— Devin Brugman Daily (@DevBrugmanDaily) August 5, 2017
Wow 😍🤤 pic.twitter.com/kiz5jLioaz
— Devin Brugman Daily (@DevBrugmanDaily) August 5, 2017
— Devin Brugman Daily (@DevBrugmanDaily) August 5, 2017
— Devin Brugman Daily (@DevBrugmanDaily) August 5, 2017
— Devin Brugman Daily (@DevBrugmanDaily) August 6, 2017
Fired White House staffer argued "deep state" attacked Trump administration because the president represents a threat to cultural Marxist memes, globalists, and bankers.
Alessandra Ambrosio turns up the heat on the beach in Malibu 🔥 🔥 🔥 https://t.co/2QRlivIMFB
— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) August 10, 2017
Eleven Eleven coming soon... #staytuned pic.twitter.com/EULPA7RPCG
— Jessica Simpson (@JessicaSimpson) August 9, 2017
When Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” Tuesday if it continues to menace the U.S. with nuclear weapons, he provoked almost as much backlash at home as in Pyongyang. The usual diplomatic suspects, including some American lawmakers, claimed his remarks hurt U.S. credibility and were irresponsible.More.
The President’s point was that the North’s escalating threats are intolerable; he didn’t set any red lines. True to form, Pyongyang responded by putting the U.S. island of Guam in its cross hairs. Mr. Trump may be guilty of hyperbole (quelle surprise), but that is far less damaging to U.S. credibility than Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his prohibition on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. The foreign-policy elite who claim to be shocked also don’t have much credibility after their policy across three Administrations led to the current North Korean danger.
While the President’s words were unusually colorful, the Communist-style language may have been part of the message: Kim Jong Un isn’t the only one who can raise the geopolitical temperature. The U.S. has military options to neutralize the regime’s nuclear threat if it continues to develop long-range missiles, and the U.S. is considering those options.
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said as much in an interview Saturday, explaining that Pyongyang’s nuclear threat is “intolerable from the President’s perspective. So of course, we have to provide all options to do that. And that includes a military option.” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reinforced that message Wednesday, warning North Korea to stop acting in ways that could “lead to the end of its regime.”
Last week Senator Lindsey Graham told a morning television program, “There is a military option to destroy North Korea’s program and North Korea itself.” The South Carolina Republican revealed that Mr. Trump told him there will be war if the North continues to develop long-range missiles: “He has told me that. I believe him. If I were China, I would believe him, too, and do something about it.”
The China reference is a tip-off that the main audience for this rhetorical theater is in Beijing. Kim Jong Un won’t stop now that he’s so close to his goal of a nuclear deterrent. But China might restrict the flow of oil to the North, for example, if it believes that stronger action on its part could forestall a U.S. pre-emptive strike...
Before the age of compact cars, laptop computers and pocket telephones, there were miniature nuclear warheads.More.
For as long as there have been engineers, they have been working on making complicated things smaller and better. Weapons are no exception.
Now, North Korea apparently has figured out how to make a very big explosive small enough to sit atop one of its mobile-launched missiles, a development that could threaten much of the U.S., according to a U.S. intelligence report that surfaced this week.
North Korea is making progress, showing it can put together competent teams of scientists and solve technical problems, but it is far from proving that it is capable of launching a punishing nuclear strike on the U.S., according to U.S. weapons experts.
Making a miniature nuclear weapon that has a large explosive force involves a lot of scientific and engineering know-how.
The “Little Boy” bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 9, 1945, weighed as much as two 2017 Cadillac Escalade SUVs, about 9,700 pounds. Three days later, the “Fat Man” bomb, slightly heavier at 10,300 pounds, was dropped on Nagasaki.
Since then, the weight of U.S. atomic bombs has shrunk considerably, as scientists have refined the physics of the devices and streamlined how they are armed.
With the last generation of nuclear weapons designed in the 1980s, engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory produced the W88, weighing only 800 pounds despite having an explosive force equal to 475,000 tons of TNT — in other words, less than one-tenth the weight of the first atomic bomb, but 400 times more powerful.
