Our aim is not zero Covid-19 cases. That is a misleading and unrealistic goal. We should simply aim for continuously low and stable local transmission rates whatever that figure is, depending on our health care systems capacity that should be revealed by the government. Instead of just harping on our personal responsibility in curbing the virus, the government must play its part in ensuring sufficient testing, tracing, and quarantine, and being transparent about such efforts.

Boo Su-Lyn is CodeBlue editor-in-chief. She is a libertarian, or classical liberal, who believes in minimal state intervention in the economy and socio-political issues.

Read the original here:

Masking Authoritarianism In The Name Of Public Health - CodeBlue

Soon, the Senate will vote on whether to approve the appointment of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Shelton is one of our better gold standard advocates, the author ofFixing the Dollar Now (2012), and a longtime fixture at monetary conferences in Washington. The Federal Reserve absolutely should have someone on its Board who understands the policy that the Federal Reserve itself followed for the first 58 years of its history (1913-1971); and which the United States followed for the 124 years (1789-1913) that preceded the Federal Reserve.

The idea behind the gold standard is that a currency should be stable, reliable, and unchanging in value the monetary equivalent of other weights and measures like the kilogram, meter, or minute. As George Gilder described in detail in The Scandal of Money (2016), this monetary stability allows rational economic calculation of profit and loss, success and failure. When this rational economic calculation takes place properly, capital is allocated to its best uses, and the economy thrives. Capitalism works like it is supposed to.

Value of the dollar vs. gold, 1965-2017

President James Madison summed up why a mandate to use gold-based money appears in Article I Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution:

The only adequate guarantee for the uniform and stable value of a paper currency is its convertibility into specie [gold] the least fluctuating and the only universal currency.

This is a nice idea. The United States spent two centuries proving that it works. Sticking to gold-based money, the U.S. became the most successful country in the world. Today, we ask: WTF Happened In 1971?

The Federal Reserve is imagined to be a purveyor of floating currencies; and, no doubt the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 (under veeeery suspicious circumstances) was an important step to that eventual outcome. But, for a long time, the Federal Reserve actively supported and maintained the gold standard. William McChesney Martin was Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1951 to 1970. His first task was to implement the Accord of 1951, which effectively returned the dollar to a gold standard at $35/oz., after a period of modest wartime floating when the Fed was pressured by the Treasury to manipulate interest rates.

In 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon wanted the Fed to ease, to give him a boost in his election campaign against John F. Kennedy that year. Martin told him to pound sand. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson physically bullied Martin for easy money. Martin stood up to this pressure. At the end of his term, in January 1970, the market value of the dollar was right at its $35/oz. gold parity.

With the help of Martins Stable Money efforts, the 1950s and 1960s are today considered the most economically prosperous time, in the U.S. and worldwide, since the Classical Gold Standard ended in 1914.

When Martins term ended in January 1970, President Nixon took the opportunity to put in his old friend, Arthur Burns, at the Fed. Burns soon opened the easy money spigot, and interest rates collapsed. The economy boomed, and Nixon won in 1972.

But, this had consequences. In August 1971, the pressure on the gold standard, from all the excess money, was so great that Nixon took the step of closing the gold window, which had the unplanned effect of creating the environment of floating currencies we have today. Nixons re-election boom quickly collapsed into stagflationary disaster.

From this, you might think that Nixon and Burns were enemies of the gold standard. But, they were not. Nixon himself attempted to put the world gold standard back together just months later, at the Smithsonian Agreement of December 1971. The dollar would be repegged to gold at $38/oz., suffering a slight devaluation, much as Britain and France had also devalued (and returned to gold) just a few years earlier. (That was the idea, although it didnt work out.) Burns, at the Fed, was distraught that the gold standard, the U.S.s super-successful monetary policy, could come to an end. In August 1971, Burns told Nixon not to close the gold window, if he could at all avoid it. Nixon recalled: He warned that I would take the blame if the dollar were devalued. Pravda would write that this was a sign of the collapse of capitalism, he said. On the economic side he worried that the negative results would be unpredictable ...

In August 1971, a reporter asked the economist Arthur Laffer, who was then the 31-year-old Chief Economist of the Office of Management and Budget, what the effects of Nixons closing the gold window would be. Laffer reportedly said: Its not going to be as much fun to be an American anymore. And, he was right. Economist Paul Krugman once called our post-1971 era: The Age of Diminished Expectations.

Another person at that fateful meeting with Burns and Nixon in 1971 was Paul Volcker, then the Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs. Volcker was also in favor of keeping the dollars link to gold at $35/oz., although he was confused as to how to do so. During his term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve (1979-1987), the dollar ended its devaluation trend of the 1970s and stabilized again vs. gold. This came about in part through the influence of people like Arthur Laffer and Alan Greenspan, both of whom participated in Ronald Reagans Gold Commission of 1981, which discussed returning the dollar to its gold basis. Economists cheered the Great Moderation that resulted, although, with typical cluelessness, they still have no idea what created it.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (1987-2006) was a gold standard advocate in the 1960s, part of a group centered around Ayn Rand. In 1981 by that time already with a stint as the head of President Fords Council of Economic Advisors under his belt, and a director of the Council on Foreign Relations he wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal in favor of returning to a gold standard. To nobodys surprise, the value of the dollar vs. gold during his 18-year tenure was quite stable, which Greenspan later said was definitely on purpose. Today, he remains a staunch admirer of the pre-1914 Classical Gold Standard period. During Greenspans term, he enjoyed the support of Wayne Angell, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who, in 1991, recommended that Russia implement a gold standard for the ruble.

If we look at the history of Federal Reserve Chairmen since 1951, we find that Martin, Burns, Volcker and Greenspan were all supporters (in principle) of the gold standard system. The exception was G. William Miller (1978-1979), who presided over the worst of the Carter-era stagflation. He came from a corporate background, rather than banking or economics, and was generally considered to be in over his head. Carter kicked him out by making him Treasury Secretary before the end of his term, and replaced him with Volcker.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke (2005-2014) made his academic reputation by arguing that easy money from the Federal Reserve would have helped ameliorate the Great Depression. Perhaps it is no surprise that the value of the dollar during his watch collapsed to a low of $1920/oz. before stabilizing, less than a fifth of its value around $350/oz. during the Volcker/Greenspan years.

Janet Yellen (2014-2018) never said anything favorable about the gold standard during her tenure. But, in 2015, she invited a group of gold standard advocates (including Judy Shelton) to make presentations at the Federal Reserve, with Yellen in attendance. Perhaps it is no surprise that the value of the dollar vs. gold was surprisingly stable during her term, somewhat like it was during Greenspans.

Today, a braying mob from academia, the press, and the Federal Reserve itself wants to keep Judy Shelton from playing a role in monetary affairs. But, I would argue that whatever success we have had since the bad old days of 1970s stagflation has come about because people like Volcker, Greenspan, Angell and perhaps Yellen have kept the Fed loosely (sometimes, very loosely) anchored to gold, even during our era of floating currencies.

For some reason, the principle that made the U.S. great, over a period of nearly two centuries (1789-1971) is, to these people, unthinkable. Instead, they offer a long list of experiments zero interest rates, QE, Treasury yield control, corporate bond buying, interest on reserves, and now, Modern Monetary Theory which have no track record of success at all. Instead of rational economic calculation these schemes and tricks are all calculated to create as much economic distortion as is necessary to achieve their goals. For some reason, it seems like capitalism doesnt quite work right anymore. Why is that?

David Stockman Congressman from Michigan, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and later cofounder of the Blackstone private equity group called the monetary distortion under Bernankes term The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (2013). Today, these complaints seem a little quaint, since things have become so much more distorted since then. Bank of England Governor Mervyn King begged central bankers for The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy (2017). Quit deforming everything! King seemed to complain. Former Fed staffer Danielle DiMartino Booth was Fed Up: An Insiders Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America (2017).

The COVID era just made everything much more wacky. Everything that economist George Selgin warned about in The Menace of Fiscal QE (February 2020), came true with alarming speed only weeks later.

And that, basically, is why Judy Shelton should have a spot at the Federal Reserve. In the end, you have to put your faith in the PhD Standard, or the Gold Standard. One of them has never worked; one of them has always worked.

Excerpt from:

The Federal Reserve Works Best When It Sticks With Gold - Forbes

By Jonny Lupsha, News Writer

According to Reuters, a federally funded loan program designed to aid small businesses saw at least one surprising recipient. The institute promoting the laissez-faire capitalism of writer Ayn Rand [] was approved for a Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) loan of up to $1 million, the article said.

The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism in Santa Ana, California, sought to preserve 35 jobs with the PPP funding. The institute referred Reuters to a May 15 article, in which board member Harry Binswanger and senior fellow Onkar Ghate wrote that the organization would take any relief money offered by the CARES Act.

Ayn Rands philosophy in fiction and nonfiction was to promote individualism and unfettered capitalism, denouncing government involvement in virtually every aspect of life.

Ayn Rands beliefs aligned with libertarianism.

Libertarians come in two major clanseconomists and philosophers, said Dr. Lawrence Cahoone, Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Economist libertarians typically argue for maximum individual liberty and minimal government interference through a utilitarian economic argumentin other words, that free markets bring the greatest utility or benefit to society.

Philosophical libertarians have prominently been ethical, natural rights theorists, claiming that capitalism is morally required independent of its consequences.

Similarly, Ayn Rands philosophywhich is called objectivismis rooted in humanitys need to survive, which she said is rooted in self-dependence. Dr. Cahoone said that there is an objective standard of value, an objective ethics, in her beliefs, and that rights are how those ethics are applied in society.

