Can Jared Kushner Do His Job? What Job?

In my film version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, I'm casting John Kelly as the unnamed governess, Donald Trump as poor little Miles, and Jared Kushner as the unspeakably evil, but possibly imaginary, ghost of Peter Quint. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

I can't get over all the solemn concern as to whether Jared Kushner will be able to do his job without a security clearance—like Mara Liasson audibly shaking her head on NPR: "He won't be able to read the President's Daily Briefing!", that single page of amply illustrated bullet points highlighting stories where the president's name shows up. Imma come right out and speculate there isn't that much classified information in the PDB anyway, not only because the governess is afraid Trump might get angry, or pass what he learns to Putin or Netanyahu or who knows who, just by way of showing off how clued in he is, but because there's no real positive point in it—what useful thing would Trump be able to do with such information? He doesn't even believe it if it doesn't show up on Fox.

Old Ancestor, He Just Keep Rollin' Along

Dr. Franklin flying a kite with his friend Amos observing from the genius's knee, by Robert Lawson, via. It was hard to find a good one, too, amid the truly crappy stills and storyboards from the Disney cartoon.

Screenshot from today's Brooks, "A Generation Emerging from the Wreckage", just in case some editor in the retreating rear guard stumbles across this lost detail and puts it out of its misery:

Brooks reports, speaking of the young people he encountered on his Voyage into the Heart of Millenniality,

They looked at me like I was from Mars. 

And no wonder. They've probably never met anybody from one of those cultures where the ancestors are invisible actors living among us, working their mysterious will. Propitiate them, with offerings of burnt animal fat and alcohol! They'll build that promised land yet!

So what kind of moment is it?

New York Daily News, via Business Insider. May 2016.

A justified complaint from Steve:

If you write a news lede with a transparently false assertion like this, just quit your journalism job and go into PR. You're transmitting talking points, not the facts.https://t.co/DzlYnUxS5I pic.twitter.com/Yz50CMIfJ0

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) February 27, 2018

"Post-partisan moment" indeed!

But it's kind of interesting all the same, if it's anything at all. This new "Unite America" centrist-nonpartisan-unlabeled concoction is seemingly less oriented to getting itself onto the op-ed pages and more to getting onto the ballot than the usual run of such experiments, and there's something interesting about where it's active, in the first place: states where the Republican Party has been failing in some especially peculiar way, and who they're choosing to do something about it:

For the Record: Monday Outtakes

Via Malia Litman.

Spent a lot of time answering comments to the previous post, and working at the job they pay me for, and tweeting, naturally. Some of the last was fun:

Six GOP chairmen of key panels tell us they see little reason to dig into Trump family finances - or made no commitment to do so. They call it a fishing expedition, or something in Mueller’s purview. Ds say it’s essential to Russia probes. w/ @jeremyherb. https://t.co/U2G0h7RONe

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 26, 2018

Dear Mike Conaway,

Deutsche Bank is a nexus,

I believe there are people on HPSCI who have heard about this.https://t.co/e8xcdemM3g

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) February 26, 2018

More evidence that Deutsche has low standards: they kept loaning to Trump when no respectable large US bank would. https://t.co/odla5DlMlg

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) February 26, 2018

Schiff Memo update: Two conspiracies?

Doom Patrol 96 (June 1965). Via.

Following up on yesterday's post:

1. Marcy has spoken, and she doesn't think there's much new stuff for us to learn from the Schiff memo, except for the one thing, or set of things, about international man of mystery George Papadapoulos, the mook whose boasting with High Commissioner Downer in the Kensington Wine Rooms in May 2016, reported by Downer to his government that July, launched the FBI's investigation of Trump campaign collusion with the (already known) Russian efforts to mess up the 2016 presidential election.

The question of what emails Joseph Mifsud and the Russians he introduced Papadopoulos to in April 2016 were talking about, the "thousands of emails" that were going to damage the Clinton campaign; Marcy is now convinced that, as I speculated in December, Papadopoulos wasn't told at all what they were, only that they could be helpful to Trump. He could have imagined it had some connection with the emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server in 2012 when she was leaving the State Department, which in the fantasies of rightwingers would have concealed all sorts of evidence of corruption, but we have no evidence that he did.

This allows me to go on assuming that the Russians were talking at that point about about the emails stolen from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's computer, which the Fancy Bear team had just concluded with that March (as opposed to the theft of the Democratic National Committee emails, which which was mostly from April and May), and which were ultimately published by WikiLeaks (more or less simultaneously with the revelation of the Trump Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing monologue) and weaponized into use as evidence (with material from the transcripts of Clinton's paid speechmaking of 2013-14) of Clinton's supposedly corrupt ties to the banking industry and generally evil neoliberal intentions, as a way to discourage people on the left from voting for her or voting at all.