What technical capability is necessary to build a missile-ready nuclear bomb?
The first step is understanding how to reduce the amount of conventional high explosives that surround a hollow pit of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. A nuclear detonation occurs when the high explosive implodes the hollow sphere of fissile material next to it to start an uncontrolled chain reaction.
After the war, work progressed on smaller bombs. One of the crucial design steps was to create a small, precisely uniform air gap between the conventional explosives and the sphere of nuclear fuel, amplifying the force of the conventional explosion and reducing the amount needed to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.
It’s unclear that Pyongyang has mastered that precise construction, said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons analyst with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.
What Pyongyang has said so far is that its weapon is a “Korean-style mixed charge” device, indicating “they don’t have a lot of plutonium, so they are mixing it with uranium,” Lewis said.
It is possible the North Koreans are also injecting tritium gas into the hollow sphere to get some fusion energy out of the bomb, as well, he said...
As news of the death of Glen Campbell spread, celebrities of all kinds took to the Internet to express their grief over the loss of the country music legend, who died Tuesday at 81.More.
"Had Glen Campbell 'only' played guitar and never voiced a note, he would have spent a lifetime as one of America’s most consequential recording musicians," Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said in a statement.
"Had he never played guitar and 'only' sung, his voice would rank with American music’s most riveting, expressive, and enduring," Young added. "He left indelible marks as a musician, a singer, and an entertainer, and he bravely shared his incalculable talent with adoring audiences even as he fought a cruel and dread disease. To all of us who heard and loved his soulful music, he was a delight."
Others shared similar sentiments about the singer, songwriter, musician, television host and actor...
Probably no harder on your liver, either.
There are roughly 50 games left in the Major League Baseball season. Some teams have more, some teams have fewer, but it's pretty much around that number -- and it will go by like that. All you can reasonably hope for, if you are a team that is on the fringes of contention -- particularly with first-place teams owning massive leads like Los Angeles, Houston and Washington -- is to at least have a shot.Here's the analysis for the Angels, who just can't seem to earn winning consistency. It's maddening!
This year, plenty of teams still have skin in the game thanks to the American League Wild Card chase, which looks like it's going to be lunacy. From the Wild Card leader (the Yankees) entering Monday's action to the team that's five spots out of the second slot (Minnesota), you have only 5 1/2 games of separation. Texas, a team that just traded away its ace, is closer to a Wild Card spot than the closest Wild Card team in the National League. It is jammed, essentially top to bottom. Keep your eye on these standings!
So let's take a look at every contender, what their chances are and what the stakes are moving forward. We have to cut off the definition of a "contender" at some point, so for the sake of discussion, we'll omit Texas, Toronto and Detroit, all of whom were sellers at the Deadline. We do this even though Texas is only one game behind Minnesota (also sort of a seller, but no matter). It's crazy this year, and we may have to revisit this in a few more weeks if any other teams go on a run. Also, right now, the Red Sox, thanks to a six-game win streak, have opened up a three-game lead over the Yankees in the AL East. That division is far from settled, but for the sake of discussion, we'll include the Yankees but not the Sox. That, like everything else, could change quickly.
Los Angeles Angels Record: 55-58, fourth Wild Card runnerup, three games out of second Wild Card spot.Angels play the Orioles tonight, and could move past them with a win. So, root for the rally monkey, heh.
Playoff projections on MLB.com: 9.8 percent.
What's at stake: The last few years of the best player in baseball. The Angels have been trying to cobble together a mediocre team around Mike Trout for a few years now, with no luck. This year has been different in that Trout missed two months and the Angels somehow treaded water. (Andrelton Simmons is quietly having a superstar season -- he's third in the AL in FanGraphs WAR -- which helps.) But the odds are still stacked against them. It would help to get something, anything, out of Albert Pujols. There are 514 American League position players who have enough at-bats to register a WAR rating this season. Pujols is ranked 513th in WAR.
Fans' reasonable optimism level: Realistic. Three more years of Trout left. They are a little closer to the playoffs than they were last year. But that feels like the fighting of gravity.
Is there even a principled conservative view at this point? Who should I be reading?