Note that rights are primarily not to own things, he said. They are a right to ones own self and own life, which yields rights to pursue interests and purposes. But on that basis, property rightswhich are the rights to use, enjoy, or dispose of somethingare essential.

With Rands emphasis on self-reliance, its no surprise that she was no fan of charity.

Rand hates altruism, Dr. Cahoone said. That is, she hates the tendency to first take as the ultimate moral standard the effects or benefits of my acts on other people. And second, she hates the belief that the highest moral act is self-sacrifice.

Rand believed that if people are precious, their egoistic purposes and freedoms were precious, and therefore selfishness is a virtue. This belief is called rational selfishness, which Dr. Cahoone said is a belief in which selfishness is a moral duty.

So capitalism, for her, is the only moral and rational socioeconomic system in human history. She endorses laissez-faire; no government activity whose aim is more than to protect individuals and their property is just. She wanted a voluntary system of taxation, among mere provision of military and police.

The Ayn Rand Institute said it was accepting the million-dollar PPP loan unapologetically, because the principle here is justice.

This article was proofread and copyedited by Angela Shoemaker, Proofreader and Copy Editor for The Great Courses Daily.

Dr. Lawrence Cahoone contributed to this article. Dr. Cahoone is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he has taught since 2000. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Read more from the original source:

Government Grants Loan to Libertarian-Based Ayn Rand Institute - The Great Courses Daily News

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ROBERT SMITH, HOST:

I remember the last normal day I had - March 12, 2020. And I remember it so vividly because I spent most of it in a studio recording this lighthearted episode with Sarah Gonzalez about the strange new coronavirus and how everyone was dealing with it. We never played the episode, but here's just a taste from four months ago.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SARAH GONZALEZ, HOST:

Like, not touching your face - turns out it's impossible to do.

SMITH: Or finding sanitizer or just going to work with your colleagues or public transportation.

GONZALEZ: Or even cleaning your hands properly. Most of us have been doing it wrong.

SMITH: You have never heard this episode because, by the time we finished recording it - by the end of the day even - it seemed like everything had changed. Cities shut down. The stock market plunged. Tom Hanks announced that he had the virus. The episode felt out of date by the time we left the studio, and we just put it on a shelf and forgot about it. But I think about that episode a lot because, at the very end, Sarah and I were talking about hand sanitizer, and I did something that I haven't done since.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SMITH: Maybe for the last time in my life, I feel confident to do a high-five (laughter).

GONZALEZ: Oh. No...

SMITH: All right, the last high-five.

GONZALEZ: I don't know. I don't know. All right, let's do it.

SMITH: We're finally sterilized.

GONZALEZ: (Laughter).

(SOUNDBITE OF SMACK)

SMITH: The last high-five. It was also the last day I rode the subway, the last day in the office, the last day recording in a studio with another human being. In the four months since that, so much has happened - so many deaths, the worst economic collapse of our lifetimes. And we're still in the middle of it. But we wanted to stop for a moment, as a show, and take a look at what we've been through and how much of our lives have changed in such a short period of time.

(SOUNDBITE OF LE FAT CLUB'S "IBIZA POOL PARTY")

SMITH: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Robert Smith. Usually, we wait until the end of the year to do a special episode we call The Rest of the Story, where we check in on the people we met that year and find out how they're doing. We're going to do that show a little early this year because so much has happened so fast. Today on the show, we're going to go back over the episodes that we did about COVID and report the rest of the story. We'll track where the money went, who got it and who didn't, and we'll check in on some of the people we profiled over the last few months - the unemployed, the business owners, the nurses and the man who manufactured a tiny piston to save lives.

(SOUNDBITE OF LE FAT CLUB'S "IBIZA POOL PARTY")

SMITH: Some of the economic changes in the last four months have been staggering - tens of millions of people unemployed, bankruptcies skyrocketing. But just as extraordinary has been the response to this challenge.

Congress moved faster than anyone thought possible to provide $3 trillion in relief, money that went to states and hospitals and businesses but also to individuals - checks for $1,200, a $600 a week boost for unemployment checks across the country. So much money, in fact, that when you look at the charts, the total personal income in the United States went up. Income was higher than it was before the crisis, even with so many people not working. Those benefits are expiring in a week, and Congress is debating what to do next. A lot is on the line. So we wanted to take this moment to follow up with the people we profiled over the last four months and to see how they're doing.

First up, small businesses. Part of that $3 trillion package went straight to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. It was called the Paycheck Protection Program.

NICK FOUNTAIN, BYLINE: PPP.

SMITH: The PPE. That is Nick Fountain who's with me now.

FOUNTAIN: It's true.

SMITH: Nick and I interviewed a bunch of business owners who were applying for these loans from the federal government. They would eventually be turned into grants if they kept their employees. And we traveled out to Queens to meet one person in particular.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

AUDRA FORDIN: My name is Audra Fordin. I am the fourth generation and first female to take ownership of my family's auto repair shop here in Flushing, Queens, N.Y. It's called Great Bear.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. And, Robert, just to remind people about Audra, we talked to her during the middle of New York's shutdown. And her business was pretty much devastated. She does car repair, but nobody was driving. So the amount of money her business was bringing in had gone down 75%. And she'd been talking with her employees about how she might have to lay them off or furlough them. She didn't really know what. But as a last-ditch effort, she applied for this PPP loan. And she asked for $25,000. And last we heard from her, she had been approved for the loan, but she hadn't gotten it yet.

SMITH: And there was a little bit of drama at the end of the episode because the rollout of this PPP plan by the federal government, it was an absolute mess. The computers were crashing. Nobody knew the rules. It was first-come, first-served, so there was a limited amount of money, and everyone was desperately, like, refreshing the site, refreshing the site, trying to get through to get these loans.

FOUNTAIN: And after we published the episode, things got a little smoother the computer system was worked out. Congress put more money into the program. But this other problem arose, which was that it turned out that people who had, you know, banking relationships, people who knew their banker and had them on speed dial, were the most likely to get those early loans. And some people without those relationships kind of just gave up. And so now when we look at the data - we actually have a lot of the data now - we can see that richer neighborhoods got more of these loans per capita than poor neighborhoods and Black and brown neighborhoods.

SMITH: Absolutely. And if you've followed Twitter any amount over the last few months, you know there's also been this backlash against businesses who took the loans.

FOUNTAIN: People have strong feelings on the Internet about who got PPP money. That is an understatement.

SMITH: Well, there was this whole, like, you shouldn't have taken the money; I deserved the money. And then other people would be like, no, you shouldn't take the money. And the thing that really typified this was the Ayn Rand Institute, named after, of course, the famous author and philosopher Ayn Rand, who talked about the power of the individual and who railed against government handouts. Well, the organization named after her asked for a government handout.

FOUNTAIN: And, Robert, you and I have been sort of sending these articles back-and-forth - like, ah, ha-ha, Ayn Rand Institute got it. But all these articles really missed the point of the program, which was to get as much money into business owners' hands as quickly as possible so that they could keep people on the payroll. And at least for Audra, when I talked to her this week, that seems to have happened.

SMITH: Yes. You called Audra back. Tell me everything.

FOUNTAIN: Well, we FaceTimed. And quick side note - she was wearing one of those masks - have you seen these? People send in a photo of them smiling, and it's printed...

SMITH: No.

FOUNTAIN: ...On the mask.

SMITH: No.

FOUNTAIN: And so it's just very weird.

Hey, Audra.

FORDIN: Hi there, Nick.

FOUNTAIN: You at the shop?

FORDIN: Yes.

FOUNTAIN: How you been?

FORDIN: We're doing OK. You know, as far as - I guess you're asking with the PPE...

FOUNTAIN: Not the PPE, but the PPP.

FORDIN: PPP.

FOUNTAIN: I see that you're set with the PPE. You've got the mask. You've got the gloves. How about the PPP?

FORDIN: The PPP came through great. I got the money. It was timely.

SMITH: She got the money.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. She asked for $25,000. She got all of it. And she says that it's been a huge help because business isn't actually at full strength yet, and despite that, she's been able to keep her whole team together.

FORDIN: There's a community that happened, and I can't make that up - the relationships.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. It seems like you have such an awesome team, and it would've been such - so heartbreaking to lose any of those guys. And you didn't have to.

FORDIN: Well, not that I didn't have to. I chose not to.

SMITH: This is one example of a team that was able to stay together, which is good, which is exactly what this program was meant for.

FOUNTAIN: Yes, totally.

Are people working in the - on the floor right now? You want to...

FORDIN: You want to say hi to Cedric?

FOUNTAIN: Sure.

Robert, you remember Cedric Kang (ph), her lead mechanic, the guy who showed us all those drills?

SMITH: Yeah. (Imitating drill) - yeah. We recorded drills for 10 minutes, yeah.

FOUNTAIN: So many drills.

FORDIN: I'm sure he'll be happy to hear from you, too.

FOUNTAIN: Anyways, I got to talk to him for a second.

CEDRIC KANG: Hi, Nick. How are you?

FOUNTAIN: Hey, Cedric. What's going on?

KANG: All right. Not much. I have very good news for - you know, with my wife. We got a quarantine baby.

FOUNTAIN: You're having a baby?

KANG: Yeah, yeah.

FORDIN: Yeah.

FOUNTAIN: That's awesome.

SMITH: Such a happy ending. Thanks, Nick.