For the Record: First Impressions on the Schiff Memo

As you know, the Democratic minority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence prepared a response mostly drafted by Rep. Schiff of California to the Republican majority's memo or Nunes Memo released unredacted and against strong objections from the intelligence community on February 2, but President Trump objected to the publication of the response until an unclassified version could be prepared.

That's out this afternoon, and I found myself live-tweeting some initial reactions, and thought I'd lay that out here in slightly better organized format than the one you'll see on Twitter proper, before smarter people get around to commenting on the thing:

Overwhelming overall how much more professionally produced the whole Schiff memo is than the Nunes memo to which it is a response. https://t.co/Cqr8g2DQNN

— (((WaveOfEuropeanStyleSocialists))) (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2018

(1) One of the things redacted seems to be the Australian government, and exactly what the High Commissioner said.

(2) "Thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails" always means emails from Secretary of State's private server. But Russians never had any of them, did they? Weird. pic.twitter.com/ZqJpjAC2J1

— (((WaveOfEuropeanStyleSocialists))) (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2018

Literary Corner: Do shooters just want to have fun?

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic no, 110, 1971, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, via Wikipedia.

This quirky little piece flashes with odd insights and surreal pictures, like that of a bank where they have armed tellers and loan officers instead of security guards, or of a man so rich he owns everything in the plural, things like banks that people really do own, and things they don't, like schools, and might plan, "I'll do that thing with my schools that I do with my banks." Or of "hardened" schools, I realize he's not making that one up, but when the expression acquires Trump's voice it acquires the strangeness of its literal meaning, of schools in danger of melting or crumbling that need to be reinforced, stiffened, or they could disappear into the natural surroundings. Then it slips into imagining something darker, the mentality of what he's elsewhere called the "sicko shooter", the attacker against whom the banks and schools must be guarded.

They Live For Gun Free Zones

by Donald J. Trump

I

You'd need 100, 150 security guards... But you
could have concealed on the teachers.
I want my schools protected just
like I want my banks protected.

Aflame and Disordered: Supplement

As a point of comparison to Stephen Rose's picture of an "upper middle class" ballooning from 12% of the US population in 1979 to 30% in 2014, discussed this morning courtesy of Steven Pinker and David Brooks, I found a much more directly useful model from Pew Social Trends, 2015.

It shows an upper middle class (defined in terms of a three-person household earning from $126,000 to $188,000 a year) remaining steady in size at about 12% since at least 1981; an upper class growing substantially but still remaining tiny; a lower (under $31,000) and lower middle (under $42,000) class following a similar pattern on the other side, though involving half again as many people; and a middle class gradually shrinking into minority status.

Sounds like three quarters of the growth in Rose's "upper middle" came from people moving up around the $100K barrier but not far enough to make it into Rose's category, and the rest from a small minority getting up from $188K. Doesn't sound anything like the picture Brooks and Pinker like, of course.

Aflame and Disordered

From the Moment Magazine Great DNA Experiment of 2012, which tested the DNA of 15 prominent Jewish-American writers and found that they were literally within zero degrees of separation from one another, i.e. that not only were David Brooks and Steven Pinker third cousins, unbeknownst to each other, but also directly related to NPR's Robert Siegel, freakonomist Stephen Dubner, Esquire's A.J. Jacobs. neuroscientist and actress Miriam Bialik, law professor Alan Dershowitz, and more. I'm probably related myself to Pinker, whose ancestors seem to have hailed, like the Yastreblyanskys, from Kishinev/Chişinau.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Virtue of Radical Honesty", February 22 2018:

The virtue of radical honesty is that it is exemplified in the the new book (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)  by psychologist Steven Pinker, who is radically honest and also optimistic, in defiance of those who feel that, especially on campus, you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous rage. After all, tremendous economic progress has taken place in the world and in the United States since the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong and a third of American children lived in poverty. However he is wrong, because he's lying when he refers to himself as an Enlightenment man rather than as a scientific rationalist, and he only cites data that support his progressive hypothesis, refusing to look at where the real problems lie, which is in the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions, or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres. Still, I'm glad I said he was radically honest, because apparently we're related.

Brooks feels that you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous sniffing. He's opposed to rage, though. On the relationship, see the illustration above.