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) August 5, 2017
Lynne MacTavish lives in a small wooden house on her South African game reserve with a fierce pet emu, a juvenile ostrich, a flock of geese, two Jack Russell terriers and her grandma’s double-barreled shotgun to protect her rhinos.More.
She keeps an ugly statue at her gate: a tokoloshe, or evil spirit in the local traditional belief, installed by a witch doctor to ward off superstitious rhino poachers.
Every night MacTavish gets up after midnight, grabs her shotgun, clambers into her SUV and patrols for poachers.
She still gets flashbacks of the scene she found one windy October morning in 2014 and still cries telling the story. Poachers had killed two rhinos, including a pregnant cow she had known since the day it was born. Two more died as an indirect result of the attack and a calf, days from being born, was lost.
MacTavish, as tough as the spiky bush on her animal reserve in South Africa’s northwest, struggles to cover the cost of security guards. One local poacher has threatened to kill her.
South Africa is home to 80% of the world’s 25,000 rhinos. Hamstrung by corruption and security lapses, it loses three rhinos a day to poaching, 85% of them in state reserves. Private owners such as MacTavish have become important to the species’ survival, nurturing more than 6,500 rhinos on an estimated 330 private game reserves, spanning 5 million acres, that provide a relative degree of safety.
But security is costly — so much so that many reserves are closing their doors. To help generate revenue, private reserve operators have successfully sued to resume South Africa’s limited trade in rhino horns, which had been banned since 2009. The government is finalizing new regulations that will allow foreigners to export up to two horns apiece for personal use.
The measure has rocked the wildlife preservation world. Most wildlife advocates say opening the door even to “farmed” rhino horn sales could threaten an international effort to wipe out the trade across the globe. About 2,200 horns a year flow into the illegal trade, mostly poached, and opponents of the new trade rules argue that criminals will find ways to funnel poached horns into the new legal market.
“Reopening a domestic trade in rhino horn in South Africa would make it even harder for already overstretched law enforcement agents to tackle rhino crimes,” World Wildlife Fund policy manager Colman O’Criodain said in a statement...
Venezuela squashed a small uprising on a military base Sunday, the first inkling of armed unrest in the beleaguered South American country after a new all-powerful legislative body condemned by the international community began targeting opposition foes.More.
Though the would-be rebellion, which left at least one man dead, appeared short-lived, it reignited spontaneous anti-government protests that had been absent for days after nearly four months of prolonged street tumult. Security forces once again repressed the demonstrations with tear gas and rubber pellets.
Further clashes loom. The opposition-held parliament intends to convene Monday at the legislative palace, which was taken over Saturday by the new constituent assembly. Its delegates, all ruling socialist party members elected last week in a vote widely seen as fraudulent, face potential sanctions from the U.S. and countries in Latin America and Europe.
The government of President Nicolás Maduro insisted Sunday’s incident was an outside attack staged by civilians hired by his political opponents. While security forces claimed the skirmish was quickly quelled, the defense minister acknowledged an ongoing search for an unknown number of stolen military weapons.
The extended confusion over what took place before dawn Sunday at the Paramacay military base in Valencia, a city in central Venezuela about two hours west of the capital, Caracas, fed opposition calls for dissenting troops to rebel.
They were fueled by the morning release online of a video — the kind used in failed coup attempts against previous Venezuelan governments — showing more than a dozen men dressed in military fatigues and holding assault rifles. They declared themselves in rebellion and urged like-minded security forces to stage a revolt against Maduro.
Without citing the video, socialist party deputy Diosdado Cabello asserted early on, via Twitter, that an irregular situation at the base was under control. But for hours, no government official took to the airwaves, communicating only in Twitter posts and written statements. State-run television replayed an episode of the late Hugo Chávez’s weekly TV show, “Aló Presidente.” The convening of a new “truth commission” was postponed.
When Maduro finally appeared on TV, at 3 p.m., he congratulated military leaders for their swift response but also admitted security forces were still hunting down a group of men from the morning assault who had gotten away.
“We’re going to capture them,” he said. “A week ago we defeated them with votes. Today, we were forced to defeat them with bullets.”