FOUNTAIN: You bet.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAWRENCE WONG'S "EYES ON YOU")

SMITH: The last four months were obviously hard for businesses that shut down. But in some ways, it was worse for the employees of the businesses that had to stay open. Those workers were essential. They weren't going to get fired, so no unemployment checks. And they had to show up for work in the middle of a pandemic. Sarah Gonzalez profiled some of those workers. Hey, Sarah.

GONZALEZ: Hey, Robert.

SMITH: Sarah, you visited a grocery store because you had to 'cause you were doing a story about grocery workers.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, essential workers.

SMITH: Tell us what the story was.

GONZALEZ: So about three months ago, I spent a morning at a grocery store in North Carolina with essential workers. And just to, like, remind listeners, this was a grocery store where everyone was a person of color, and mostly the people working there were women. I don't know if you guys remember this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

FATIMA PAVON: Oh, no white people work here. No. We do have, you know, a little bit of everything except white people, yeah.

GONZALEZ: That was Fatima Pavon (ph). She works at Compare Foods supermarket. And when we spoke in April, she was trying to bring herself to ask for a raise because her job had gotten a lot riskier than she signed up for with the virus.

SMITH: And that was one of those interesting things about this story, is normally when a job is riskier, you get paid more for it. But in this case, no one had gotten a raise yet.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, no hazard pay. And Fatima made $9.20 an hour, which came out to about $300 a week.

SMITH: Which, we should say, is a lot less than she would've made if she had been fired and put on unemployment. Sarah, you called her back. What did she say?

GONZALEZ: Yeah, we checked in this week.

Hey, Fatima.

PAVON: Hey. How are you?

GONZALEZ: Hey. I'm good. How are you?

PAVON: Good.

GONZALEZ: So I was just curious what's going on with you.

PAVON: Nothing. I'm still at the - at my job. Only thing new is - so I got a raise.

GONZALEZ: You got a raise?

PAVON: Yeah. Yeah.

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Rest of the Story, Pandemic Edition : Planet Money - NPR

During her Friday press briefing, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany touched again on the subject of cancel culture, and lamented that the Nickelodeon show PAW Patrol had been canceled. Calling the program a a cartoon show about cops she grouped it among other cop shows like, Cops and Live PD, which have actually been canceled. Unfortunately for the nations parents, McEnany was (and I know this is shocking) inaccurate. Sadly, PAW Patrol, in all of its saccharine, vivid, extremely grating, Canadian glory remains on the air.

But why would McEnany claim that PAW Patrol was canceled in the first place? Most likely because in the wake of ongoing police violence toward Black people, parents are casting a dubious eye towards PAW Patrols leading pup, Chase. The plucky German Shepherd is, well, problematic. He is a cop-dog and part of a seemingly privatized police force. He apparently operates with impunity, free of warrants, or public mandate. He has a goddamn surveillance drone. Which, you know, feels like the show is grooming a generation to accept the benevolent oversight of a police state.

Thats only a guess, though. Its also possible that Trump simply wasnt able to find his favorite show and assumed the worst.

The thing is that plenty of parents would welcome the cancelation of PAW Patrol. It would be a sweet release. Because for anyone over the age of 8, the show is basically unwatchable. The voices are pitched way too high and unnaturally optimistic. The plots are so simplistic and yet confounding that its likely even the target audience of Kindergartners feels that they are being patronized. And the characters? What is even going on there.

Do you plan on sending your kids back to school this fall?

Yes. I trust that our schools are taking precautions.

No. We don't feel that proper precautions are in place.

I'm not sure yet. It depends on how things progress.

Thanks for the feedback!

Leaving aside Chases fascist tendencies, theres the PAW Patrols owner, Ryder. Hes the child Ayn Rand never had, living out some kind of John Gault objectivist fantasy. Hes the child genius/iconoclast who has somehow managed to privatize the social infrastructure of Adventure Bay by replacing it with specialized dogs. Hes put the clumsiest one in charge of fire response, by the way, so sleep tight Adventure Bay! Even on the merits of his dog ownership, hes terrible. He basically neglects Zuma the water dog, giving most of his attention to his favorites. What kind of role model is that?

The merits of PAW Patrol are few and dim the second you count past It keeps my kid slack-jawed for a half-hour. Believe me, if the show were canceled there would be much parental rejoicing.

Is that cancel culture? Not in the way McEnany and the White House understands it. But lets be honest. Some things deserve to be canceled, simply because they are objectively terrible. PAW Patrol is one of those things and McEnany should be ashamed for getting our hopes up.

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No. PAW Patrol Wasn't Canceled. But We Wish It Had Been - Fatherly

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbors pocket? Asks Ayn Rand in the classic Fountainhead and goes on to answer, No, its not as easy as that. If that were all, Id say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they arent. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesnt borrow or pawn.

The on-going catharsis in the Court No 1 of the Supreme Court has all the components for a competing episode in the theatre of Indian Judiciary. The histrionic screenplay unfolds in the backdrop of the gruesome and gory murder of 8 men in khaki, in a typical Maoist style operation just that it was not played out in the forests of Dandakaranya by a history sheeter roaming free with more than 60 criminal cases pending various stages of trial in different courts. The celebration in social media that followed the killing of Vikas Dubey and his men in police encounter was a sharp slap on the knuckles of our judiciary. What was being mocked at, if not questioned, was the integrity of the Indian judiciary.

The ensuing PIL drama in the Supreme Court is nothing but a cruel attack on the 8 policemen who were butchered on duty, by elements who do not believe in the concept of rule of law. This enactment is beginning to remind one of the Nirbhaya case the one who should not be named wherein the self-appointed conscience keepers of the legal cottage industry in Delhi took it upon themselves to dictate to the judiciary as to how their perverted idea of deliverance should substitute the idea of dispensation of justice.

I have dealt cases with Justice B S Chauhan. I too would have suggested his name, observed the CJI when the Solicitor General, representing the UP Government, submitted a draft notification for appointment of a three member inquiry commission. Instant verdict was delivered by this coterie and the farce did not even break for an adequate recess. Bang came the next petition, orchestrated with significant precision, attacking the retired bureaucrat in the Commission, that it appeared as if the CJI pleaded for the endorsement of this legal cabal while stating we will not allow you to cast aspersions on someones integrity on this. How can you call a man corrupt by a statement that simply says rule of law has to be followed?. In a court wherein public interest has got substituted by competing vested interests of criss-crossing factions those that want to selectively shed a cinematic tear only for blood-thirsty murderers as defined in the left-leaning human rights encyclopaedia an endless stream of frivolous petitions is becoming the new norm. What we are witnessing in Court no 1 is the precise death of obiter dicta one cut every day under the mindful watch of our robed luminaries.

Who is the director behind this clan which probably subscribes to no ideology other than the rule of expediency and wants to remote control the Supreme Court of India? Why should the Apex Court watch this political circus that aims to convert the highest seat of justice into a Lutyens panchayat exhibiting a tendency of judicial masochism? Who is behind these petitioners, lawyers, journalists, media platforms that earnestly want to dish out integrity certificates to serving and retired judges and bureaucrats? Should wine tasting sessions or kitty parties in swanky south Delhi living rooms decide what defines constitutional morality for the collective conscience of this country?

The joke, many would argue, is not on the judiciary but on us, the common people, who still believe in the institutional integrity of the courts. This joke gets amplified when you will learn that even after the Supreme Court dismissed the plethora of petitions asking the Commission to begin the enquiry, a fresh set of public interest litigations on the same issue have been filed, this time on the basis of a news report that appeared in a digital platform whos only point of existence is to expend certificates of virtue to every institution this country holds dear. One question that begs reply in this ongoing saga, even before the Commission has commenced an enquiry when will the tirade of these petitions stop?

The lofty acumen of the three member committee becomes evident when one has a sneak-peak into the 150 collective years in public service they have registered in service to this nation. Should the verdict of a failed journalist ruling on their integrity in a struggling left-leaning media platform be the only reason for the top court to open their doors for this unrelenting caucus in their endless fight to bring down the judicial values we cherish?

By questioning the single-member Commission and restructuring it on the plea of this professional legal clique, did the chief justice unwittingly play into their hands? Where will the line be drawn in the process of establishing justice? Or will that also be outsourced to the disastrous tone of these eminent activist lawyers? When the Supreme Court very often invokes the extraordinary jurisdiction in the name of public interest, should it not invoke the same authority to stop this brutally vicious tyranny that is being perpetually unleashed in the name of crony human rights?

If the killing of Vikas Dubey has evinced cheer from an otherwise peace-loving and law abiding public chamber, it is a moment to pause and reflect for the highest court of our land. What will be put on trial before the Chief Justice next week is not just the criminal justice system of our nation but the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court of India. Whether the Court No 1 wants to stand by their notion of integrity the ability to stand by their idea of justice or outsource this for the certification of the career activists, is a conscious choice that the bench will make. The Chief Justice with more than 40 years of significantly successful legal experience is carrying on his shoulders not just the combined wisdom of his predecessors but the unbearable heaviness of the aspirations of young India. Will he set a precedent by ending this stinking menace of judicial harassment by invoking Article 142 and cause a CBI enquiry? The nation is watching.

The Author is a Senior Journalist

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Law of Integrity the Joke's on Us - India Legal

Every day there is more data to prove the dangers of the coronavirus. Yet, bizarrely, the more proof we have of the damage of the pandemic; the more vicious and hysterical its deniers.It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of uninformed, deluded ideas covidiots spew on a daily basis. We mourn not just the lives lost and the bodies damaged, but the collective intelligence of our nation.With international news consistently depicting the United States as the dumbest nation in the developed world, it is as if news of the covidiocy is almost as depressing as news of the virus's spread itself.