The peculiar thing Brooks has been doing with his book report format is getting increasingly irritating, like a tic. As you might represent it with a general Shorter:

Neutrocracy

The famous castrato singer Senesino, with the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni and alto castrato Gaetano Berenstadt in Händel's Flavio (London, 1723), in a caricature by John Vanderbank. Wikimedia Commons.

So David Brooks was begging Twitter to come and kill him yesterday morning ("Respect First, Then Gun Control") advising, as his title implies, that "we" need to get "our" priorities straight, and trying to stop America's schoolchildren from getting shot up with semi-automatic rifles must come second to stopping America's rightwingers from feeling less than wholly admired. Old white sumbitches have feelings too! If you'd just show them some of that R-E-S-P-E-C-T, effete liberal elitists, they'd ban those AR-15s in a heartbeat!

And Twitter obliged, as you can imagine. Don't know anybody who hit the appropriate note better than this:

other Great David Brooks Columns Of History pic.twitter.com/CkEPABACg5

— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) February 20, 2018

Which Driftglass also felt obliged to reproduce, because what else is there to say, really? But I like mine, to tell the truth:

David Brooks, man of respect: "Cute kid you got there. Shame if anybody was to blow his head off." https://t.co/JYcUNXJZIu

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 21, 2018

For the Record: Who's Emotional and Uninformed?

Via EBL News.

Excerpted from the Twitter feed: I think I managed to bring some attention to an important point.

"Parkland students aren't credentialed to talk about the gun debate" is one of the worst takes of all time, especially when it comes from people who don't have very much relevant life experience themselves. pic.twitter.com/JVjckmoSLs

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 20, 2018

Actually these students are experts on something you know nothing about, which is what it feels like to have a lot of friends murdered one day out of the blue and to realize the authorities you trust are unable to protect you.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 20, 2018

What do we talk about when we talk about spreading distrust?

"I said NO PEPPERONI!"

Sometime in the fall of 2017, Russian television picked up an Onion-style story from a French satirical website according to which the Danish government had legalized animal brothels, that there was a place you could go in Copenhagen and pay to have sex with an animal, with a picture of a dog dressed as a prostitute, only in the Russian media it was presented as a true story, pingponging ultimately outside the country to Belarus and Georgia, according to my source, Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security, a report from the minority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued January 10.

That story doesn't seem to have gone too far, but you never know. On November 2 2016, the equally Onion-esque story of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta running a child prostitution ring out of a DC pizzeria, piggybacked onto the FBI's startling announcement of State Department emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, which had blown up out of almost nowhere with a Facebook post not even mentioning pizza from one Carmen Katz—

"My NYPD source said its much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner's device. The email DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend's plane, the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls. . . . We're talking an international child enslavement and sex ring."

—and through thousands of Twitter accounts, made it onto Alex Jones's Infowars show.

The folks from Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, as recounted by Amanda Robb in Rolling Stone, which you totally have to read,

The Lighter Side of Intersectionality

Super tree frog picture I'm not finding a credit for. Here for instance.

David Brooks ("The Rise of the Amphibians") says he's been interviewing Millennials—why do I imagine a voice going, "Dad, this is so awkward"? No, it's not like that at all:

I’ve begun a little tour in which I gather millennials for interviews and ask them what they have faith in and how they are going to lead us in the years ahead.

So I guess he proceeded the same as when he was making his Journey Into the Heart of Whiteness in search of the Trump voter last year, driving to towns he suspected might have some good Millennials and asking the local authorities—ministers, aldermen, a dean in the local college—to hook him up with them. "Kelly, nice to meet you! I'm David! So... ah... what do you have faith in?"

He didn't have anything in particular to say about what they have faith in, but he did notice something nice, though he didn't quite get it:

For the Record: Hope this is clarifying

A week after the election, via Daily Beast. How much better we'd know your scalp a year later!

Their main object wasn't to support you, it was to wreck US democracy. "Spreading distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general." https://t.co/vIoFwyKrgH Doesn't matter when they took you on. You were always perfect for the job.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 17, 2018

For the Record: There will be so many indictments we'll be sick of indictments

Via BitsAndPieces.

Cannot believe how BADLY DACA recipients have been treated by the Democrats...totally abandoned! Republicans are still working hard.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2018

Translation: What part of "hostage situation" do Democrats not understand? I'm going to send your precious DACA kids to hell if you don't do what I want! It'll be your fault! https://t.co/pidRHSt1Z5

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 17, 2018

It's an unceasing astonishment to me that Trump can seem completely unaware that the predicament of the "incredible kids" is something he caused himself with his "arbitrary and capricious" action, as Judge Nicholas Garaufis of New York's Eastern District called it, in the opinion blocking the action:

If the decision is allowed to go into effect prior to a full adjudication on the merits, there is no way the court can “unscramble the egg” and undo the damage caused by what, on the record before it, appears to have been a patently arbitrary and capricious decision.