In an incongruous scene, Maduro spoke from a park, standing on a logo with colorful hearts — and surrounded by bodyguards. He admired a naturalist exhibit of animal skulls and skins, and cheered on a little girl standing in the middle of a circle of happy children, whacking a piñata.
According to Maduro, the scuffle at the base began at 3:50 a.m. when the instigators surprised overnight guards and went directly to weapons caches...
Stunner @RhianMarie looks VERY different as she shows off new brunette hairdo in Instagram snap https://t.co/KVVaTzGnOI— The Sun North West (@TheSunNW) August 7, 2017
DURING HIS SUCCESSFUL 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for worse, advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).More.
Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation’s op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time Magazine reported, just a week before the election, that “the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash . . . . what bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”
Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, went to the pages of the Washington Post in mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump with unbridled scorn, saying what he hated most about Trump was his refusal to consider cuts in entitlement spending (in contrast, presumably, to the Democrat he was endorsing). “It doesn’t surprise me when a socialist such as Bernie Sanders sees no need to fix our entitlement programs,” the former Goldman CEO wrote. “But I find it particularly appalling that Trump, a businessman, tells us he won’t touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”
Some of Trump’s advocated assaults on D.C. orthodoxy aligned with long-standing views of at least some left-wing factions (e.g., his professed opposition to regime change war in Syria, Iraq/Libya-style interventions, global free trade deals, entitlement cuts, greater conflict with Russia, and self-destructive pro-Israel fanaticism), while other Trump positions were horrifying to anyone with a plausible claim to leftism, or basic decency (reaffirming torture, expanding GITMO, killing terrorists’ families, launching Islamophobic crusades, fixation on increasing hostility with Tehran, further unleashing federal and local police forces). Ironically, Trump’s principal policy deviation around which elites have now coalesced in opposition – a desire for better relations with Moscow – was the same one that Obama, to their great bipartisan dismay, also adopted (as evidenced by Obama’s refusal to more aggressively confront the Kremlin-backed Syrian government or arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine).
It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly inconsistent in virtually all of these pronouncements, often contradicting or abandoning them weeks after he made them. And, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.
Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric, repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan orthodoxy, and his policy and personal instability only compounded elites’ fears that he could not be relied upon to safeguard their lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways – due to his campaign positions, his outsider status, his unstable personality, his witting and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S. hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in western capitals, his reckless unpredictability – Trump posed a threat to their power centers...
Hiroshima, today 1945: #NARA pic.twitter.com/iEmTZ4TDuO
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) August 6, 2017
From the moment Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, a plan was hatched to blame Russia for her historically epic loss and use it to hamstring Donald Trump’s presidency.More.
Always a hive-mind, Democrats in and out of the media could be counted on to do their parts, and they’ve done just that. But what started out as a few near-riot protests to keep their base angry has morphed into a slow-rolling coup.
The book “Shattered” documented how the Clinton campaign was not interested in an autopsy, it had a plan:
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.From that, the idea that horrified Democrats during the campaign – that one of the participants would refuse to accept the election results – became an accepted, forgotten fact and the first salvo in what would become a sustained war against the duly-elected president.
Since that meeting, the media dutifully has gone over and above its duty to the cause. After eight years of slumber, print and cable news “journalists” became “woke” to the cause and blew past reporting to a level of propaganda activism that would make Leni Riefenstahl tell them to pump the brakes.
There has been enough embarrassment to go around, but none have beclowned themselves more than CNN’s Jim Acosta. He spent a month whining about not having the cameras on in the press briefing room to capture his antics and add to his sizzle reel so he could get his own show. Then, he showed himself to be the Forrest Gump of the press pool when he equated a poem written to raise money to build the base of the Statue of Liberty with actual law. He then proceeded to congratulate himself, repeatedly, for his performance.
But the media isn’t just a clown show of correspondents fumbling basic facts and shunning logic in its progressive pursuit of a new Nixon. It’s the PR wing of the Democratic Party’s “resistance.” No story is too absurd, no leak too damaging to the nation’s security not to publish. After years of repeating Obama administration spoon-fed talking points, they media now gleefully reports anything that might damage the Trump administration for that sake alone...
