each job is compared relative to the other items from the same backlog.

scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest)

7-10 committed objectives (plus 2-3 uncommitted

Still, it’s all too easy to get caught up in ‘finishing the features’ and missing the overall goals hiding inside.

That’s about as good as it gets because this is, after all, research and development.

However, the OKR format has proven less effective when applied to PI Objectives.

Realistic

More than 250 bills have have been introduced in 43 states that would change how Americans vote, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice, which backs expanded voting access. That includes measures that would limit mail voting, cut hours that polling places are open and impose restrictions that Democrats argue amount to the greatest assault on voting rights since Jim Crow.

From statehouses to Washington, the fight over who can vote and how — often cast as “voting integrity” — has galvanized a Republican Party in search of unifying mission in the post-Trump era. For a powerful network of conservatives, voting restrictions are now viewed as a political life-or-death debate, and the fight has all-but eclipsed traditional Republican issues like abortion, gun rights and tax cuts as an organizing tool.

Leonard Leo, a Trump advisor and one of the strategists behind the conservative focus on the federal judiciary, formed The Honest Elections Project to push for voting restrictions and coordinate GOP effort to monitor the 2020 vote.

Anti-abortion rights group, the Susan B. Anthony List, has partnered with another conservative Christian group to fund a new organization, the Election Transparency Initiative.

That might sound strange, a bunch of Republican graybeards past their primes yet still playing the long game. Then again, the future of the party could arrive very soon. A Republican collapse this fall—Biden wins the White House, Democrats flip the Senate and hold the House—would trigger a reckoning within the GOP every bit as sharp as the one associated with Obama’s takeover of Washington in 2008. If that occurs, much of the party’s pent-up irritation with Trump (which often masks long-simmering disgust with themselves) will spill over, and the efforts to expunge this ugly chapter of GOP history could commence with stunning ferocity.

What was once a source of annoyance and frustration for one sect of the party, social conservatives, has turned into the dominant lifeforce for the GOP.

Success in healthcare should be measured by the amount of patients who don't come back with complications. Our ultimate goal should be preventing illness and disease by promoting public health instead of treating recurring problems in vulnerable communities.

Venter now lives in a hypermodern house on a bluff in Southern California. Chatting one evening on the sofa beside the door to his walk-in humidor and wine cellar, he described how saltwater microbes could help solve the most urgent problems of modern life.

Plank number six - illegal drugs. ROBERTS: Make them legal.

Tax energy use or carbon emissions in a way that reflected the cost to the environment that we all share.

consumption tax

smoking

eliminate all income and payroll taxes.

The corporate income tax makes no sense whatsoever.

The deduction for employer-provided health care.

The mortgage interest deduction.

And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this:

Unfortunately, the words that we applied to Mr. Clinton 20 years ago apply almost perfectly to our current president.

We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath.

Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president.

this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story

The Democrats have had it out for him from day one

Good human work honors God's work.

What the Bible might mean, or how it could mean anything, in a closed, air-conditioned building,

We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is fumed into grapes.

water into wine--which was, after all, a very small miracle.

It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better.

It is incompatible with Scripture.

It is understandably difficult for modern Americans to think of their dwellings and workplaces as holy, because most of these are, in fact, places of desecration, deeply involved in the ruin of Creation.

the idea that the only holy place is the built church

murder of Creation

the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments

By "economy" I do not mean "economics," which is the study of money-making, but rather the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated and maintained within the household of Nature.

Siena College/New York Times Upshot

As a simple rule of thumb, we’ve found polls “call” the right winner 80 percent of the time, meaning they fail to do so the other 20 percent of the time

Polls in our database that showed a lead of 3 percentage points or less identified the winner only 58 percent of the time — a bit better than random chance, but not much better.

exploitive

everything that lives is holy

the Bible forbids usury and great accumulations of property. The usurer, Dante said, "condemns Nature. . . for he puts his hope elsewhere."

We will discover that, for these reasons, our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy.

continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God.

it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding--that is, we are "fallen."