For the Record: It's the RPM, Stupid.

Three rounds per minute and sometimes you still needed a sword. Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, via WhiteRoseWritings.

Over 30 shots, 17 lethal, in under 5 minutes.

AR-15 firing rate cited as between 45 and 700 rounds per minute.

Thompson submachine gun, 600-1500 rpm, banned successfully 1934.

2nd Amendment written before invention of Baker rifle, 2-3 rpm.

Has something to do with guns.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

The Las Vegas shooter used a bump stock to achieve 9 rps (540 rpm).

The Orlando shooter reached 2.66 rps/160 rpm.

Ban on Tommy gun didn't stop gang killings, but made them far less lethal. Banning semi-automatics would save lives.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Not a majority of lives lost to guns, which are mostly suicide and spouse/partner murder. Just a few. But these include concertgoers in Las Vegas, clubbers in Orlando, children slaughtered in Columbine, Newtown, Va Tech, now Broward County. How do you have a problem with this?

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Gun and Done

Drawing by Rob Tornoe, 2015.

Can the Left let the families grieve for even 24 hours before they push their anti-gun and anti-gunowner agenda? My goodness. This isn't about a gun it's about another lunatic. #FloridaShooting

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) February 15, 2018

I don't see how anything I say is going to interfere with the grieving of anybody's family—I doubt any of the Broward County families whose children, brothers and sisters, and friends and teachers were murdered yesterday are hanging on Twitter waiting to see what Tomi Lahren or I have to say about it. If they are and they'd like us to stop, they're welcome to let me know, but that's not the impression I'm getting from Steph, or Glenn Greenwald's niece, who seem to need to talk, right now:

Never in a million years would I think that I had to run over dead bodies in the same hallway I once walked happily with my friends. Never in a million years would I think I had to mentally prepare myself for the worst because the gunshots were getting louder and closer. Never.

— Steph (@ohstephany_) February 15, 2018

My niece goes to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where the shooting occurred. She wasn't there at the time, but just heard from my brother many horror stories of parents still without information about their kids, others who texted as their kids hid in closets.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 14, 2018

Ben Shapiro at the Direly Wail claims that

More Prayers

Don't have the heart to write much about Parkland, Florida, and another mass murder of children, but something Rubio said got to me:

Just spoke to Broward School Superintendent. Today is that terrible day you pray never comes.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 14, 2018

It's happened 18 times this year, Marco, once every 2.5 days. And every time it happens you pray some more. Thoughts and prayers. I don't know where your prayers go, but it seems your thoughts don't go far at all. https://t.co/rmcug9nuZ8

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 15, 2018

Trumpism Without Trump

Betty Bronson in the 1924 version by Herbert Brenon of Peter Pan, with Virginia Brown Faire as Tinker Bell, via Raiders of the Lost Tumblr.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("The Pull of Populism"):

Crude and demogogic, haphazard, hypocritical, and often stupid, but you've got to hand it to the Trump administration, they're doing the right thing.

Which is, to be exact, getting the isms under control, with the "nationalism-infused deficit-financed populism" implementing the "Trumpian or George W. Bushian mix of cultural conservatism and economic populism", which sounds like an item from one of those farm-to-table restaurants (Champagne-braised leg of Long Island rabbit in a bath of fennel-infused truffle broth napped with ginger-cloudberry Ranch dressing) but "is in fact the natural basis for an American center-right majority".

Or in English, if you prefer, he thinks there's something there that might win elections, a composite new ism, and if there are any conservatives who don't like it they should shut up.

Use your mentality

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding, 1567, from Todorf's Pinterest.

Shorter David Brooks, "The End of the Two-Party System", February 13 2018:

All of humanity, or most of it at any given moment, shares this thing I call an unconscious mind-set, and back in the good old days of the early 1990s, which I observed first-hand from Brussels when I was nothing but a young sprout myself, employed by the Wall Street Journal, the unconscious mind-set of the world population was an abundance mind-set, which means that everybody thought stuff was abundant, thanks to democratic capitalism, prejudice was falling away, and everywhere you looked was a win-win situation, except Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, as I now have come to understand it, had a scarcity mind-set, that is to say one in which stuff seems to be scarce, and therefore they were attracted to authoritarian populism, acquired a warrior mentality, regarded each other as enemies, and saw every situation as zero-sum. This is exactly what happened to us in 2007, when stuff became scarce over here. Now we too have acquired warrior mentalities, have become nasty and brutish, if not actually short, and bitterly partisan. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm afraid we may end up with—a European-style multiparty system!