The Angels are still not healthy, still receiving lackluster seasons from an array of hitters, still struggling to capture the public’s interest, still unlikely to actually qualify for the postseason.More.
But they are undeniably making this thing interesting. They secured their fourth straight victory and sixth in seven tries Friday, scoring six unanswered runs to come back to beat Oakland 8-6 at Angel Stadium. They are 55-55, and only two games separate them from playoff position.
“Better late than never,” said Ben Revere, who scored Friday’s winning run.
It has become the team’s refrain this summer, enjoyed because of its duality: “We’re still in it.”
Applicable to their 32 comeback victories and to their playoff odds, the Angels cite it in interviews and tell it to their pregame visitors during batting practice, a subtle reminder to one another that they can yet contend in 2017. With each passing week, the idea appears more plausible. They do not have to play particularly good games, especially while hosting Philadelphia, Oakland and Baltimore on this homestand. They can always come back, as they did Friday.
After Mike Trout hit an infield single to short in the first inning, Albert Pujols tapped into an inning-ending double play. It was the 351st double-play groundout of his career, which holds grand significance. It broke Pujols’ tie with Cal Ripken and staked him alone to the all-time record.
Making the first start of his career, the Angels’ Troy Scribner did not give up a hit until the second inning. It was a three-run home run to Matt Chapman — a walk and an error preceded it — that gave the Athletics an early lead. The Angels made it 3-2 with three singles, two errors, a sacrifice fly, and a hit by pitch in their half of the second. With the bases loaded and two out, Trout flied out to left field.
Over the next three innings, they mustered two baserunners — both on doubles, by Trout and Kole Calhoun. Neither man advanced...
In June, Zack Exley, a political organizer and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, published a report on “Black Pigeon Speaks,” a political commentator on YouTube. In Exley’s judgment, B.P.S. is emblematic of a marginal but ascendant sort of YouTube figure — a type that is becoming a meaningful force in the practice of politics online. B.P.S. has, by any objective standard, a significant and engaged audience; at the moment, he has about 215,000 followers, and his uploads have been viewed more than 25 million times. In an introductory video, he describes himself as something like a pundit or an analyst: “I attempt to make sense out of the increasingly nonsensical world we all share,” he says of his channel. “I try and be only as offensive as I need to be.” His videos are unhurried, heavy on explanation and argument, regularly stretching over the 10-minute mark. And, as Exley notes, his politics skew right. Hard right:RTWT.
He is a traditionalist in many ways, and is positive about Christianity as a cultural force and foundation of Western civilization, but he is not a Christian. He defies the postwar “fusion” of classical libertarianism and evangelical Christianity. B.P.S. believes in a global conspiracy of central bankers led by the Rothschilds who are driving immigration into predominantly white countries to increase the pool of “debt slaves” and to drive down wages; thinks that “cultural Marxism” is a Jewish conspiracy that is undermining Western civilization; and believes that women being allowed to do whatever they want, including choosing their own mates, is the deathblow to Western civilization.Like its fellow mega-platforms Twitter and Facebook, YouTube is an enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities. But like the much smaller Tumblr (which has long been dominated by lively and combative left-wing politics) or 4chan (which has become a virulent and effective hard-right meme factory) YouTube is host to just one dominant native political community: the YouTube right. This community takes the form of a loosely associated group of channels and personalities, connected mostly by shared political instincts and aesthetic sensibilities. They are monologuists, essayists, performers and vloggers who publish frequent dispatches from their living rooms, their studios or the field, inveighing vigorously against the political left and mocking the “mainstream media,” against which they are defined and empowered. They deplore “social justice warriors,” whom they credit with ruining popular culture, conspiring against the populace and helping to undermine “the West.” They are fixated on the subjects of immigration, Islam and political correctness. They seem at times more animated by President Trump’s opponents than by the man himself, with whom they share many priorities, if not a style. Some of their leading figures are associated with larger media companies, like Alex Jones’s Infowars or Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media. Others are independent operators who found their voices in the medium....