The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein

join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation

the culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world, and the uselessness of Christianity to any effort to correct that destruction

vangelical Christians need another model for cultural and political engagement, and one of the best I am aware of has been articulated by the artist Makoto Fujimura, who speaks about “culture care” instead of “culture war.” According to Fujimura, “Culture care is an act of generosity to our neighbors and culture. Culture care is to see our world not as a battle zone in which we’re all vying for limited resources, but to see the world of abundant possibilities and promise.” What Fujimura is talking about is a set of sensibilities and dispositions that are fundamentally different from what we see embodied in many white evangelical leaders who frequently speak out on culture and politics. The sensibilities and dispositions Fujimura is describing are characterized by a commitment to grace, beauty, and creativity, not antipathy, disdain, and pulsating anger. It’s the difference between an open hand and a mailed fist.Building on this theme, Mark Labberton, a colleague of Fujimura’s and the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, the largest multidenominational seminary in the world, has spoken about a distinct way for Christians to conceive of their calling, from seeing themselves as living in a Promised Land and “demanding it back” to living a “faithful, exilic life.”

Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche—might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective—is troubling enough.But there is also the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions. Don’t forget: Trump was essentially named an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual 1”) in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son.While on the Pacific Coast last week, I had lunch with Karel Coppock, whom I have known for many years and who has played an important role in my Christian pilgrimage. In speaking about the widespread, reflexive evangelical support for the president, Coppock—who is theologically orthodox and generally sympathetic to conservatism—lamented the effect this moral freak show is having, especially on the younger generation. With unusual passion, he told me, “We’re losing an entire generation. They’re just gone. It’s one of the worst things to happen to the Church.”

living a “faithful, exilic life.”

modify :: (a -> a) -> Zipper a -> Zipper a

An early advert talked about “friendly neighbors of our own kind … the peace and beauty and hominess of Shaker Village can never be invaded.”

More than a dozen other attorneys interviewed cited similar problems, especially with gaining access to computerized “audit trails.”

Regarding the first effort at least, “there was consensus that this needed to happen and that it would take the government to push this forward,” she says.

She has promised to reduce the documentation burden on physicians

The notion that one EHR should talk to another was a key part of the original vision for the HITECH Act, with the government calling for systems to be eventually interoperable. What the framers of that vision didn’t count on were the business incentives working against it.

What she heard then became suddenly personal one summer day in 2017, when her husband, himself a physician, collapsed in the airport on his way home to Indianapolis after a family vacation. For a frantic few hours, the CMS administrator fielded phone calls from first responders and physicians—Did she know his medical history? Did she have information that could save his life?—and made calls to his doctors in Indiana, scrambling to piece together his record, which should have been there in one piece. Her husband survived the episode, but it laid bare the dysfunction and danger inherent in the existing health information ecosystem.

potentially enormous fraud against Medicare and Medicaid that likely will take many years to unravel

While the jury’s still out, there’s growing suspicion the digital revolution may potentially raise health care costs by encouraging overbilling and new strains of fraud and abuse.

Doctors could shop for bargain-price software packages at Costco and Walmart’s Sam’s Club—where eClinicalWorks sold a “turnkey” system for $11,925—and cash in on the government’s adoption incentives.

“The industry was moving along in a natural Darwinist way, and then along came the stimulus,”

“We had all the right ideas that were discussed and hashed out by the committee,” says Mostashari, “but they were all of the right ideas.”

jumped in line

In the depths of recession, the EHR conceit looked like a shovel-ready project

In February 2009 legislators passed the HITECH Act, which carved out a hefty chunk of the massive stimulus package for health information technology. The goal was not just to get hospitals and doctors to buy EHRs, but rather to get them using them in a way that would drive better care.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was fond of saying it was easier to track a FedEx package than one’s medical records. Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, had also pursued the idea of wiring up the country’s health system. He didn’t commit much money, but Bush did create an agency to do the job: the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC).

“It’s not that we’re a bunch of Luddites who don’t know how to use technology,” says the Rhode Island ER doctor. “I have an iPhone and a computer and they work the way they’re supposed to work, and then we’re given these incredibly cumbersome and error-prone tools. This is something the government mandated. There really wasn’t the time to let the cream rise to the top; everyone had to jump in and pick something that worked and spend tens of millions of dollars on a system that is slowly killing us.”

Every time she prescribes the basic painkiller for a female patient, whether that patient is 9 or 68 years old, the prescription is blocked by a pop-up alert warning her that it may be dangerous to give the drug to a pregnant woman. The physician, whose institution does not allow her to comment on the systems, must then override the warning with yet more clicks. “That’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg,” she says.