Or maybe that's supposed to be a happy ending.

Trump Gets CLAP From Maduro Regime

CLAP packages. Via Venezuelanalysis.

My UK tweep Paul Canning, an expert observer of, among other things, Venezuela, noticed something familiar in the Trump budget proposal to turn half of the SNAP program into church basement–style distribution of beans and rice, to stop the poor from indulging in their well-known habit of blowing all their food stamps on crab legs and pomegranate juice:

Shocking anti-hunger advocates, the Trump admin is proposing to replace half of food stamp money with a box of government-selected food they’d deliver monthly. They’d call it a “Harvest Box” even though it wouldn’t include anything fresh. https://t.co/jjc9Edgp0S

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 13, 2018

Poo Apron. https://t.co/GYCCW9smAF

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) February 13, 2018

After decades, even centuries of claiming there was no need for government welfare programs because churches could take care of it, now they're saying government needs to run its own church food pantries. https://t.co/hbpSBTQbFV

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 13, 2018

This is what the Maduro regime does, it supplies (or rather often doesn't) a food box called CLAP (Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción). It's a scam that profits regime insiders https://t.co/G53t7cjwcR Maybe American opponents of this proposal could use that? https://t.co/QnWjmffVe0

— Paul Canning (@pauloCanning) February 13, 2018

I like my headline, but Republicans might prefer "Trump Picks Up On Bolivarian Socialism".

Lincoln's birthday

Happy birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

Unknown artist, portrait of Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood (1830-1917), first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, in a campaign poster from her first presidential race, in 1884. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Abraham and Tad Lincoln, 1865, in a photo by Alexander Gardner. Looking for an unfamiliar picture of Lincoln in the NPG collections is what set me off on this,

Nunes Declares War

I really couldn't pass up gentleman farmer Devin Nunes taking time out from his busy schedule fabricating plots by the FBI, the Democratic Party, the retired journalists of the Wall Street Journal and the retired spies of MI6, and I believe the Order of the Templars, to spy on the totally innocent businessman Carter Page in the hope that this would somehow stop Donald Trump from getting elected sometime after he got elected (good cooking takes time!)...

... using his appearance on Fox News to invoke the specter of class war:

.@DevinNunes: "There's been a war on people who actually build things, grow things, work with their hands. They think that if your'e in the D.C. Beltway or NYC... or SF and LA, that this is somehow the people who make this country work. And the fact is: they don't have a clue." pic.twitter.com/pL1fGYGc8F

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 12, 2018

Really. I didn't expect to agree with Devin Nunes about anything, but he's got a point, when you think about it. I think about Speaker Paul Ryan and his famous account of who he thinks are the people who make this country work:

For the Record: Windy Olympics

Mr. Vice President and Mrs. Pence in their matching jackets in Pyeongchang, painfully aware that the baleful eyes of Madam Kim Yo-jong may be on them. Screenshot via Fox.

It's a good thing that the South Korean and North Korean athletes are competing together, as a single country in a slightly half-assed way, and an even better thing that the South Korean president Moon Jae-in is contemplating a meeting with mad North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. To say that is not to say that Kim Jong-un is a good person, and I'm getting a little cheesed with rightwingers suggesting that it is (though I'd agree with them that CNN's crush on the dictator's sister Kim Yo-jong is, ah, unnecessary):

1. Since people are being willfully obtuse in interpreting this tweet, I'm going to delete and spell out, slowly, why North Korean charm offensive is surprisingly successful. pic.twitter.com/io7hN1PuXw

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 11, 2018

To me, it is the South Koreans who are especially winning this initiative, and last night I tacked on a couple of additional details to Jeet Heer's thread:

This gives the political maneuvers a transcendent emotional value for the public. It's not just maneuvering. US always fails to understand this, but this time much worse than usual.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

And then spent the rest of the evening happily watching non-Korean skaters, and in the morning there was sour-assed Ben Shapiro, still whining, and his fans:

All you need is cognitive empathy-based living for the good of all

One of the 33 bakeries preserved in Pompeii by the Vesuvius eruption of 79 C.E. Via Classofoods.

That's what changemakers have, according to David F. Brooks ("Everyone a Changemaker") :

For example, Ashoka fellow Andrés Gallardo is a Mexican who lived in a high crime neighborhood. He created an app, called Haus, that allows people to network with their neighbors. The app has a panic button that alerts everybody in the neighborhood when a crime is happening. It allows neighbors to organize, chat, share crime statistics and work together.