*****
The YouTube right may be comparatively marginal and ragtag, but it’s also comparatively young. If talk radio primed listeners for Trump’s style and anticipated the American right’s current obsessions, the YouTube right is acquainting viewers with a more international message, attuned to a global revival of explicitly race-and-religion-based, blood-and-soil nationalism. Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars, 35, is perhaps the archetypal YouTube-right vlogger; he has nearly a million followers, and his videos have been viewed more than 215 million times. He has in the last month published videos with titles including “Staged Video Shows ‘Refugee’ Fake Drowning,” “Finsbury Mosque Terror: What They’re NOT Telling You,” “The Truth about Refugees” and “Why Leftists Submit to Terror.” The scripts for these videos are straightforward nativist polemics, with a particular focus on Europe — Watson is from Northern England — delivered in a relentlessly insistent tone, and quite close to the camera. Watson posts extended “roasts” of his political villains, as well as rants that betray a peculiar blend of self-taught reaction: against pop culture, broadly, but also against “modern architecture” and “modern art.” If one video sums up what a receptive viewer might take from subscribing to his channel, it’s “Some Cultures are Better than Others.”
Cal State plans to drop placement exams in math and English as well as the noncredit remedial courses that more than 25,000 freshmen have been required to take each fall — a radical move away from the way public universities traditionally support students who come to college less prepared than their peers.More.
In an executive order issued late Wednesday, Chancellor Timothy P. White directed the nation’s largest public university system to revamp its approach to remedial education and assess new freshmen for college readiness and course placement by using high school grades, ACT and SAT scores, previous classroom performance and other measures that administrators say provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of students’ knowledge.
Cal State will no longer make those students who may need extra help take the entry-level mathematics (ELM) test and the English placement test (EPT).
The new protocol, which will go into effect in fall 2018, “facilitates equitable opportunity for first-year students to succeed through existing and redesigned education models,” White wrote in a memorandum to the system’s 23 campus presidents, who will be responsible for working with faculty to implement the changes.
The executive order comes at a time when educators and policymakers across the nation are questioning the effectiveness of traditional remedial education and placement exams. At Cal State, about 40% of freshman each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees.
Currently, students who enter Cal State without demonstrating college readiness in math and/or English are required to take up to three traditional remedial classes before they are allowed to enroll in courses that count toward their degrees. (If students do not pass these remedial courses during the first year, they are removed from university rolls.)
The problem is that these noncredit remedial courses cost the students more money and time, keep many in limbo and often frustrate them to the point that some eventually drop out, administrators said. In a recent study of similar college-prep work at community colleges, the Public Policy Institute of California found that remedial programs — also called developmental education — largely fail to help most students complete their academic or vocational programs.
Under the new system, all Cal State students will be allowed to take courses that count toward their degrees beginning on Day 1. Students who need additional support in math or English, for example, could be placed in “stretch” courses that simultaneously provide remedial help and allow them to complete the general math and English credits required for graduation.
Faculty are also encouraged to explore other innovative ways to embed additional academic support within a college-level course. A few other states have experimented with these approaches, and the results so far are encouraging, administrators said.
“This will have a tremendous effect on the number of units students accumulate in their first year of college,” said James T. Minor, Cal State’s senior strategist for academic success and inclusive excellence. “It will have an enormous effect on college affordability, on the number of semesters that a student is required to be enrolled in before they earn a degree, and it will have a significant impact on the number of students that ultimately cross a commencement stage with a degree in hand, ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school."
In addition to redesigning remedial requirements systemwide, the executive order instructs campuses to strengthen their summer Early Start programs...
For the past two years, ever since Donald Trump’s escalator ride, the immigration debate has focused on enforcement and illegality. The wall, criminal aliens, deportation, Obama’s lawless executive amnesty—it’s been all illegal immigration, all the time.More.
And that’s as it should be, at first, because if the rules aren’t enforced, it doesn’t much matter what the rules are.
But in the long run the more important questions are: What are the rules? How many people should the federal immigration program admit each year? How should they be selected? How can we minimize the harm from the program while maximizing the benefits?
Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue have started to answer these questions. They joined President Trump at the White House this morning to unveil legislation to restructure and modernize the federal immigration program. The Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act (RAISE Act) resumes the effort undertaken by civil rights icon Barbara Jordan’s U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in the mid-1990s. Two decades ago, the corporate Right allied with the cultural Left to kill Jordan’s recommended immigration changes. But the logic of those changes didn’t go away. And today’s announcement picks up where she left off.
The Cotton-Perdue bill makes a number of significant changes to the current program. First, it focuses family immigration more narrowly. Currently, two-thirds of the million-plus foreign citizens who get green cards (i.e., permanent residence that can lead to citizenship) each year qualify only because they have relatives already here. This nepotistic system does not screen for skills or education. It also drives chain migration, as each cohort of immigrants sponsors the next one.
The RAISE Act would limit family immigration rights to the actual nuclear family: husbands, wives, and little kids of American citizens and legal residents. The current categories for adult siblings, adult sons and daughters, and parents would be retired. U.S. citizens could still bring in their elderly parents in need of caretaking, but only on renewable nonimmigrant visas (no green cards or citizenship) and only after proving that they’ve paid for health insurance up front.
The second major element in this restructuring addresses the employment-based immigration flow. It is now a jumble of categories and subcategories, the main result of which is to provide steady work for immigration lawyers. The Cotton-Perdue bill would rationalize this mess by creating one, streamlined points system, along the lines of similar schemes in Canada and Australia. Points would be awarded to potential candidates based mainly on education, English-language ability and age, and those who meet a certain benchmark would be in the pool for green cards, with the top scorers being selected first.
The bill would also eliminate the egregious Diversity Visa Lottery and cap refugee admissions at fifty thousand per year, rather than allow the president let in as many as he wants, as is the case today.
The level of immigration—now running at over a million a year—would likely drop by 40 percent, and then drop some more over time, as the number of foreign spouses declined. (Most U.S. citizens marrying foreigners are earlier immigrants, so as they age, and fewer new immigrants come in behind them, the demand for spousal immigration is likely to fall.) That would still mean annual permanent immigration of 500,000–600,000 a year, which is more than any other nation.
The bill isn’t perfect. It leaves the level of skills-based immigration, for instance, at the current 140,000 a year—the world doesn’t generate 140,000 Einsteins annually. It preserves a category for the spouses and minor children of green-card holders, which I don’t think is justified. (That relates to spouses acquired after immigration; if you’re married at the time you get your green card, your spouse automatically gets one too.) And I don’t think there’s any justification for resettling even fifty thousand refugees (as opposed to helping a far greater number at the same cost in the countries where they’ve taken refuge).
Neither does this bill address so-called temporary immigration, where businesses import cheap labor—both higher- and lower-skilled—to make an end-run around the American labor market...
VENICE — “You guys, just say ‘skooozy’ and walk through,” a young American woman commanded her friends, caught in one of the bottlenecks of tourist traffic that clog Venice’s narrow streets, choke its glorious squares and push the locals of this enchanting floating city out and onto drab, dry land. “We don’t have time!”Heh, I feel the Venetian pain, lol. Maybe they should come hang out in Anaheim for a few days, and see how many Disneyland tourists they hit it off with?
Neither, the Italian government worries, does Venice.
Don’t look now, but Venice, once a great maritime and mercantile power, risks being conquered by day-trippers.
The soundtrack of the city is now the wheels of rolling luggage thumping up against the steps of footbridges as phalanxes of tourists march over the city’s canals. Snippets of Venetian dialect can still be heard between the gondoliers rowing selfie-snapping couples. But the lingua franca is a foreign mash-up of English, Chinese and whatever other tongue the mega cruise ships and low-cost flights have delivered that morning. Hotels have replaced homes.
Italian government officials, lamenting what they call “low-quality tourism,” are considering limiting the numbers of tourists who can enter the city or its landmark piazzas.
“If you arrive on a big ship, get off, you have two or three hours, follow someone holding a flag to Piazzale Roma, Ponte di Rialto and San Marco and turn around,” said Dario Franceschini, Italy’s culture minister, who lamented what he called an “Eat and Flee” brand of tourism that had brought the sinking city so low.
“The beauty of Italian towns is not only the architecture, it’s also the actual activity of the place, the stores, the workshops,” Mr. Franceschini added. “We need to save its identity.”
The city’s locals, whatever is left of them anyway, feel inundated by the 20 million or so tourists each year. Stores have taken to putting signs on the windows showing the direction to St. Mark’s Square or Ponte di Rialto, so people will stop coming in to ask them where to go...
It needs to seek a balance: neither forgetting its past, nor succumbing to it.I'd say keep Germany tied down, just like it was tied down throughout the Cold War by U.S. power and multilateral institutions. Why take any chances, especially in an era like this.
Near my flat in Berlin, six cobblestone-sized plaques glint from the pavement. The first reads: “Here lived Maria Witelson, née Zuckermann. Born 1892. Deported 1942. Murdered in Majdanek.” Each of the others commemorates one of her five teenage children, who also died in that concentration camp near Lublin in Poland.
Along the street are similar plaques recalling the Holz family, deported one by one over a six-week period in 1943. Old Ernst died a week afterwards in Theresienstadt; Herbert and Lieselotte (née Cohn) in Auschwitz on unknown dates; young Willy in January 1945 on the death march to Buchenwald. Such Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones”, have been sprouting from German streets since 1992.
These monuments to the country’s terrible abnormality – and its admirable determination never to forget it – are not isolated examples. Every synagogue in Germany gets police protection. The mainstream media often boycotts far-right politicians. Every school pupil must visit a concentration camp. The forest of tombstone-like pillars constituting the Holocaust memorial in Berlin takes up an entire block.
This is the context in which Finis Germania (“The End of Germany”) recently appeared. Written by Rolf Peter Sieferle, a Heidelberg-based historian who committed suicide last September, this collection of essays asserts that a guilt-stricken Germany has swallowed the lie of its own abnormality and is determined to dissolve its identity through European federalism and open-border immigration. Most offensively, it compares Germans to the Jews; claiming that the former are now being collectively punished for the Holocaust as the latter were once collectively punished for the Crucifixion.
The book would have made little impact without its inclusion on June’s “non-fiction book of the month”, a list drawn up by a jury of broadcasters and writers. Since then, sales have soared. It is now top of Amazon Germany’s bestseller list. Berlin bookshops are out of copies.
Uproar has ensued. Johannes Saltzwedel, the journalist who proposed its recommendation more as provocation than endorsement, has withdrawn from the “non-fiction book of the month” jury. Finis Germania appears to have been excised from some bestseller lists. Dark rumours swirl that establishment forces have frustrated reprints by its publisher (a fringe outfit based in right-wing Saxony).
The saga tells a bigger story about today’s Germany. The country spent the immediate postwar years concentrating on reconstruction. But then the generation of 1968 radicals (including a then-leftist Sieferle) began to ask their parents about the recent past and upbraid them for smothering it; inspired partly by the 1967 book The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. This generation dismantled what the Mitscherlichs called Germany’s “manic defences” against its past. It produced a culture of remembrance and guilt that still dominates the political class.
All of this is as welcome as it is visible on my Berlin street. Yet it also poses an unanswerable question that must nonetheless be answered: is Germany a normal country? That arose most urgently in 1990. The new, reunified Germany would be the largest country in the EU and by far the largest European economy. This begged questions about its military, economic and political role; about whether it should seek to lead or defer to others; about where the limits of its power and responsibilities should lie. Yet Helmut Kohl, the then chancellor, engineered no such debate. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas complained that: “Essential questions of political self-understanding – in particular the question of how we should understand the ‘normality’ of the approaching Berlin Republic – have remained open”.
This all marks German politics today. On Trump and Macron, on the environment and on the euro, the reunified country bequeathed by Kohl to successors such as Angela Merkel is increasingly expected to show leadership. Yet there is no consensus among its elites about what form that leadership should take, if any. Some urge idealism. Some advocate a rigorous focus on national interests. Most are for an ill-defined fudge. Few debate how the various imperatives might be balanced. Germany is as unclear as ever about the scope and limits of its own normalcy...