“complete overhaul”

“Texting while you’re driving is not a good idea. And I have yet to see the CEO who, while running a board meeting, takes minutes, and certainly I’ve never heard of a judge who, during the trial, would also be the court stenographer. But in medicine … we’ve asked the physician to move from writing in pen to [entering a computer] record, and it’s a pretty complicated interface.”

“If you go into medicine because you care about interacting, and then you’re just a tool, it’s dehumanizing,”

cognitive burden

Others have turned to social media to vent.

Earlier this year, MedStar’s human-factors center launched a website

Ratwani spent his early career in the defense industry, studying things like the intuitiveness of information displays. When he got to MedStar in 2012, he was stunned by “the types of [digital] interfaces being used” in health care, he says.

MedStar Health’s National Center on Human Factors in Healthcare, a 30-­person institute focused on optimizing the safety and usability of medical technology.

Physicians had been inputting squiggly brackets—{}—the use of which, unbeknownst to even vendor representatives, deleted the text between them. (The EHR maker initially blamed the doctors, says Schneider.)

“we’ve swapped one set of problems for another. We used to struggle with handwriting and missing information. We now struggle with a lack of visual cues to know we’re writing and ordering on the correct patient.”

To be sure, medical errors happened en masse in the age of paper medicine, when hospital staffers misinterpreted a physician’s scrawl or read the wrong chart to deadly consequence, for instance. But what is perhaps telling is how many doctors today opt for manual workarounds to their EHRs. Aaron Zachary Hettinger, an emergency medicine physician with MedStar Health in Washington, D.C., says that when he and fellow clinicians need to share critical patient information, they write it on a whiteboard or on a paper towel and leave it on their colleagues’ computer keyboards.

101 resulted in patient deaths.

alert fatigue

the average clinician working in the intensive care unit may be exposed to up to 7,000 passive alerts per day.

Patients have discovered mistakes as well: A January survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in five patients spotted an error in their electronic medical records.

patient matching—the process of linking the correct medical record to the correct patient—a seemingly basic task at which the systems, even when made by the same EHR vendor, often fail

Many such cases end up in court. Typically, doctors and nurses blame faulty technology in the medical-records systems. The EHR vendors blame human error. And meanwhile, the cases mount.

“I was stunned when my son for a year was battling Stage 4 glioblastoma,” said Biden. “I couldn’t get his records. I’m the Vice President of the United States of America … It was an absolute nightmare. It was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, that we’re in that circumstance.”

we didn’t think about how all these systems connect with one another. That was the real missing piece.”

Compounding the problem are entrenched secrecy policies that continue to keep software failures out of public view. EHR vendors often impose contractual “gag clauses” that discourage buyers from speaking out about safety issues and disastrous software installations—though some customers have taken to the courts to air their grievances. Plaintiffs, moreover, say hospitals often fight to withhold records from injured patients or their families. Indeed, two doctors who spoke candidly about the problems they faced with EHRs later asked that their names not be used, adding that they were forbidden by their health care organizations to talk. Says Assistant U.S. Attorney Foster, the EHR vendors “are protected by a shield of silence.”

the proprietary EHR systems made by more than 700 vendors routinely don’t talk to one another, meaning that doctors still resort to transferring medical data via fax and CD-ROM.

optimized for billing

It is not about one lawsuit or a piece of sloppy technology.

eCW’s spaghetti code was so buggy that when one glitch got fixed, another would develop, the government found. The user interface offered a few ways to order a lab test or diagnostic image, for example, but not all of them seemed to function. The software would detect and warn users of dangerous drug interactions, but unbeknownst to physicians, the alerts stopped if the drug order was customized. “It would be like if I was driving with the radio on and the windshield wipers going and when I hit the turn signal, the brakes suddenly didn’t work,” says Foster. The eCW system also failed to use the standard drug codes, and in some instances, lab and diagnosis codes as well, the government alleged.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) and Fortune spoke with more than 100 physicians, patients, IT experts and administrators, health policy leaders, attorneys, top government officials, and representatives at more than a half-dozen EHR vendors, including the CEOs of two of the companies.

Proofs are hard. Obnoxiously hard. “Quit programming and join the circus” hard. Surprisingly, formal code proofs are often more rigorous than the proofs most mathematicians write! Mathematics is a very creative activity with a definite answer that’s only valid if you show your work. Creativity, formalism, and computers are a bad combination.