To form and lead this community of communities, Gallardo had to possess what Drayton calls “cognitive empathy-based living for the good of all.” Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive how people are feeling in evolving circumstances. “For the good of all” is the capacity to build teams.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is cognitive empathy the ability to perceive how people are feeling in evolving circumstances? I mean, I'm left wondering if there's some kind of noncognitive or pre-cognitive empathy for perceiving how people are feeling when circumstances aren't evolving.

Also, how exactly is "for the good of all" the capacity to build teams? Fortunately I'm a semanticist. I can check this out by a simple substitution test: if Brooks's hypothesis on "for the good of all" is correct, the following two sentences should be equivalent in meaning:

• You've sacrificed yourself for the good of all!
• You've sacrificed yourself the capacity to build teams!

Nope. I don't think that works.

Ashoka is the name of a nonprofit organization that used to be about the cultivation of social entrepreneurs, who are, if I'm understanding this right, people who bring the skill set of Internet startup managers to the pursuit of social goals, like giving people panic buttons and the ability to share crime statistics. The term was invented by Bill Drayton, Ashoka's founder and CEO, and Brooks first wrote them up in 2008 ("Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders"), when he seemed particularly impressed that they weren't hippies—

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

I dated an heirloom tomato once, but it didn't last.

Drayton is now working out what sounds like a more cosmic kind of issue, the problem that automation seems likely to deprive most of us of our livelihoods:

For millenniums most people’s lives had a certain pattern. You went to school to learn a trade or a skill — baking, farming or accounting. Then you could go into the work force and make a good living repeating the same skill over the course of your career.

But these days machines can do pretty much anything that’s repetitive. The new world requires a different sort of person. Drayton calls this new sort of person a changemaker.

Changemakers are people who can see the patterns around them, identify the problems in any situation, figure out ways to solve the problem, organize fluid teams, lead collective action and then continually adapt as situations change.

For generations (from around 1840 to 1940) most people wrote "millenniums", but "millennia" has been much more current for almost 80 years. Just saying. We know Brooks is conservative, but this is a case where it is plainly preferable to be right.

But if you're talking about millennia, I think the historical period during which anybody has gone to school to learn farming has been a very short one. It would be more accurate to say that over the long term most people were born on farms and didn't go to school at all.

Accounting goes back a good 7,000 years, and clearly involved some training—the rulers of Persia hired professional accountants in the 4th and 3rd millennia B.C.E., and Chanakya, the adviser of the first sovereigns of the Mauryan empire in the India of the 4th century B.C.E., wrote a textbook on the subject, though apparently not a very useful one for the historians of bookkeeping (my impression is historians of economics get more out of it—I should add this is all Wikipedia, not stuff I could literally know), but most people were certainly not accountants. Or bakers, although that too is a pretty old profession, originating in Egypt, where the first commercial yeasts were developed, and in the late Roman Republic there was a collegium or guild of foreign bread bakers, suggesting some kind of apprenticeship.

I don't think there's ever been a time when most people went to school to learn the skills that they would practice in working life unless maybe in Germany since World War II. The idea of most people going to school at all is a pretty recent development, compulsory schooling having originated in Germany and North America in the 19th century; and if you think back to your own education, you'll realize that few of us learned skills that actually served us in working life beyond basic reading and math, and hardly any of us outside the formal professions specifically trained for the jobs we ended up doing.

Which is not to say people shouldn't worry about technology stealing their jobs (a fear that goes back to the the Luddites of early 19th-century England), but there is a weird little Brooksian disconnect here between the idea that everybody must be a changemaker, as in Ashoka's vision—

Because we live in a changemaker world, everyone must be an effective and confident changemaker.

For many generations, society was organized around a few people at the top telling everyone else to repeat their specialized skills faster and faster. Today, all of us have the means to lead and get big things done. This is causing social change to explode in every direction.

—and the real tendency of programs like this, which is clearly the nourishment of lower-elite management classes to mediate between the rulers and the "teams"; those kids you've heard of if you've had kids of your own in school over the past 20 or 30 years who organize mass online movements like the Ice Bucket Challenge (which will in fact get them into schools where they will learn to be tax attorneys, or princes among the accountants, performing work so repetitive it would drive them to suicide if not for the boat or the Hamptons place):

Once a kid has had an idea, built a team and changed her world, she’s a changemaker. She has the power. She’ll go on to organize more teams. She will always be needed.