The trend to what is described as America's move from freedom to"freedumb"has sadly been a long time in the making. The pandemic only painfully reveals a process that was well-documented by Charles Pierce's 2010 book "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free."

Pierce opens with a story of Americans descending on the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where homeschooled children on field trips can behold a dinosaur wearing a saddle. With stories like these it is not hard to understand how this country lost its grip on even the most basic scientific concepts. It is not a big leap from dinosaurs in saddles to believing thatface masks make us sick.

Shortly before the 2016 election we started to hear that part of the problem with America's stupidity was the fact that social media allows us to exist in information silos or echo chambers where our ideas aren't challenged and where we get a daily dose of confirmation for our brand of personal wackiness. Surely, information silos are a problem, but as the pandemic deniers have shown, there is actually a fairly diverse array of covidiocy types.

In fact, when we lump all pandemic deniers together into the same pile, we miss the fact that what plagues America on acognitive levelis a far more serious disease, one that has neither one symptomnor one easy cure. Here are five main types of covidiots to look out for:

The eye rollers think that all of the news over the pandemic is exaggerated hype. This is the line of reasoning that suggests thatif we didn't test for the virus so well, our numbers would be more in line with other developed nations.The eye rollers think that the coronavirus is just like the flu and that its mortality rates are of no real significance.

You'd think all you'd need to do with an eye roller is show them the inside of an ICU or have them hear stories from those who have been gravely sickened by the virus. But the key to the eye roller is that they aren't going to believe a single piece of evidence because, from their view, all proof of the dangers of the pandemic is manufactured to produce hysteria.

The eye roller is disturbing for the fact that they have a long history of not taking a single critical issue in this nation seriously. So, coupled with their eye rolling over what they perceive as coronavirus hype, they are also likely to believe that we have no racism, no sexism, in fact, no significant problems whatsoever.For them, liberals manufacture issues that aren't real so that they can create social anxiety and elevate their policy platform. These are the people who disparage the Black Lives Matter movement as reverse racism and mock #MeToo as a problem of thin skin.

The shoulder shruggers are your Ayn Rand-style covidiots. These folks get the numbers and the science. They have a full sense of the dead bodies and damaged lungs, but they simply don't care. They epitomize the "profit over people" worldview.

This is the line of reasoningwe saw on displayby Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick who suggested that grandparents should be willing to die in order to save the economy for their grandkids:"My message: let's get back to work, let's get back to living, let's be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we'll take care of ourselves." According to him, there is no reason to "sacrifice the country" in order to save a few old people.

Like the eye rollers, the shoulder shruggers have a far more pernicious mindset that shapes their views on a wider set of concerns than the virus. These are the folks who see in the virus neoliberal opportunities to capitalize rather than empathize.

The hedonists simply don't want to be inconvenienced by the virus. They want their manicures, haircuts and happy hours. Their own selfishness dominates their behavior and clouds their ability to consider the wellbeing of others.They see the entire world from the vantage point of their pleasure-driven egos and they outright refuse to be inconvenienced for the benefit of others.

The narcissistic hedonists talk about how they have a right not to wear a mask and how those who worry over the pandemic should just stay home."You're infringing on my rights,"they screamany time they are told they can't enter a store without a mask. "This is a free country, and I'm here to shop."

The narcissistic hedonists have no commitment to a social project nor do they care a wit about the common good. They have weighed the costs and risks of their behavior and they think that their own desires are more valuable than their grandparents' lives.

This strain of covidiot also has a long history in this nation. Unlike the eye roller who thinks everything in the nation is already great or the shoulder shrugger who cares more about the economy than society, the narcissistic hedonist places their desires at the center of everything. And, even worse, they think that their own destructive ego-driven behavior is their "right" as Americans.

The self-proclaimed scientists are a unique strain of covidiot that derives from this nation's long resistance to expertise. The self-proclaimed scientist will tell you that you should not listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci.Instead you should listen to them, since they have done "research" and they know more about the virus than world-leading scientists.

Fauci,the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,recently warned of the dangerous consequences of our national anti-science bias:"One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority."

Yet, as Pierce documents in the book I cited earlier, the American tendency to eschew expertise and disparage science has extremely deep roots in our collective history. It is tied not just to religious extremism, but also to the history of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. The urge to put down teachers and professors alongside scientists is part of the American habit of distrusting smart people and it is tied to the idea that some folks would prefer a president theywant to have a beer withover an intellectual or even highly educated president.

The anti-expertise sickness that plagues the United States is sadly to blame for much of the failed U.S. response to the pandemic, but its negative impact on the functioning of our nation goes well beyond flaws in our healthcare system and public health policy. As long as we continue to be skeptical of knowledge and attracted to BS, we can expect our nation to continue to lookless and less like a developed nation.

One of the special features of conspiracy theorists is that they are found on both the left and the right, unlike a lot of the other strains of covidiots. They converge in the bizarre alternate reality of anti-vaxxers. But, regarding the coronavirus, the conspiracy theories are largely skewed to the right.

The range of conspiracy theories about the pandemic is simply too broad to cover in this piece.It spans from theories that the virus was deliberately started by China or by Bill Gates to theories that the virus simply isn't real at all.Naturereportedin March that "the website Biohackinfo.com falsely claimed that Gates planned to use a coronavirus vaccine as a ploy to monitor people through an injected microchip or quantum-dot spy software."

Healthline reported in Junethat 25 percent of people believe unproven theories about COVID-19. This is all to show that there is a strange urge in this country to attach to fantasy theories rather than facts.

The danger to the conspiracy theorist is not just their refusal to accept evidence that challenges their views, but rather their paranoid worries that any evidence is actually propaganda designed to dupe them and cause harm.The conspiracy theorist is so worried thinking that information is manipulation that they lose any sight of what the truth actually is.And as coverage of a Palm Beach County Commission meeting that went viral for the outlandish arguments presented by residents against a mask ordinance (which the Florida county did pass) shows, covidiots tend to mix up their reasons for refusing to wear masks and take the pandemic seriously. Trying to follow thesearguments against wearing masks will hurt your brain.

What's worse is that having to "debate" matters of science and evidence-based medicinetends to leave us fighting each other rather than the virus.Even more disturbing, there is no vaccine for covidiocy: It promises to linger well after the virus has been contained, wreaking havoc on our society, taking up resources and frustrating progress.It's a condition that has plagued our country for decades and it won't be cured until and unless we make a collective effort to prevent its spread.

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A field guide to the pandemic deniers - Salon

Two Minutes to Late Night continues to deliver some pretty cool quarantine covers, this time delivering perhaps their biggest star power to date, with members of Tool, Mastodon, Coheed and Cambria, Primus and Mutoid Man signing on to rock out Rush's 1975 song "Anthem."

The lineup includes Coheed's Claudio Sanchez on vocals, Mastodon's Bill Kelliher and Mutoid Man's Stephen Brodsky on guitars, Primus' Les Claypool on bass and Tool's Danny Carey behind the kit.

Each of the musicians bring their own unique look to the song, whether it be Kelliher's light goggles, Claypool's gas mask or Brodsky's continually changing backgrounds. But it all makes for a video that not only captures the eye, but delivers a raucous cover that more than lives up to the original.

"Uhhh... Holy Moley. It's Claudio Sanchez, Bill Kelliher, Les Claypool, Danny Carey, and Steve Brodsky covering a Rush song. We're just as surprised as you are," gushed Hall, later adding that in lieu of taking money for the cover, the participants decided to donate their fees to the Cancer Research Institute. Kelliher composed the cover that the collective performed.

"Anthem" was the lead off song on Rush's 1975 album Fly By Night. Neil Peart would name the song after Ayn Rand's novella of the same name, taking inspiration from the piece while working on the lyrics.

Rush served a big influence to a number of musicians, with Primus even plotting a tribute tour to Rush's A Farewell to Kings that has been moved from this summer to 2021.

Claudio Sanchez, Bill Kelliher, Les Claypool, Danny Carey, Stephen Brodsky + Gwarsenio Hall Cover Rush's "Anthem"

Where Does Geddy Lee Rank Among the Top 66 Hard Rock + Metal Bassists of All Time?

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Mastodon, Tool, Coheed + Cambria, Primus Members Team on Cover of Rush's 'Anthem' - Loudwire

Posted Jul 24, 2020, 2:11 pm

Blake MorlockTucsonSentinel.com

Gov. Doug Ducey, in his coronavirus press conference Thursday, had encouraging news to share as he told a story of Arizonas improved outlook during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Case numbers, positive tests and hospitalizations are all trending in toward the better, he told Arizonans. Ducey rather publicly broke with President Donald Trump and announced the state would let school districts make the decision locally about when and how to do the majority of re-openings. He even had Democrat Kathy Hoffman, the state superintendent of public instruction, with him as he addressed reporters in a rare show of bipartisanship.

Arizona has an improving story to tell and Ducey was going to tell it.

We are going to continue to take a responsible approach and the decisions from my office will be guided by public health, Ducey said, concluding an upbeat presentation and inviting the press to ask questions.

The first few reporters all men got up and essentially bought into the framing Ducey had provided.

Then KNXV reporter Nicole Grigg stood up, walked to the microphone and flat socked Ducey in the nose. She challenged his use of New York Times, MSNBC and Johns Hopkins University numbers for Arizona while continuing to ignore home-grown research done jointly by Arizona State University and the University of Arizona. Ducey had told those institutions to stand down their reporting early in the health crisis.

The governor staggered back for a bit pointing out that the New York Times and MSNBC werent cherry-picking numbers to downplay the virus, which has become a cause celeb for his Republican Party.