Programmers tend to mistrust software artifacts that aren’t code or forcibly synced with code. It’s the same reason documentation, comments, diagrams, wikis, and commit messages are often neglected.

merciless flow of time

If I say “this should distinguish parks from birds”, what am I saying? I could explain to a human by giving a bunch of pictures of parks and birds, but that’s just specific examples, not capturing the idea of distinguishing parks from birds. To actually translate that to a formal spec requires us to be able to formalize human concepts, and that is a serious challenge.

type [a] -> [a]

It's important to note that in the Monoid instance for Ordering, x `mappend` y doesn't equal y `mappend` x.

If you replace >> with >>= \_ ->, it's easy to see why it acts like it does.

We couldn't have achieved this by just using Maybe as an applicative. If you try it, you'll get stuck, because applicative functors don't allow for the applicative values to interact with each other very much.

There is a common myth in software development that parallel programming is hard. This would come as a surprise to Alan Kay, who was able to teach an actor-model language to young children, with which they wrote working programs with more than 200 threads. It comes as a surprise to Erlang programmers, who commonly write programs with thousands of parallel components. It's more accurate to say that parallel programming in a language with a C-like abstract machine is difficult, and given the prevalence of parallel hardware, from multicore CPUs to many-core GPUs, that's just another way of saying that C doesn't map to modern hardware very well.

A processor designed purely for speed, not for a compromise between speed and C support, would likely support large numbers of threads, have wide vector units, and have a much simpler memory model. Running C code on such a system would be problematic, so, given the large amount of legacy C code in the world, it would not likely be a commercial success.

Using this from C is complex, because the autovectorizer must infer the available parallelism from loop structures. Generating code for it from a functional-style map operation is trivial: the length of the mapped array is the degree of available parallelism.

(tempName, tempHandle) <- openTempFile "." "temp"

The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?

The United States has nationwide vaccination programs, advanced hospitals, the latest diagnostic tests. In the National Institutes of Health, it has the world’s largest biomedical research establishment, and in the CDC, arguably the world’s strongest public-health agency. America is as ready to face down new diseases as any country in the world.Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. Most of the intravenous bags used in the country are manufactured in Puerto Rico, so when Hurricane Maria devastated the island last September, the bags fell in short supply. Some hospitals were forced to inject saline with syringes—and so syringe supplies started running low too. The most common lifesaving drugs all depend on long supply chains that include India and China—chains that would likely break in a severe pandemic. “Each year, the system gets leaner and leaner,”

In these dense throngs, pathogens can more easily spread and more quickly evolve resistance to drugs.

Airplanes now carry almost 10 times as many passengers around the world as they did four decades ago.

since 2008 have been home to more than half of all human beings.

In 1948, shortly after the first flu vaccine was created and penicillin became the first mass-produced antibiotic, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall reportedly claimed that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent. In 1962, after the second polio vaccine was formulated, the Nobel Prize–winning virologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet asserted, “To write about infectious diseases is almost to write of something that has passed into history.”Hindsight has not been kind to these proclamations.

The Congo is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. It was here that HIV bubbled into a pandemic, eventually detected half a world away, in California. It was here that monkeypox was first documented in people. The country has seen outbreaks of Marburg virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, chikungunya virus, yellow fever. These are all zoonotic diseases, which originate in animals and spill over into humans. Wherever people push into wildlife-rich habitats, the potential for such spillover is high. Sub-Saharan Africa’s population will more than double during the next three decades, and urban centers will extend farther into wilderness, bringing large groups of immunologically naive people into contact with the pathogens that skulk in animal reservoirs—Lassa fever from rats, monkeypox from primates and rodents, Ebola from God-knows-what in who-knows-where.

ne hundred years ago, in 1918, a strain of H1N1 flu swept the world. It might have originated in Haskell County, Kansas, or in France or China—but soon it was everywhere. In two years, it killed as many as 100 million people—5 percent of the world’s population, and far more than the number who died in World War I. It killed not just the very young, old, and sick, but also the strong and fit, bringing them down through their own violent immune responses. It killed so quickly that hospitals ran out of beds, cities ran out of coffins, and coroners could not meet the demand for death certificates.

Finally, the narrative Trump will use this report to advance has no actual merit—but enough incidents within the IG’s narrative will seem to give credence to it so as to give it continued political effect.

Eighth, interestingly, the report’s conclusions are so far being widely accepted by those it concerns.

Citing the “harm caused by leaks, fear of potential leaks and a culture of unauthorized media contacts,” the report says the leaks highlight the need to change the cultural attitude at the bureau regarding unauthorized media contacts.

“At a minimum,” the report says, “we found that the employees’ use of FBI systems and devices to send the identified messages demonstrated extremely poor judgment and a gross lack of professionalism.”

“We found it extraordinary,” the report says, that “the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General conclud[ed] that it would be counterproductive to speak directly with the FBI Director.”

Comey has repeatedly described his dilemma regarding the newly discovered emails shortly before the election as a choice between concealing or revealing what the FBI was doing—and he appears to have used that metaphor once again in his testimony here. The IG report is emphatic that this was a false choice and insists that Comey’s actual choice was between adhering to or departing from Justice Department practice. The report makes clear the OIG’s belief that he was wrong to choose the latter course.

the New York Field Office was waiting for the Midyear team to follow up on the laptop after the Sept. 28 meeting, and the Midyear team—many of its members by now engrossed in the Russia investigation—was waiting for the New York Field Office to follow up.

“We found that the prosecutors’ decision was based on their assessment of the facts, the law, and past Department practice in cases involving these statutes. We did not identify evidence of bias or improper considerations.”

Second, and relatedly, the IG broadly concludes that the investigation’s judgments were not influenced by politics.

it never questions that the FBI as an institution was pursuing its proper mission: conducting a serious investigation in good faith.

First, the report validates the essential integrity of the investigation.

We usually end up with JavaScript bundles, containing 100% of application logic, templates and CSS (generated via JavaScript of course) put into one huge file that loads as a giant “hello user, let’s test your connection speed” for all our new users.

When you have separate pages in traditional web application - there is nothing stopping you from using completely different stacks on different pages.

Testing is harder

Why you should not build your start-up as Single-Page Application?

Eventually, the scientists say, wildfires in the western United States might dwindle. This could happen when precipitation withers to the point that vegetation doesn’t come back. The fires will end when there is nothing more to burn.

Cady* was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and ADHD—the millennial trifecta.

"We need more funded scientific research to better understand the effects of cannabis on emotion," says Troup. "At this point, from my research, I would suggest that cannabis has the potential to disrupt emotion processing, so [self-medicating] would be something I would consider to be risky."

Dr. Lucy Troup studies cognitive neuroscience at Colorado State University. She is wary of treating depression with cannabis because it disrupts emotion processing, specifically empathy. In a study she conducted, Troup found that marijuana affected subjects' ability to read and empathize with displays of negative emotion. "Cannabis changes how the brain responds to emotion. One could make the case that this is not a good thing," says Troup, especially "in situations where we ask people to empathize."

In a way, I think there should be more talk of revolution, if only to expand the bounds of debate

Now, few people outright argue for revolutionary overthrow of the American system of government. The closest we get to calls for revolution or overthrow are celebrations of the Chinese model of dictatorship from both Chinese and Western admirers who see a nation that, unlike a vetocratic America, can just do things, with the implicit idea being that America could use a turn toward autocracy.

The press did not generally greet Johnson’s speech as a claim of white responsibility, but rather as a condemnation of “the failure of Negro family life,” as the journalist Mary McGrory put it. This interpretation was reinforced as second- and thirdhand accounts of the Moynihan Report, which had not been made public, began making the rounds. On August 18, the widely syndicated newspaper columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote that Moynihan’s document had exposed “the breakdown of the Negro family,” with its high rates of “broken homes, illegitimacy, and female-oriented homes.” These dispatches fell on all-too-receptive ears.

Budgets are moral documents

@security

[1]

[@security]

*

core function library

“It’s the idea of having support and resources,” said Billy Elles, a speech and debate coach at Westmoore High School who moonlights as a waiter at Outback Steakhouse. “I’m tired of having 34 students in a classroom. I’m tired of buying my own copy paper and my books.”

Gov. Mary Fallin and GOP leaders have been unable to reverse course because of a constitutional quirk that says any tax increase needs a three-fourth’s majority vote of the Legislature. Despite broad GOP support for tax hikes, a small number of fiercely anti-tax Republicans have joined with the minority Democrats to derail attempts to raise revenue. Democrats complain that most of the tax plans unfairly target the poor.

Teachers are in shorter supply too. There are about 1,500 fewer teachers in Oklahoma than in 2010, according to a recent study, and nearly 20 percent of districts have shifted to a four-day school week to save money.

“moral outrage”

Republicans target Warren far more often than they target her populist doppelgänger, Senator Bernie Sanders. Not coincidentally, according to HuffPost, Americans approve of Sanders by a margin of 24 points—and of Warren by only four points.

Others chalk up Pelosi’s image problems to her ideology (liberal) and home base (San Francisco). But Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a liberal from Brooklyn, has a disapproval margin half as large as hers.

One might think grassroots Democratic enthusiasm for Pelosi would offset her lack of appeal among Republicans and independents. The party, after all, is moving left, where Pelosi has been all along.

Gender scholars would not be surprised.

On the surface, Trump’s “Pocahontas” slur may appear as unrelated to gender as Clinton’s emails did. But the moral outrage that female ambition provokes takes many forms.

By climbing to the top of the greasy pole, however, Pelosi has made her ambition visible. She has gained the power to tell her male colleagues what to do. (The pollster Celinda Lake notes that most ads attacking Pelosi show her speaking, not listening.

“The Republican playbook for the past four election cycles has been very focused, very clear,” Representative Kathleen Rice, a Democrat from New York, insisted after Ossoff’s defeat. “It’s been an attack on our leader. Is it fair? No. Are the attacks accurate? No. But guess what? They work.”

Why so much discontent with a woman who has proved so good at her job? Maybe because many Democrats think Pelosi’s unpopularity undermines their chances of winning back the House. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians usually are.

The GOP has been using her as a scarecrow ever since.

The administration claims it wants an accurate count. But while Trump fantasizes that there are millions of noncitizen voters out there, who really gets counted twice and wins more representation? People with two homes.

The real problem with Trump’s push to add citizenship questions, underfund the census, and produce an undercount is that it corrals the Census into producing the vision of America Trump already imagines.

After September 11, 2001, people were astonished to learn that the federal government didn’t know how many Middle Easterners lived in America. There was a simple explanation: We hadn’t gone to war there recently. A group listed on the census is a group we’ve invaded or colonized. The census has check boxes for nine different subcategories of Asians, nearly every one representing a different war or territory: Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Hawaiian, Guamanian, Chamorro or Samoan.

More practically, the move deprives the bureau of the 3,500 specialized employees that the 2010 Census used because they could speak multiple languages to find non-English speakers (who tend to live in Democratic districts).

While we have multiplied, reshuffled, and sliced our racial categories, they have never been comprehensive or comprehensible to anyone but Americans. Like the Trump presidency itself, the census’s foundations are racial. The census has always reflected a Trumpian view of America, revealing our deepest anxieties about race and inequality. Yet the census is our best source of information about the nation, and the only way to draw fair legislative boundaries. And today it is in danger.

“If Bolton becomes the national security advisor, the United States has not hit rock bottom in our international relations,” says Eoyang. “We could go lower.”

In December 2016, the Washington Post reported that Bolton was eliminated from the running for secretary of state because Trump — I swear I’m not making this up — didn’t like his mustache.

John Prados, a fellow at George Washington University’s National Security Archives, came to an even broader conclusion in a study of declassified Bush administration documents: Bolton bears a significant amount of blame for the politicized intelligence used to justify the decision to attack Iraq.

Trump sees the world through a televisual lens; he seems to get more information from Fox News than from his daily intelligence briefings.

But watching Farrakhan bask in the media attention, as yet another generation of black leadership faces public immolation on his behalf, it is impossible to see him as worthy of her loyalty.

The more politically expedient path indeed seems obvious—but the stakes here for Mallory are personal and not simply political. I asked Mallory if she thought Farrakhan was anti-Semitic, or sexist, or homophobic. “I don’t agree with everything that Minister Farrakhan said about Jews or women or gay people,” said Mallory. “I study in a tradition, the Kingian nonviolent tradition. I go into prisons and group homes and I don’t come out saying, ‘I just left  the criminals or the killers.’ That’s not my language. That’s not something I do. I don’t speak in that way. In the tradition that I come out of, we attack the forces of evil but not people.”

Denouncing the marginalized Farrakhan can seem ridiculous to those who feel like white people put their own Farrakhan in the White House.

This is also where the resistance to condemning Farrakhan or the Nation can come from: a sense that despite the Nation’s many flaws, it is present for black people in America’s most deprived and segregated enclaves when the state itself is not present, to say nothing of those who demand its condemnation.

Mallory was surprised by the backlash to her presence at the Saviour’s Day event, in part because she’s been going to the annual Nation of Islam function since she was a child—her parents were activists. Although she is a Christian, she says it was common for her to work with the Nation of Islam on anti-violence initiatives, such as the NOI’s “Occupy the Corner” program, which involves members of the Fruit of Islam patrolling dangerous areas to prevent violence. In 1989, after the Fruit of Islam’s “Dopebuster” patrols proved successful in the Mayfair Housing projects, the Washington Post reported that other neighborhoods were clamoring for their help.

It was in that context that Mallory came into contact with the Nation of Islam. Mallory turned to anti-violence activism after her son’s father was murdered, eventually becoming the national director of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

“In this era of mass incarceration, the Nation still maintains a presence in the prisons, where we have too many people of color locked up, too many men, they are in many of our communities. So the unsparing critique of racism that he provides has a certain appeal."

I spoke with several civil-rights leaders who reject Farrakhan’s views but didn’t want to go on record criticizing Farrakhan—in part out of respect for the constituency he represents, but also because they are aware of precisely how he exploits such condemnations to strengthen his own credibility.

“I think people see the Nation as a voice of dissent. A viable voice of dissent. Leadership in these communities, few are as visible as Farrakhan.”

Farrakhan’s inability to grow the Nation’s ranks indicates that sympathy with his critiques of white racism does not necessarily translate into broad affection for the man himself.

“They command some respect because of their visibility and presence in lower-class communities. People don't see them selling out to corporate America, selling out to government. I think people see them as a grassroots organization. They still speak to the poor, to racial injustices, and that's where their power lies.”

Yet because of the NOI's ongoing presence in many poor and working class black communities, time and again Farrakhan is able to threaten the mainstream political ambitions of black public figures who, for good reasons and bad, choose to deal with him.

Most people outside the black community come into contact with the Nation of Islam this way—Farrakhan makes anti-Semitic remarks, which generate press coverage, and then demands for condemnation. But many black people come into contact with the Nation of Islam as a force in impoverished black communities—not simply as a champion of the black poor or working class, but of the black underclass: black people, especially men, who have been written off or abandoned by white society. They’ve seen the Fruit of Islam patrol rough neighborhoods and run off drug dealers, or they have a family member who went to prison and came out reformed, preaching a kind of pride, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurship that, with a few adjustments, wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a conservative Republican.

Since then, the cycle has repeated for one black leader after another. Farrakhan says something anti-Semitic, which draws press attention; he is roundly condemned, which draws more press attention, but also causes some black people to feel he is being disproportionately attacked; and the controversy further burnishes his credibility within the black community as someone who is unacceptable to the white establishment and is therefore uncompromised. It is a cycle he has fueled, and benefited from, for decades.

khan’s defense of Jackson, who many black voters felt was unfairly maligned and taken out of context, helped establish his reputation as someone who, right or wrong, would not cave to the white establishment.

“I think that my value to the work I do is that I can go into many spaces as it relates to dealing with the complexity of the black experience in America. It takes a lot of different types of people to help us with our struggle.”

It’s a reminder that the sources of the Nation of Islam’s ongoing appeal, and the reasons prominent black leaders often decline to condemn Farrakhan, may have little to do with the Nation’s prejudiced beliefs.

Xlog:help shows the same information but more beautifully formatted

But at a minimum, the next time the economy falls into recession and really needs bigger deficits let’s not be played for fools again.

At a minimum, there’s absolutely no economic theory under which 2018 deficits are more benign than 2012 deficits.

Then Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and the Tea Party rebrand became obsolete.

80 per cent of the vetiver oil used commercially comes from Haiti.

18 months from now, some ambitious New York Times editor will assign Leon Wieseltier an essay on identity politics, pitching it as counterintuitive, knowing it will get zillions of clicks; someone a decade from now will ask an 82-year-old James Toback to direct an artsy realist movie about sexual assault, and it will be admired by some prominent person as trenchant and gutsy.

I did not trust the polls, I said.

Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

one in five million people

In the end, though, other people’s wishes and entreaties didn’t matter. They still don’t.