Drayton asks parents: “Does your daughter know that she is a changemaker? Is she practicing changemaking?” He tells them: “If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to these questions, you have urgent work to do.”

Too late!

Brooks's writing in this piece is really awful beyond the usual standard, and as far as that goes Drayton's is worse, like a Thomas L. Friedman for whom writing actually isn't a priority or a computer-generated Prosperity Gospel preacher—

It is a fact that the rate of change and the degree of human interconnectedness have been accelerating exponentially since 1700. Change now begets change—ever faster and more broadly. 

This is the new reality. 

It brings with it a new definition of what success in growing up (and therefore parenting and education) entails. Because value now comes from changemaking, today’s key measure of success is: “What percent of teens know that they are changemakers?” They can only know this if they have actually had a dream, built a team, and changed their class or school or community. Practice is the only way they can master the four critical underlying skills—cognitive empathy, new types of teamwork, opposite forms of leadership, and changemaking. One cannot know one is a changemaker without knowing one is well on the way to such mastery.

He may well be doing good work—how would I know?—but linguistically he's a conman. Maybe opposite forms of leadership are going to be my thing. I'll try to keep you updated.

KAG!

Sometime early Thursday morning, I think, the phrase "ignoring Trump", captured on the screenshot from my phone, disappeared from the New York Times teaser headline in the computer version, although "disregarded President Trump's threats" remained in the body copy:

Then again, Trump had moved in Wednesday afternoon to claim implicit credit for the coming resolution:

Or did Steele fire the FBI?

Image via Graeme Shimmin.

According to the Nunes memo, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, hired in summer 2016 to help Fusion GPS out in its (now Democrat-funded) investigation of Trump's Russia connections, after taking his findings to the FBI, lost the Bureau's confidence when he went to various journalistic outlets as well, and they "terminated" him, which sounded pretty odd, because I hadn't heard any suggestion that they'd given him a job in the first place.

But a new story by Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman in the Washington Post quotes Steele as saying he was in fact in "talks" with the FBI about doing some contract work with them, but broke off at the end of October 2016, when James Comey announced on the 28th that he was reviving the investigation of the private email server Hillary Clinton had used as secretary of state, which he had seemed to be publicly ending the previous July, after giving him the impression that every detail of their ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign must be concealed from the public, because

Bureau officials repeatedly told him they were extremely cautious about taking actions that could be viewed publicly as influencing an election, associates said.

In other words, he began thinking, as many of us out here in the audience began thinking, that forces within the FBI might be acting to take it in a pro-Trump direction, as we've already heard from the House Intelligence Committee hearing with Glenn Simpson—

Constitutional Crisis

King Salman and President Sisi induct President Trump into the Order of the Orb, May 2017, via Harvard Political Review. Did he give them anything in return for admission to the sacred mysteries? Who knows, but what was that Qatar thing about?

The only Trump bribery case I've really worked on is the way he acquired a legal opinion from the General Services Administration allowing him to keep the lease on the federally-owned Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue for the Trump International Hotel in DC, although "No member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States or the Government of the District of Columbia, shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom". During the transition, it was the GSA's view that Trump couldn't be allowed to hold the lease. Then,

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, an Obama-appointed General Services Administration official named Norman Dong became acting administrator, according to an agency email obtained by POLITICO. Seven and a half hours later, Trump replaced Dong with Tim Horne a Denver-based GSA official who had coordinated the agency’s transition with the Trump team, a second email showed.

Then in late March, the relevant contracting officer, Kevin Terry, found that Trump was legally entitled to keep the lease; the previous GSA opinion, he held, had "reached simplistic 'black and white' conclusions regarding the meaning and implications of the clause"; the lease belonged not to Donald J. Trump but to DJT Holdings LLC, DJT Holdings Managing Member LLC, Don OPO LLC, Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, Donald J. Trump, Jr. Revocable Trust, Eric OPO LLC, Eric Trump Revocable Trust, Ivanka OPO LLC, Ivanka Trump Revocable Trust, Trump Old Post Office LLC, and Trump Old Post Office Member Corp., and was therefore not violated, even though Trump did own at least some of the companies. And since his share of those companies was in his "revocable trust", he wouldn't be able to take any money out of the hotel until he stopped being president, unless the revocable trust felt like giving it to him, which it can any time it wants.

Mud From a Muddy Spring

The Peterloo Massacre of August 16 1819, engraved by Richard Carlile, Wikimedia Commons.