Then Grigg then planted a rhetorical flurry in Duceys figurative nostrils: How can you say that cases are going down when there is a 60,000 case backlog at one of the states largest testing facilities? How can you say you are making data-informed decisions with incomplete data?

Ducey for a couple weeks now has pointed to a slowing of the increase in the number of cases here as a reason to not lock things down, or even go back to the loose "maybe stay at home" suggestions he issued in the spring.

"Why do you sit here and say that things are positive?," the Phoenix reporter asked.

If this were the old days back on Manor Hill Drive, Ducey would have cradled his bloodied beak and admonished Grigg: Im telling my mom!

Ducey yadda, yaddaed through an answer with a tone I interpreted to drip with condescension and mansplaining. "We don't have the demand for the test," he said.

Ordinarily, Im not a fan of septum-crushing questions. They tend to be counterproductive to getting information because they throw the source on the defensive. Empathy is a much better device to get governors to spill.

In this case, Grigg who's been dogging Ducey daily for months was dead on because its important to pierce the senses of futility and inevitability.

Arizona has positive trends only in the context of a hellscape. A stay-at-home order is still needed to save lives that can be saved. Ducey won't issue one because it's bad for business but how do we have a good economy while living in one of the global hotspots of a pandemic.

I have a neighbor who works at one of Banner Healths clinics andhes being redeployed to University Medical Center, where the staffneeds relief like the 101st Airborne at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. These bands of brothers and sisters are in the Bois Jacques Woods and COVID-19 is absolutely shelling them into oblivion.

Speed is life. The faster we get the virus under control, the morepeople we save. Ducey wants a slower recovery because thats best forbusiness and fits his ideology. Its why hundreds have to die every weekfor God only knows how long.

Arizonas cases are trending downward. Positivity rates after tests are also decreasing. The R-nought number defining how many others each sick person can infect is on the wane. Fine. Arizona is still are reporting more four to five times the daily infections than the 446 million people living in the European Union.

Our state has lost more lives to coronavirus than were killed on 9/11.

Let me throw a couple other numbers at you, Dear Reader. If Arizona were a country, it would rank between Laos and Paraguay in descending order of total population. Those two (we used to call them) third-world countries have reported 36 combined deaths from COVID-19.

Disclaimer: Laos says they have zero deaths. I don't buy that for a second because because communist countries arent known for transparency. However, they did impose a lockdown and strict quarantine measures, taking a much stronger approach than the U.S. The argument in Laos is whether or not the numbers are zero, or just low. It's not whether the country is a global hotspot like Arizona has become.

While polls show Americans dont buy the official line from the the United States of Trumpia, we run the risk of accepting an unacceptably low bar as proof of success.

For instance, it is increasingly apparent that given a choice between Ducey and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state is far better off with Ducey in charge. Hes not incompetent maniac insisting everything is great as his state is ravaged by the pandemic.

Over in Texas, my family is stuck with Gov. Gregg Abbott, who I think wants to do right by the Lone Star population but hes looking over his shoulder at a lieutenant governor telling the world there are better things than living. I suppose thats true, but freedom from wearing a strap of cloth over ones face isnt one of them. Fearing a primary challenge, Abbott has been forced to hold back on the kinds of measures that could bend the curve. There are a lot worse things than losing the governorship.

Ducey is doing all that "he can do" but that's a different amount than "what can be done." The governor is no new-school sociopath. He's an old-fashioned laissez-faire conservative, who thinks the government should have a light touch interfering with the economy.

That's fair, except that he's resistant to taking further (half-)measures to interfere with coronavirus because that would be interfering with the economy.

The spring rounds of stay-at-home-orders were supposed to get the virus under control. Failure to keep them in place long enough to work, lead the rise in new cases. Its also going to likely lead to another trillion-dollars in spending probably about twice the Toxic Asset Relief Program.

We're spending this money because Republicans of the new and old schools, aren't capable of believing this pandemic requires a sustained public response.

I'm not denying that Ducey has taken some action in that he shut down bars, gyms and other public facilities (or at least the ones that don't flaunt their flouting of the order). That was when coronavirus seemed destined to climb to 6,000 cases a day. So it seems like Arizona is going to have to get used to the horrible and be thankful we haven't climbed into the absolutely horrific.

No one's explained how an economy is supposed to improve during a pandemic, when the consumer base is filled with a bunch of people afraid their names would be added to the body count.

My first column about COVID-19 predicted the governor and the Republicans in the Legislature were going to have overcome their allergy to the notion of public action in order to fix things.

A pandemic screams for the sort of collective public action that Ayn Rand would hate.

However, the state and national response to the global pandemic is an increasingly political game of Whos your daddy?

Daddy is the Republicans, more specifically, the MAGAs. Mommy is the Democrats, specifically women and a bunch of men who are too wimpy to let mere human lives fuel an economy chugging along uninterrupted by stay-at-home orders.

I didn't invent this construct and it's been used against the Left for years. Empathy is fine for sniffles but tough guys are required when things get dangerous.

In letting COVID-19 fly free, Daddy will justify the body counts by saying, I did what I had to do to protect this family!

This masculine versus feminine approach to the virus has even been noticed by Duceys administration, who unveiled an ad to undercut it, even as they are perpetuating it. The 30-second spot released by the state depicts a boxer equating masks to gloves, saying They dont make me weak.

Well, Ill tell you what strong looked like. It looked like a woman at a microphone smashing through the bubble because thats what journalists do.

And it looks like Mayor Regina Romero of Tucson and Kate Gallego of Phoenix issuing a must-wear-mask directive that correlates almost precisely to Arizonas turn-around because thats what strong leaders do. Ducey kinda wimped out and left the hard decisions to local government leaders.

Absent context, Ducey is claiming progress.

The question is whether Arizona and America will shut up and let Daddy call the shots, because he knows what's best and is strong enough to do what's right.

The country and Arizona have gone for it in the past. We have taken care of Daddy so Daddy can take careof us all the way to mass incarceration, ignoring climatechange, tax cuts for the rich, a wealth gap for the ages and a stupidwar in Iraq. Maybe coronaviruswill be the bridge too far.

Theres no victory laps. Theres no celebrations, Ducey said, as if he could use a pat on the back. Everything put up here is informed by the data.

That may be true, but its filtered through an ideology out of sync with the times.

Its increasingly clear Arizona, Texas and Florida, its clear that Daddy has an agenda other than preventing deaths. Its also becoming clear, we might have to go get Mom.

Blake Morlock is a journalist who has spent 20 years covering government in Arizona and also worked in Democratic political communications. Now hes telling you things that the Devil wont.

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Daddy Ducey had his chance to deal with COVID; It's time to call Mom | What the Devil won't tell you - TucsonSentinel.com

Groundbreaking ideas seem in short supply at the moment. This summers streamer hits drew big audiences but did not resonate in terms of novelty. Charlize Theron returns as a lethal and immortal mercenary in The Old Guard. Tom Hanks again calmly captains a World War II warship in Greyhound. Most of the new original series on Peacock and HBO Max had to first prove themselves in the UK before being granted their U.S. visas.

The brave new world of streaming thus is reaffirming a rule that Hollywood learned a century ago: If an idea is billed as new or, even worse, as important, run for cover.

All this may sound war-weary, but its worth review at a moment when Hollywood is celebrating (or should be) an anniversary that produced one of its most embarrassing flops a movie that was aggressively heralded as both new and important. It was going to change filmmaking as well as affecting public opinion worldwide.

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It was about the dawn of the atomic age.

Aptly titled The Beginning or the End, the 1947 movie announced itself as a meticulously researched docudrama that would explore the creation of the atom bomb and the decision 75 years ago to drop it on two Japanese targets. In heralding the project, MGM declared that it would not be another Hollywoodized version of history; the filmmakers had obtained the cooperation and approval of President Harry Truman himself and of all of the scientists and generals who built and delivered the bomb. Thats why the movie would be important.

By the time The Beginning or the End was released, however, Hollywood had learned some valuable lessons about the collision of art and politics. The details of that story are captured in a new book by Greg Mitchell, same title, its publication tied to the anniversary of the bombings, which instantly obliterated two cities costing the lives of 200,000 people.

The dropping of the bomb was initially celebrated worldwide in August 1945, dramatically bringing down the curtain on World War II. Americas apocalyptic weapon had the power not only to destroy an enemy but also civilization as a whole.

Within days, however, the tone of the celebration changed dramatically as teams of scientists and religious leaders came forward with the hard questions: Was the decision a catastrophic mistake? Could advance warnings to the Japanese military have achieved the same surrender? Were the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary victims?

In this light, Hollywood, having profited from heroic war movies, now set about to a create a classic end-of-war movie. Could Clark Gable be the man whose force of character got the bomb made, presiding over the top-secret Manhattan Project? Could Jimmy Stewart heroically fly the plane that targeted it so deftly?

Both MGM and Paramount made headlines by jumping to the challenge. Louis B. Mayer declared that this would launch a new genre, the superstar docudrama. He dispatched aides to meet with the crusty Gen. Leslie Groves, who had commanded the project, offering a $10,000 fee; also a guarantee that he could veto anything in the script that he deemed untrue or simply didnt like.

Meanwhile, the formidable Hal Wallis was empowered by Paramount to meet with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant nuclear scientist, and close a deal similar to Groves, minus the fee. Wallis also hired Ayn Rand, the hottest writer of the moment, to rush ahead with a script.

The Mayer-Wallis competition was itself big news, both being Hollywood legends who needed a big production to energize their stalled careers. Wallis, whod produced Casablanca, was suffering amid postwar doldrums.

Learning of Wallis deals with scientists, Mayer now decided to top him by setting up a meeting with President Truman, eliciting his cooperation, again with conditions. Truman, too, would effectively have final cut.

Hollywood was in awe. Two major films were now in the pipeline, both new and important. But both soon were weighed down by major problems.

Wallis quickly realized he had selected the wrong writer in Rand, author of The Fountainhead, who excelled as a right-wing ideologue, not as a screenwriter. A new writer was secretly hired behind her. MGM also bet not only on the wrong writer (Frank Wead) but also a miscast director named Norman Taurog, whose main credits were on Mickey Rooney movies.

Shuffling screenwriters, both studios also realized theyd walled themselves in creatively by granting approvals to so many politicians and scientists, all of whom were actively weighing in, their demands at once predictable and destructive. Oppenheimer and fellow scientists felt the movie, as scripted, glorified the military, not the science. Groves insisted the movie rewrite history by eliminating the controversial bombing of Nagasaki, which took place three days after Hiroshima. It was promptly cut. He also fostered a scene which showed Nazi scientists sharing nuclear secrets with the Japanese, thereby justifying Washingtons quick decision to drop the bomb (the meetings never took place).

If Hollywoods creatives were shocked by the willingness of Washington to distort history, they were even more surprised by Trumans demand: Upon seeing the first cut, he was apprehensive that the movie made him seem indecisive about the bombing. He wanted it re-edited to show that he didnt harbor a moments regret or reflection about greenlighting the atomic age.

By this time, Wallis had shrewdly dropped out, leaving MGM to make its many changes and re-edits according to their directives. Pre-release screenings were scheduled, then canceled after walkouts by invited scientists. MGM nonetheless went through with its obligatory celebrity opening, with Mayer already cringing from the early reviews.

Time magazine decreed that The Beginning or the End reflected Hollywoods imbecilic assumption that audiences were not capable of facing facts. The Nation declared that the film symbolized state-controlled cinema at its worst. The New York Times Bosley Crowther wrote, The filmmakers think they have made history but its a ridiculous conceit.

The film grossed a modest $1.6 million (perhaps $15 million in todays dollars) and was largely ignored by audiences around the world. Mayer lectured his acolytes that docudramas would not represent MGMs future.

The critics would have to wait until Doctor Strangelove in 1964 to feast on a more satisfying portrayal of the new nuclear world.

See the rest here:

Peter Bart: How Hollywood Learned That Mixing Politics And Art Can Turn Big Ideas Into B-Pictures - Deadline

WASHINGTON Never mind Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

You want to see a real cant-look-away train wreck of a relationship?

Look to the nations capital, where a messy falling out is chronicled everywhere from the tabloids to a glossy fashion magazine, replete with a photo shoot by a swimming pool.

The saga has enough betrayal, backstabbing, recrimination, indignation and ostracization to impress Edith Wharton.

The press breathlessly covers how much time has passed since the pair last spoke, whether theyre headed for splitsville, and if they can ever agree on whats best for the children.

It was always bound to be tempestuous because they are the ultimate odd couple, the doctor and the president.

One is a champion of truth and facts. The other is a master of deceit and denial.

One is highly disciplined, working 18-hour days. The other cant be bothered to do his homework and golfs instead.

One is driven by science and the public good. The other is a public menace, driven by greed and ego. One is a Washington institution. The other was sent here to destroy Washington institutions.

One is incorruptible. The other corrupts.

One is apolitical. The other politicizes everything he touches toilets, windows, beans and, most fatally, masks.

After a fractious week, when the former reality-show star in the White House retweeted a former game-show host saying that we shouldnt trust doctors about COVID-19, Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci are gritting their teeth.

Whats so scary is that the bumpy course of their relationship has life-or-death consequences for Americans.

Who could even dream up a scenario where a president and a White House drop oppo research on the esteemed scientist charged with keeping us safe in a worsening pandemic?

The administration acted like Peter Navarro, Trumps wacko-bird trade adviser, had gone rogue when he assailed Dr. Fauci for being Dr. Wrong, in a USA Today op-ed. But does anyone believe that? And if he did, would he still have his job?

No doubt it was a case of Trump murmuring: Will no one rid me of this meddlesome infectious disease specialist?

Republicans on Capitol Hill privately confessed they were baffled by the whole thing, saying they couldnt understand why Trump would undermine Fauci, especially now with the virus resurgent. They think its not only hurting Trumps reelection chances but theirs, too.

As though it couldnt get more absurd, Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Friday that she thinks it would help Trumps poll numbers for him to start giving public briefings on the virus again even though that exercise went off the rails when the president began suggesting people inject themselves with bleach.

How did we get to a situation in our country where the public health official most known for honesty and hard work is most vilified for it? marvels Michael Specter, a science writer for The New Yorker who began covering Fauci during the AIDs crisis. And as Team Trump trashes him, the numbers keep horrifyingly proving him right.

When Fauci began treating AIDs patients, nearly every one of them died. It was the darkest time of my life, he told Specter. In an open letter, Larry Kramer called Fauci a murderer.

Then, as Specter writes, he started listening to activists and made a rare admission: His approach wasnt working. He threw his caution to the winds and became a public-health activist. Through rigorous research and commitment to clinical studies, the death rate from AIDs has plummeted over the years.

Now Fauci struggles to drive the data bus as the White House throws nails under his tires. It seems emblematic of a deeper, existential problem: America has lost its can-do spirit. We were always Bugs Bunny, faster, smarter, more wily than everybody else. Now were Slugs Bunny.

Can our country be any more pathetic than this: The Georgia governor suing the Atlanta mayor and City Council to block their mandate for city residents to wear masks?

Trump promised the A team, but he has surrounded himself with losers and kiss-ups and second-raters. Just your basic Ayn Rand nightmare.

Certainly, Fauci has had to adjust some of his early positions as he learned about this confounding virus. (When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? John Maynard Keynes wisely observed.)

Medicine is not an exact art, Jerome Groopman, the best-selling author and professor at Harvard Medical School, put it. Theres lots of uncertainty, always evolving information, much room for doubt. The most dangerous people are the ones who speak with total authority and no room for error.

Sound like someone you know?

Medical schools, Groopman continued, have curricula now to teach students the imperative of admitting when something went wrong, taking responsibility, and committing to righting it.

Some are saying the 79-year-old Fauci should say to hell with it and quit. But we need his voice of reason in this nuthouse of a White House.

Despite Faucis best efforts to stay apolitical, he has been sucked into the demented political kaleidoscope through which we view everything now. Consider the shoot by his pool, photographed by Frankie Alduino, for a digital cover story by Norah ODonnell for InStyle magazine.

From the left, the picture represented an unflappable hero, exhausted and desperately in need of some R & R, chilling poolside, not letting the White Houses slime campaign get him down or silence him. And on the right, some saw a liberal media darling, high on his own supply in the midst of a deadly pandemic. While America burns, Fauci does fashion mag photo shoots, tweeted Sean Davis, co-founder of the right-wing website The Federalist.

Its no coincidence that the QAnon-adjacent cultists on the right began circulating a new conspiracy theory in the fever swamps of Facebook that Faucis wife of three-and-a-half decades, a bioethicist, is Ghislane Maxwells sister. (Do I need to tell you she isnt?)

Worryingly, new polls show that the smear from Trumpworld may be starting to stick; fewer Republicans trust the doctor now than in the spring.

Forget Mueller, Sessions, Comey, Canada, his niece, Mika Brzezinski. Of the many quarrels, scrapes and scraps Trump has instigated in his time in office, surely this will be remembered not only as the most needless and perverse, but as the most dangerous.

As Fauci told The Atlantic, its a bit bizarre.

More than a bit, actually.

The rest is here:

The saga of the doctor versus the denier continues - Antelope Valley Press

Long ago, I worked for a fellow devoted to the writings of Ayn Rand. He did not take part in this fraternity by himself.

The Russian-born Rand authored a couple of best-selling books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in addition to numerous articles and essays, that gave birth to a philosophy known as Objectivism.

This movement championed the individual above all else, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, she wrote.

Rand, who died in 1982, became a significant influence in the American conservative movement.

Ronald Reagan had called himself an admirer of her thinking, though that praise did not bounce back his way. They shared a hate for the Soviet Union, but the author criticized the future president for kowtowing to organized religion, for which she had little use.

During his campaign in 2016, Donald Trump called The Fountainhead his favorite book, its protagonist a builder named Howard Roark whose individualism puts him at odds with the community of collective-thinking architects.

In The Fountainhead, Rand wrote of basing self-respect on personal standards of achievements, noting that any person can fake virtue for an audience while finding it impossible to fake it in your own eyes.

Its simple to seek substitutes for competence such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity, she wrote. But there is no substitute for competence.

Competence can have a tricky semantic bearing, an agreeable word but closer in line with adeptness and proficiency than, say, mastery.

A B student might be said to have competence. Those pressing for an A grade would tend toward the exceptional.

I understand that the term American exceptionalism does not refer to a letter grade for acts carried out in this nation. Rather, the phrase points out a historical, moral and freedom-endowed superiority, this great land a harbor of democracy in a global tempest.

Of course, it didnt hurt that the United States did some things right. It parlayed vast resources into industrial might. It took the fight to oppressors in World War II. It promised that Americans would walk on another world and did just that in less than a decade.

Need a can-do country? America can.

Or could.

Maintaining your mojo in a pandemic can not be easy. The United States, though, should be built for challenges ... hence the exceptionalism.

If you look at the highly industrialized nation of the G7, the U.S. ranked fourth on Monday for the most COVID-19 deaths by population, 434 for every 1 million residents.

Japan had just eight deaths per 1 million population, with Germany at 109 deaths and Canada at 235 deaths in this accounting. (France, Italy and the United Kingdom stood at worse rates.)

Back in March, many states put individualism to work in finding personal protective equipment for health-care workers, largely because centralized supplies seemed unreliable. Four months later, shortages once more arise, only the locations having changed.

School administrators, charged with safety of the nations young, have gotten into the business of translating mixed messages coming from everywhere. Youre on your own, Washington says, but if you dont open, were cutting off some money.

Times demand the best of America. Scientists cant even coax citizens into the simplest act of civic good, the wearing of masks.

The Ayn Rand Institute, enemy of the collective and advocate of free enterprise, accepted the federal governments Payroll Protection Program money. A can-do country can do irony.

Ken Newton's column runs on Tuesday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter: @SJNPNewton.

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Making it on your own in pandemic | Opinion - News-Press Now

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Photo: KAILEY SCHWERMAN/NETFLIX

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Every generation gets 'The Baby-Sitters Club' it deserves

In the year 1989, somewhere between the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the U.S. invasion of Panama, I read 20 "Baby-Sitters Club" books.

I was 8 years old. Id recently had my first culinary experience at a Chilis Bar and Grill. The world was awash with possibility. Also, I shared a bedroom with my sister, who was four years older.

That entire year was an immersion course in things sixth-grade girls liked. Paula Abdul. Janet Jackson. That weird ball-and-chain-like Skip It toy. But her bookshelf was the true gold mine. I read everything on the shelves. "Nancy Drew." "Sweet Valley High." Even something called "Summer of my German Soldier," which I believe was about a 12-year-old girl in Arkansas somehow hiding a WWII POW? And yet, despite the fact that I was aggressively anti-babysitter at the time, I kept coming back to Ann M. Martin's "The Baby-Sitters Club." Perhaps, to steal a phrase from that hip animated cat who apparently dated Paula Abdul, opposites do attract.

Over the course of two months, which is seven weeks longer than it took me to watch the new Netflix series, I read every BSC book my sister had. I learned about Claudia and Mean Janine, who was truly a terrible snitch. I learned that Logan Bruno moved to town from Kentucky and liked Mary Anne, and that Cokie Mason needed to back the foff. I learned that Stoneybrook only features softball teams with alliterative names (Kristys Krushers! Barts Bashers!) and that Betsy Sobak is a prankster who orders gag toys from a place called Squirmys House of Tricks N Jokes, and that Mallory Pike has red hair and like 60 siblings.

For the past 31 years, I've rode hard for "The Baby-Sitters Club" in a manner that, if you didn't know me, you might mistake for irony. But I assure you, friends, my intentions were pure. The stories resonated. The characters felt full. The babysitting hotline business model complete with marketable "Kid Kits" seemed financially sound.

When I heard Netflix had created an updated show based on the books, despite the fact that it came from the executive producer of the fantastic "Broad City," and the showrunner from the equally excellent "GLOW," I was worried. Like anyone whose seminal cultural experiences have remained frozen in nostalgic carbonite, I view remakes and re-imaginings and GI Joe: Rise of Cobra cautiously, like Mary Anne when Cokie Mason is sniffing around Logan.

But over the past few days, Ive watched the entire series alongside my 5-year-old daughter. Im happy to report, fellow BSC Heads, that the Netflix "Baby-Sitters Club" is "The Baby-Sitters Club" we deserve.

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Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

**

The best "kids" entertainment is rooted in an ability to resonate on multiple levels. The ones that do it well the Pixar films, "Calvin and Hobbes," "The Muppet Show" derive their strength from a mix of adult-level jokes and narratives that also work literally. It's why you can watch Calvin go down the hill on his wagon and hear him wax philosophically about the meaning of life, and understand that the wagon represents that journey, or you can just think "godd, look at that kid going down a hill on a wagon."

This sort of narrative tightrope is harder to walk than it may seem, but BSC pulls it off. It layers in meta-references to "Gossip Girl," and winks at Alicia Silverstone's role as Kristy's mother with a crack about her "not being clueless." The first episode even calls back to "Sex and the City," as we see Kristy as Carrie Bradshaw, typing away on an essay about decorum.

Of course, some of my viewpoints have evolved in the past 30 years. For non-example, my 8-year-old self strongly believed that Kristy, always clad in a turtleneck and sweatshirt, was obviously the best and most awesomely dressed babysitter, and now I see that I was extremely correct.

The show has old bones. While the casting, and the themes (Mary Anne corrects adults when they misuse pronouns with a trans kid she babysits), and the shows aesthetics all feel very 2020, there is a nostalgic optimism, a sense of fairness and, to steal from Kristy's essay, decorum that feels so far from the current diaper barge burning on a Cuyahoga River-sized cesspool of snake oil in America that it might as well have been dug up out of a time capsule alongside a package of Snackwell's Devil's Food cookies and a "Did I Do That?" Steve Urkel T-shirt.

The girls in the show still fit the archetypes that Martin created (The athlete! The bookworm! The um, Stacey!) but they all share an old school, almost Midwestern maturity that makes me feel like each pulled a Freaky Friday with former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Take, for example, the third episode, "The Truth About Stacey."

During the episode, they find out, via an ad they watch on an iPad, that they have competition from The Baby-Sitters Agency, which is made up of shy Ayn Rand disciple orange-tinted high school girls. When Stacey tells on a rival babysitter for nearly getting a child killed while she was busy doing hand-stuff with her Goth rapper boyfriend, those high school sbirds pull a Lee Atwater and send around a video of her having a diabetic seizure to all the parents.

Now what does Stacey do about this? Does she kidnap the high schoolers cat and send her collage-style ransom notes with amusing pictures of the cat dressed up in lightly demeaning ways, as would be well within her rights given what just happened? Or, you know, just like email the parents and explain she has diabetes? No, she does not.

Instead, she essentially calls a PRESS CONFERENCE while wearing Melanie Griffiths "Working Girl" get-up and addresses all of the parents in-person. And you know why she does that? Because, unlike pretty much everyone else, the 12-year-olds in "The Baby-Sitters Club" are the adults in the room. And frankly, given how adults act these days, thats kind of condescending to the girls.

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Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

**Using highly scientific anecdotal research acquired by texting my friends, it seems a new generation of 8-year-olds has latched on to "The Baby-Sitters Club." Nearly everyone I know with kids in the 7 -to 10-year-old quadrant has seen it.

My daughter is 5, and slightly young for the show, but I had her watch it with me anyway, because well, screentime is screentime, you know? She watched for a few minutes and then asked how old the girls were. Twelve, I told her.

Wow, she said. Like most 5-year-olds, its often hard for my daughter to fathom any age beyond 8.

What do you think you can do when youre 12, I ask.

When youre 12, you can do everything, she said, her eyes still on the screen. Anything you want.

And after watching "The Baby-Sitters Club," you know what? I kind of think she might be right.

Kevin Alexander is a freelance journalist and author of "Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End." Twitter: KAlexander03

Continued here:

Every generation gets 'The Baby-Sitters Club' it deserves - SFGate

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Today, the woman at the centre of the decades most salacious libel trial takes to the witness stand and the world will be watching Amber Heard. For the Hollywood actress whose career includes The Danish Girl and box office record-breaker Aquaman, this week will be her greatest starring role to date.

Heard has arrived at the High Court wearing a red bandana as a face mask, and has been smiling but silent, surrounded by a support squad of powerful women. She and her entourage of female allies, nicknamed Ambers angels by the media, have spent day and night together in the last few weeks, visiting members club Oswalds in Mayfair, and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and her wife Debbie were among guests at a party thrown in Heards honour by author Kathy Lette, who is friends with Heards barrister Jen Robinson, Amal Clooneys best lawyer pal.

So who is the woman behind the red scarf?

Heard, 34, and her sister Whitney, 31, were raised in Texas, about 40 miles outside of the state capital Austin. It was a conservative area, a very monotone presentation of society, and she still recalls the first time she saw a Muslim woman in a hijab. I was electricified.

Amber Heard at the Cannes Film Festival in2018 (Getty Images)

Their mother Patricia worked in telecommunications for the state and their father David ran a small construction firm. A keen hunter and horse broker, he liked to treat middle daughter Amber as the son he never had. They were fishing, camping and hunting companions (hunting is their bonding activity to this day), and Heard, t hough a self-described girly-girl, was raised to be tenacious. Her father taught her to ride horses aggressively and drive pick-up trucks, and scared off potential suitors with his penchant for shotguns. I was always into older men as a teenager, Heard once said, before going on to marry Depp, 22 years her senior. I never dated in my school. That was a ridiculous idea to me.

At 16, Heards best friend died in a car crash, and it had a profound effect. Raised a Roman Catholic, she declared herself an atheist, and began reading books by Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell. At that time she started sending headshots to modelling agencies (shed taken part in beauty pageants as a child) and at 17 dropped out of high school to move to New York, which thrilled her from the moment she began visiting it to meet agents. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, she says of the Big Apple.

Cara Delevingne (L) and Amber Heard at the Cannes Film Festivalin 2014 (Dave Benett)

Heard insists she had no interest in modelling. After completing a home-study diploma in New York she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and, despite her lack of contacts and her parents scepticism, began to be cast in film and TV roles. Within two years she was in American football drama Friday Night Lights and played the younger version of Charlize Therons character in North Country, a film about sexual harassment, discrimination and social justice. Her big break came with two box-office hits in 2008: martial arts drama Never Back Down and stoner comedy Pineapple Express, playing Seth Rogans high-school girlfriend. That year, she won a breakthrough award at the Hollywood Film Festival.

Among other 2008 appearances was horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, picked for distribution by Harvey Weinstein but then dropped. Its director Jonathan Levine said hed chosen Heard for the lead because there was a certain type of beauty and a certain type of innate intelligence that is not something you find every day. Certainly, not something you would find in somebody her age.

In 2011 she met Depp on the set of comedy-drama The Rum Diary. Heard reportedly beat Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley to the role of Chenault and was personally selected by Depp. The pairs insane chemistry was spotted from the start, but Depp was with his partner of 14 years, Vanessa Paradis. When they amicably separated the following year, he and Heard quietly dated were first seen holding hands at a Rolling Stones concert in April 2013.

Heard with Depp in The Rum Diary (GK Films)

Since then, her film credits have also included Magic Mike XXL and catastrophic film adaptation London Fields the producers sued her for 8 million for breach of contract. Heard countersued, accusing them of using a body double to make it appear shed starred in sex scenes she hadnt consented to. The case was eventually settled.

Heards activism stems from an early age. Her fathers company employed mostly Hispanic migrants, which instilled in her a sense of injustice of the plight of those on the Mexican side of the border. At school Heard appealed against the decision to deny a same-sex couple entry to prom, and fought against the uniform policy so she could wear a shorter skirt and remove her jacket. It seemed inherently unfair to be told I had to dress a certain way, she later explained. Why is it my burden what a boy might be distracted?

She credits her teenage experience working at a soup kitchen for intensifying her altruistic drive, and has undertaken duties for the UN, American Civil Liberties Union, Syrian American Medical Society, Amnesty International and Planned Parenthood. She and girlfriend Bianca Butti were spotted at the Womens Day march in LA this year. Heard has spoken out about the gender pay gap, victim-blaming, trans rights and abortion. I would rather go down for being who I am than to be popular for something I am not. Wouldnt you? she told young voters at a conference in New York last summer.

Amber Heard with Nicole Kidman at the premiere of Aquaman in LA in 2018(Getty Images)

Heards Instagram grid presents a familiar Hollywood showreel: award ceremony selfies with Elisabeth Moss and Aquaman co-star Nicole Kidman; laughing on the sofa with James Corden; posing on the red carpet with Arianna Huffington, Camila Cabello and Helen Mirren. Cara Delevingne appears regularly, as do transgender activists Corey Rae and iO Tillett Wright, who Heard was seen laughing with on a yacht on a recent holiday. Heard took Rae as her date to the 2019 Golden Globes, and bestie Wright, an LGBT rights campaigner and author, recently made the headlines when a 2016 blog resurfaced, describing living with Depp and Heard in their guest house and claiming to have seen Depps alleged domestic abuse.

Another witness to Depp and Heards relationship was the actresss spiritual BFF Raquel Pennington, a yoga fanatic and jewellery designer whos been pictured alongside Heard at every stage of her divorce proceedings. It was Pennington, as her next-door neighbour and friend of 18-plus years, who reportedly threw herself between the couple in 2016 when Depp was drunk and high, and Pennington who was pictured collecting a tearful Heard from an LA courtroom after the actress filed a restraining order.

Front and centre of Heards inner circle and High Court support squad is Whitney, who lives with partner Gavin Henriquez in LA. The sisters lost their mother in May and have spent lockdown together in the family home.

Amber Heard on the James Corden show in 2015 (PA)

There is a list of famous exes. Heard came out as bisexual in 2010, midway through a four-year relationship with female photographer Tasya van Ree, having dated a stream of male actors during her early years in LA. She said: I dont label myself one way or another and has called out publicists who warned her against speaking out. In 2009 she was arrested for domestic violence after allegedly grabbing van Ree and hitting her arm. The charges were dropped and the photographer has since defended her ex, saying the incident had been over-sensationalised and calling the arresting officers homophobic.

Heard moved in with Depp in LA in 2012 and saw his children Lily-Rose and Jack most weekends, taking Lily-Rose shopping. They married in 2015 at Depps home before a small second wedding on a private island in the Bahamas with Depps son Jack as best man.

Heard with Elon Musk (instagram.com)

After filing for divorce in May 2016, following the domestic abuse allegations - which are now the centre of the legal trial, with Depp insisting the claims are untrue - Heard began dating billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The pair were together for almost a year (there were hotly denied rumours of a three-way with Delevingne) but split in 2017 blaming long-distance pressures. They remain close friends, with Heard saying their beautiful relationship is now a beautiful friendship.

Heard was first spotted kissing her film-maker new girlfriend Butti in Palm Springs in January and theyve spent lockdown together in LA, flower shopping and walking Buttis dog, Birdie.

Last weeks hearing was told how a broke Depp handed his ex-wife a 5.5 million divorce settlement, which she donated to a childrens hospital and domestic abuse charity. CelebrityNetWorth.com puts her fortune at about 7 million, mostly from acting, modelling, product endorsement and work as an ambassador for LOreal. Shes produced two films: And Soon the Darkness in 2010 and Syrup in 2013.

Heard in Aquaman (AP)

Shes also a petrolhead. I spend all my money on classic cars. Ive had loads, she said in 2015, referencing her 1968 red Mustang which she had for 12 years and was stolen three times. According to divorce settlement expense documents from 2016, Heard also racks up 30,000 a month on basic expenses, including holidays in Hawaii and Italy, 1,600 a month on clothing and pet care for her Yorkshire terriers.

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How Amber Heard went from a small town in Texas to centre stage in Hollywood's most explosive trial yet - Evening Standard

By David Todd McCarty | Friday, July 24, 2020

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, manevery manis an end in himself and exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Ayn Rand believed that rational selfishness was the ultimate expression of human nature, a philosophy perfectly captured in the 1987 movie Wall Street when Gordon Gecko tells room full of investors, Greed is good.

The fact that so many Republicans consider Rand to be a prophet and spiritual leader is maybe less surprising than it should be, given their adherence to laissez-faire capitalism, but you might expect them to be a little less self-congratulatory about their own avarice, out of sheer good taste.

There was a time when Republicans truly believed that free market capitalism was the best method for maintaining healthy, balanced economies, but after decades of abject failure, from Reagans trickle-down economics to Paul Ryans path to prosperity, their only viable strategy seems to be to simply embrace greed as a moral value worthy of religious rapture and run with it.

Liberals often denigrate conservatives as dull-witted, facile, religious fanatics, which given their rhetorical proclamations, is at times hard to refute, but the reality is far more complex than daft ignorance. While there is a certain amount of gamesmanship, strategy and willful ignorance involved, the key feature of conservatism is an almost total lack of imagination that results in an equal dearth of empathy.

Imagination is defined by Merriam-Webster as the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality. The creative ability to confront and deal with a problem without having a clear path to doing so.

Empathy, on the other hand, is the imaginative projection of a subjective state; the ability to be able to vicariously grasp the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another without actually having the feelings, thoughts, and experiences fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

Put another way, imagination takes an act of faith, whereas empathy, an act of submission. To imagine something requires the ability to conceptualize something weve never experienced, while empathy demands that we experience something we may not be able to conceptualize.

Empathy is a spiritual exercise, obliging you to open yourself up to the pain of another, and requiring you to lose a bit of yourself in the process. Its an act of sacrifice; a selfless exploration into the world of another.

Beyond the metaphysical, there are practical reasons to incorporate imagination and empathy into public policy, and they generating new ideas involves risk-taking that requires courage and the ability to suppress fear. In a nutshell, you cannot leap off into the wild blue yonder if you are consumed by the fear of failure.

In order to innovate beyond what you already know, you need the ability to envision a variety of outcomes, and if you have the ability to experience the world through the eyes and emotions of others, not only might you be open to untold possibilities, but you will also be more likely to account for a wider range of outcomes.

For nearly a decade during the Obama administration, Republicans were not in a position to govern, so they adopted a posture of obstruction as their overarching ideology. When they finally found themselves in power, they were completely unprepared to govern. Theyd spent eight years complaining about Obamacare but when given the chance, they failed to come up with an alternative and continue almost four years later to try to dismantle it without ever having attempted to replace it.

Republicans are not creators, rather they operate most comfortably as critics. They are no longer for things as much as they are against things. But bigger than any other single issue or policy is the fundamental nature of the Republican Party, and that is they they do not believe in government.

Donald Trumps greatest measure of success within the Republican Party has been his willingness to install Cabinet Secretaries that do not believe in the departments they run. Donald Trump and his enablers have built nothing, but have rather spent the past 40 months dismantling, defunding and discrediting every regulation and consumer protection they could.

According to the framers of the United States of America, the very idea of government itself is instituted by men, deriving their powers by consent, in order to secure the rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The purpose of government therefore is to protect the rights of citizens, not the corporate welfare of the ruling class.

America is a considerably larger and more complex country than the framers could have ever imagined. We have likely grown beyond the capacity of our current limitations and it will take people of substance to guide us into a sustainable future. We are going to need smart people capable of imagining a future that does not yet exist, and they will need the empathy to understand the importance of succeeding, as well as the consequences for failing to do so.

Government will always be about power to some degree, and there will always be winners and losers, but we should at least strive to hold it to the promise of protecting the rights of all Americans. That much, at the very least, it should strive to do.

If any society can be judged by how well its treats its most vulnerable, the very least we can do is have the empathy to imagine a country that is inherently greater than rational selfishness.

Follow David Todd McCarty on Twitter @davidtmccarty and The Standard @capemaystandard

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A Failure Of Imagination - The Standard