Another day, another Brooks ("How Nations Recover")Ten paragraphs of a miscellany of facts about early 19th-century British political economy, from around 1819 to 1847, finally naming a book, David Cannadine's Victorious Century: The United Kingdom. 1800-1906, which gets its official release February 20—you can't see any text online at all yet, and it won't be possible to do any kind of David Brooks Plagiarism Watch on this until we've forgotten this particular column, four Brooksdays from today (indeed I expect I will have forgotten about the column by sometime this afternoon)—and then three more paragraphs of purloined anecdote and a couple of paragraphs of a Magisterial Thesis, that, as you might expect, their politicians were sadly better, back in the day, than ours are now, when both sides did it but in a good way:

We have not passed a steady drumbeat of pragmatic reforms the way the Whigs and the Tories did. Over the past 15 years, the United States has managed to pass just a few major pieces of social reform — Dodd-Frank, Obamacare and I guess the Trump tax reform.

The biggest gap is in the realm of political leadership. The Victorian politicians had a stewardship mentality. They listened to the people, but stood slightly apart, deliberating, seeing governance as a shared professional responsibility. Our leaders come from a much broader swath of society, but they have lower standards of behavior, and less of a shared stewardship mentality.

Yes, if we must have two parties, why can't both of them be the same, with a "stewardship mentality" and a commitment to "pragmatic reforms" the way they were in the United Kingdom in the 1840s? It's a mystery!

For the Record: Rant on Retroaction

Reporter from the Future, by Flickr/The People Speak. Via Sputnik International, I'm sorry to say, which may have meant for the picture to be taken as news.

I may be starting to repeat myself a bit, but Donald Jr. kind of got me going:

Pretty sure the actual constitutional crisis is the prior administration weaponizing the DOJ and FBI to undermine a duly elected president with information paid for by his opponent with no basis in fact. But run with the Dem talkers. You do you. 🙄 https://t.co/SgEMTRiBBa

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 4, 2018

Plus senior members of Congress, Nunes and Ryan, Grassley and Graham, openly working with him to obstruct the investigation of his misdeeds, in totally unprecedented violation of the separation of powers, Nunes taking orders straight from White House.

— OrderOnIneptitude (@Yastreblyansky) February 5, 2018

Really shouldn't have missed failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, from the endless sabotaging of the Affordable Care Act to blatant refusal to implement the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, signed into law by Donald Trump on August 2, though he called it "seriously flawed" in his signing statement, after votes of 98-2 in the Senate and 419-3 in the House.

That's for the constitutional crisis, but that "take down a duly elected president" bullshit struck me as illustrating a deep retroactionary confusion that is a big part of this Nunes idiocy.

Literary Corner: Economy of Abstraction

Asobu (Play), by Japan--Calligraphy (that's a dumb nym, but it's a lovely piece) at DeviantArt.

Two of the endless fascinations of Donald Trump's work are its peculiarly bloodless but potent economy of abstraction, absence of sensuality or thinginess, reduction of experience from sensation to pure value terms; and its use of repetition. They come together for a remarkable effect in the new work, offered to the press in the Oval Office Friday after he signed off on the declassfication of the Nunes memo, which is the poem's subject:

It Was Declassified

by Donald J. Trump

I. I Think It's a Disgrace

I think it's terrible
you want to know the truth
I think it's a disgrace
what's going on in this country 

I think it's a disgrace
the memo was sent to Congress
it was declassified 

Congress will do whatever
they're going to do but
I think it's a disgrace
what's happening in our country

Mister Imaginary

Piggy, from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.

David Brooks ("The Abortion Memo") turns his column over to somebody called "Imaginary Democratic Consultant", who can't understand why so few Democratic Senators voted for a blanket federal ban on terminating a pregnancy after it's been going on for 20 weeks, so that the bill ended up filibustered to death:

Last week I watched as our senators voted down the Republican bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks. Our people hung together. Only three Democrats voted with the other side. Yet as I was watching I kept wondering: How much is our position on late-term abortions hurting us? How many progressive priorities are we giving up just so we can have our way on this one?

And two Republicans, Collins and Murkowski, voted with our side. How much is it hurting them? But do tell, Mr. Imaginary. How many progressive priorities is it?

It's true, Republicans are ready to pass immigrant amnesty, socialized medicine, supertrains in all 50 states, and reparations for slavery if only we give up this crazy insistence on civil rights for women. What's wrong with Democrats? https://t.co/fdwSFTgaPE

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) February 2, 2018

No, that's not what Mr. Imaginary means. He's talking about elections: he's claiming there are millions of voters who would vote Blue in a fetal heartbeat if they had anti-abortion Democrats to vote for, because in 1971 Teddy Kennedy was a pro-lifer. Plus Millennials: