FOCUS: Our Country Is Bitterly Divided. How 'Bout a Little Small Talk?
Monday, 01 January 2018 11:44
Keillor writes: "Common social moments aren't as common as they used to be."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: WPR)
Our Country Is Bitterly Divided. How 'Bout a Little Small Talk?
By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post
01 January 18
man says to me, “How do you like that car?” I’m standing by a little green Kia. “It’s not mine, it’s a rental,” I say. I’m in the town of Okeechobee, Fla., parked on the main drag in front of Nutmeg’s Cafe. “Where you from?” he says.
“Minnesota.”
“I hear they just got more snow up there.”
“How do you like that car?” is a classic opening of a casual conversation between two men who don’t know each other and it can lead in various directions, if they have the urge to talk.
He’s from Connecticut, I find out, and has lived in nearby Fort Pierce for several years. He thought when he moved to Florida that he’d be spending a lot of time on beaches but he hasn’t been on a beach much at all. He drives a 1947 Packard convertible that he fixed up himself. He moved here because Florida is better for the Packard and also to see to his father, who is 87, and also to get away from a broken romance. He and his dad have breakfast together every Thursday morning. He misses the North, the big winter storms, the bracing chill in the air, but Florida is okay. He is thinking of buying property in Okeechobee. He likes small towns. He recommends I see Fort Pierce and drive the Indian River highway down the coast.
He offers all of this in one brief encounter standing on the sidewalk, and when we say so long, I have no idea what his politics are, if he attends church, what he does for a living, how he feels about climate change, but I do feel warmly about Okeechobee.
These common social moments aren’t as common as they used to be. For one thing, so many people wear headphones and you’d have to tap them on the shoulder and have something serious to say, like “Your pants are on fire.” An older man avoids striking up a conversation with a younger woman for fear it will be misconstrued, or with younger men because their default response is “Hnnph.” You stand in line at a store counter, people are busy texting, Googling on their phones, checking their inboxes, and you hesitate to say, “Beautiful weather we’re having.” Or “Those are good-looking boots you’re wearing.” Or “How do you like that car?”
I hitchhiked a lot in my teens and remember the men who gave me a lift and how talkative they were. I was a shy kid, so older people opened up to me. It was a hitchhiker’s job to shut up and listen: That was how you paid for the ride. They complained about their jobs, talked about the war, gave you advice about women and life. But nobody hitchhikes anymore, and thanks to the universality of gizmos, small talk has become rare, and a person comes to feel he’s living in a hostile world, which is not true at all.
When I lived in Denmark, small talk with a stranger was the hardest language to get a handle on — the big declarative textbook sentences don’t work in that context — so much is conveyed by tone, by harrumph and sigh and nonsense sounds, the Danish equivalents of “oy” and “uff da” and “yikes.” Flying back to New York and walking through JFK, I felt immersed in small talk, like a sea lion returning to the herd.
My dad loved Florida. His Minnesota life was constrained by family and church and job, and in Florida he went into business as an itinerant knife-sharpener, working a long route of restaurants, meeting strangers, making small talk, which he dearly loved. He was a Christian fundamentalist, bound by strict doctrine, but on the knife route, he could talk about weather, children, sports, cars, without reference to the Rapture and the Millennium. It was the freedom to be ordinary.
The Indian River highway was a disappointment: a two-lane road along a solid phalanx of mansions behind gates and no place to stop and admire the Atlantic. But the conversation with the guy curious about the green Kia was memorable. Two weeks have passed since, and I haven’t had another encounter like it. They say the country is bitterly divided. Maybe so, but that’s no reason to be rude. My mailman likes to banter, and so do the guys at Lloyd’s Automotive and the cabdrivers. So what’s going on with you? Cat got your tongue? Where’d you get that sweater? What’s that product you put on your hair?
Crocker writes: "You know more about all of this than us, Javanka, but 2017 was a complete disaster for you. And you're not blameless, despite Ivanka's 'I didn't ask for this!' refrain whenever she's criticized for being complicit or lumped in with the swamp."
'Javanka.' (photo: Elizabeth Brockway/Daily Beast)
Dear Ivanka and Jared, This Is Your Plan for 2018
By Lizzie Crocker, The Daily Beast
31 December 17
They began 2017 as the liberal hope of the Trump White House, but 'Javanka' end the year with the Russia scandal close to home, and a lack of tangible purpose to their lives.
ear Javanka,
I know you’re not particularly fond of this portmanteau, “Javanka,” since the name-blending moniker was dreamed up by your longtime foe Steve Bannon.
But few things have brought me as much cheer in 2017 than this nickname for you, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. It sounds somewhat like the name of a Disney villain, and it’s much more fun than “Democrats,” another nickname courtesy of Bannon’s faction in the White House.
A portmanteau like Javanka seems especially appropriate given the extent to which you failed to impress Washington’s elite. They see the First Couple, or the deputy First Couple, as a single entity--“persona non grata” in D.C., as Vanity Fair put it recently.
Indeed you’ve weathered a lot together since this time last year, when you were gearing up for President Trump’s inauguration.
Democrats found you intriguing, Ivanka, when you managed to arrange a meeting with Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio and your father to discuss climate change.
Surely she’ll convince him not to pull out of the Paris climate accord, they assured themselves, before he did just that last June. Surely Ivanka will have some sway over the president when it comes to her pet issues, like equal pay and maternity leave, they told themselves in vain, then wept into their soup when President Trump rolled back Obama-era equal-pay protections in April.
Before you proved to be a wholly ineffective advocate, Ivanka, you gave these sheeple a glimmer of hope. During the campaign you successfully presented the measured case for Trumpism, free of profanities, superlatives, and bigotry. Turns out you swear like a sailor behind closed doors, according to your father’s erstwhile chief strategist, and you’re too cowardly to take responsibility for your inability to sway your father when it comes to policy.
Or maybe you don’t care enough about these issues to advocate for them beyond posing photos of yourself with children to promote STEM education. We know you’ve worked hard to persuade the public and associates in the White House that you’re focusing on issues like STEM, job creation, paid family leave, women’s empowerment, and child-care tax credits.
Evidently it was “unrealistic” to expect you to influence your father on policy other than as it pertains to your pet issues. Shame, then, that you have no policy accomplishments whatsoever under your belt as a senior White House advisor, beyond convincing the World Bank to start a fund for women entrepreneurs. You’ve earned due credit for this. So what if you have no role in managing that fund?
And Jared: You were also supposed to be a moderating force in the White House. You’re the eldest son in a family of prominent Democrats, and you and Ivanka used to hobnob with limousine liberals in New York City.
So you were given the benefit of the doubt when the president made you a senior advisor in his cabinet, despite anti-nepotism laws and potential conflicts of interest. Your father was a crook and you were politically ignorant, but you looked saint-like compared to Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller and Michael Flynn.
But looks can be deceiving. Because here we are, a year since Trump’s inauguration, and you’re ensnared in a political catastrophe. You’re a key suspect in Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign had any connection with Russian efforts to influence the election in your father-in-law’s favor.
You need no reminder that the last days of 2017 have been especially rough for you, Jared.
The same week that Bannon threw you under the bus for making it appear as if Putin had helped Trump–that you “met with the Russians to get additional stuff”–Bloomberg reported that you were the “very senior member” exposed in Flynn’s plea bargain who ordered him to arrange a meeting with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have also subpoenaed Deutsche Bank records about your family’s real estate business, and you and Ivanka were jointly sued for failing to disclose assets from 39 investment funds on your federal financial disclosure form.
You know more about all of this than us, Javanka, but 2017 was a complete disaster for you. And you’re not blameless, despite Ivanka’s “I didn’t ask for this!” refrain whenever she’s criticized for being complicit or lumped in with the swamp.
If 2018 is going to be any better for Team Javanka, you’d both do well to be less disingenuous.
Ivanka, we know you will not publicly disagree with your father because it would telegraph a message that you’re “not part of the team” or whatever.
We know you’ll never admit that you were in fact "complicit," just as SNL so deliciously, and pointedly, parodied.
If you ever have to confront the “complicit” charge in an interview again, don’t pretend like you don’t know what the goddamn word means. You’ll continue to get away with a lot of bullshit, but you won’t get away with that one next year, since “complicit” was declared one of 2017’s words of the year.
Next time your father signs an executive order banning travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries, don’t publicize your glitzy life on Instagram as if nothing happened.
You could also apologize next time you make a screw-up, rather than have “sources close to Ivanka” tell the media that you felt bad about it.
We know you’re well-versed in platitudes and that you’re accustomed to saying a lot about nothing, but maybe you should take a page out of your father’s book and tell it like it is, for once.
There’s no sense pretending that you want to help the American people and make the world a better place. I’m not sure why we entertained the idea that Javanka might be our country’s salvation during the Trump presidency. If it were true, you would have likely shown more interest in public service before arriving at the White House.
Even if a part of you does genuinely care about advocating for women’s issues, Ivanka, beyond your vague interest in promoting “women’s empowerment,” you didn’t make any friends in Washington by assuming you were just as qualified to affect change as people who have spent their entire lives advocating for the same issues.
Remember when you tried to be a middleman between Planned Parenthood and Republicans who wanted to strip the organization of federal funding?
You thought your deal-making skills as a businesswoman would apply here, so your surrogates went to the organization with a proposal that the White House would increase their federal funding if they stopped performing abortions, according to Vanity Fair. Easy as that!
Except Planned Parenthood turned it down, for obvious reasons.
Each of your attempts to distinguish yourself from your father’s bigotry in the last twelve months--your pro-LGBTQ tweet ahead of the transgender military ban; your denunciation of white supremacy after Charlottesville--only highlighted the extent to which you’re "complicit."
No one cares much about what you say anymore, since you evidently don’t have as much influence (if any at all) over your father as some of us hoped. They care about what you do.
That said, here’s one last bit of advice: if you’re not going to do anything, get out of there--for your sake more than ours.
Move your brood to Alaska for a few years. It may be hard to imagine, but isolation may be more appealing if Jared ends up in prison. Rescue your faux feminist brand while there’s still time, before even the most apolitical among us turn on you.
Steve Bannon is certainly right about one thing: the hobbits and deplorables are not Javanka’s demographic.
Expect EPA Chief Scott Pruitt's Reckless Spending to Continue in 2018
Sunday, 31 December 2017 14:31
O'Grady writes: "For the coming year, it's become obvious what's 'in' and what's 'out.' Regarding EPA, and according to this White House, fossil fuel energy lobbyists are in, and federal scientists and engineers are out."
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has questioned whether human activity ranks as a main driver of global warming. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Expect EPA Chief Scott Pruitt's Reckless Spending to Continue in 2018
By John O'Grady, The Hill
31 December 17
n 2017, the Trump administration established dangerous new norms in environmental policy. For the coming year, it's become obvious what's "in" and what's "out."
Regarding EPA, and according to this White House, fossil fuel energy lobbyists are in, and federal scientists and engineers are out.
Permits for offshore oil and gas drilling and mineral extraction at our national monuments are in, and air pollution regulations and water contamination protocols are out. Scott Pruitt's climate denial and his refusal to release documents supporting his claims are in, while the federal “endangerment finding” that enabled President Obama’s climate actions including the Paris Agreement is out.
In just 10 months, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has devastated EPA by dismantling its science directives to protect public health and the environment. What will result from backing industry interests over defending public health for 300 million Americans? Only time will tell. Here is an inventory of the major investigations of Donald Trump’s EPA expected to come to fruition in 2018.
Administrator Scott Pruitt is one of several Trump cabinet members (including Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price), who were caught taking expensive private planes for government business on the public’s dime.
EPA’s Inspector General Arthur Elkins, Jr. is now investigating Pruitt's travel through Sept. 30, 2017, considering the "frequency, cost, and extent" and whether travel policies were followed to prevent waste, fraud and abuse. Pruitt used private and military jet travel instead of commercial airlines for EPA work on four occasions at a cost of nearly $60,000. He traveled 48 of his first 92 days as administrator — 43 of those days included stops in his home state of Oklahoma.
The second investigation questions Pruitt advocating lobbying. At a meeting with the National Mining Association in April, he exhorted mining association members to tell Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate deal.
Pruitt’s staff also pressed lawmakers and conservative groups to publicly criticize the climate agreement, increasing public pressure on the resident. Afterward, mining association executives voted to support the U.S. withdrawal.
These actions exemplify a potentially larger pattern of illegal activities by Pruitt and EPA staff as these directives from a cabinet member may violate anti-lobbying laws for government officials.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) provides legal opinions on anti-lobbying questions. But first, the EPA's inspector general must "develop a comprehensive factual record" for conducting the analysis. He has not forwarded its investigation’s findings to the GAO. Once it does, the GAO will complete its inquiry.
The GAO will also investigate an appearance of impropriety by Pruitt in a video sanctioned by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to promote weakening EPA’s Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule.
In this review to rescind or revise the Clean Water Rule, Pruitt essentially urged the public to comment in favor of repealing the rule. The video advises viewers “tell EPA to kill WOTUS.”
The GAO investigation will examine if Pruitt violated laws on the use of appropriated funds for lobbying, publicity and propaganda purposes and for violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act. Obviously, calling on the public to support a rule’s withdrawal does not appear fair, impartial or open-minded, and undermines the idea that public participation matters.
Yet another investigation will consider possible ethical violations from Pruitt's insistence that he did not use a personal email address for official EPA business and for speeches he gave to conservative organizations about environmental policy while he was Oklahoma attorney general.
He also ran afoul of professional responsibility in rules for Oklahoma Bar Association lawyers for possibly lying under oath and violation of ethical rules associated with the practice of law. Once the investigation is complete, the bar association’s Professional Responsibility Commission may take disciplinary action against him.
The complaint asserts that Pruitt violated Oklahoma's rules of professional conduct for attorneys when he testified during his confirmation hearing for EPA administrator that he did not use a personal “me.com” email address for official state business. Oklahoma public-records revealed that he received at least one email message at his “me.com” email address.
The GAO opened one more inquiry into whether EPA circumvented the Trump administration’s own ethics rules when hiring certain agency employees.
To fulfill his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington, Trump issued an executive order last January prohibiting executive branch employees from participating “in any particular matter” on which they had lobbied in the two years before their appointment.
In August, Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), asked GAO to investigate a violation of Trump’s lobbying rules. The senators alleged that EPA bypassed that order by hiring certain political appointees under a provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act that authorizes the EPA to hire up to 30 people “without regard to civil service laws.”
The senators’ joint statement said, “The whole point of ethics laws is to give the American people confidence that the work of their government is being conducted fairly, honestly, and free from special interest sway. But when an agency can just ignore those rules — and congressional oversight — the result often leads to corruption and scandal.”
EPA’s inspector general has agreed to review whether Pruitt misused appropriated funds when he spent $25,000 installing a secure, soundproof communications booth in his office. According to a government contracting database, Pruitt also paid $7,978 more to remove closed-circuit television equipment to accommodate the booth in an area off his third-floor office. Pruitt has come under fire for building the booth when a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility that guards against electronic surveillance and suppresses data leakage of sensitive information is already available to him at EPA headquarters.
On Dec 18, Sen. Carper sent a letter to EPA’s inspector general asking to expand his current audit of Pruitt’s travel a third time to include the administrator’s recent four-day junket to Morocco to increase exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas. It's suspicious since natural gas exports do not fall within the EPA’s mission. Flying first class, the trip cost taxpayers $40,000.
Given the scope and seriousness of the allegations, we think the inspector general will likely grant this request. Carper added, “I presume Mr. Pruitt is aware his agency’s inspector general is conducting an investigation into his questionable travel, which makes his decision to take this trip an odd choice at best.”
So, inspector general investigations are in, while Pruitt has been at EPA’s helm for only 10 months. And, they are expected to provide lots of drama in 2018.
With Science Under Siege in 2017, Scientists Regrouped and Fought Back: 5 Essential Reads
Sunday, 31 December 2017 14:20
Villiger writes: "2017 may well be remembered as the year of alternative facts and fake news. Truth took a hit, and experts seemed to lose the public's trust."
You can't keep a good scientist down. (photo: Vlad Tchompalov/Unsplash)
With Science Under Siege in 2017, Scientists Regrouped and Fought Back: 5 Essential Reads
So where did that leave science and its supporters? Here we spotlight five stories from our archive that show how scholars took stock of where scientists stand in this new climate and various ways to consider the value their research holds for society.
1. A Risk to Standing Up for Science
In April, the March for Science mobilized more than a million protesters worldwide to push back against what they saw as attacks on science and evidence-based policy. But some people in the research community worried about a downside to scientists being perceived as advocates.
Emily Vraga, assistant professor in political communication at George Mason University, put the conundrum this way:
"On one hand, scientists have relevant expertise to contribute to conversations about public policy…. On the other hand, scientists who advocate may risk losing the trust of the public."
Maintaining that trust is imperative for scientists, both to be able to communicate public risks appropriately and to preserve public funding for research, she wrote.
Vraga and her colleagues' research suggests that scientists don't lose credibility when they advocate for policies based on their expertise. But there's a distinction to be made between advocacy and mere partisanship—statements motivated by the science are received differently than if they're perceived as driven by political beliefs.
2. Rhetorical Tools at the Ready
With the feeling that there's a "war on science" afoot, savvy scientists are thinking about how to defend their work. University of Washington professor of communication Leah Ceccarelli says they can look toward the field of rhetoric for help in how to get their messages across. She writes:
"Before dismissing this recommendation as a perverse appeal to slink into the mud or take up the corrupted weapons of the enemy, keep in mind that in academia, 'rhetoric' does not mean rank falsehoods, or mere words over substance."
It's about building persuasive arguments, built on solid foundations, she said. Rhetoricians study effective communication—and they're happy to open their toolbox to scientists.
Scientists are always scrambling to secure funding for their research, and during the first year of the Trump administration, it seemed science projects were consistently on the budget chopping block.
Christopher Keane, the vice president for research at Washington State University, made the case that federal funding for science ultimately revs up regional economies, particularly when scholars within academia join forces with entrepreneurs in the private sector:
"Thousands of companies can trace their roots to federally funded university research. And since the majority of federally funded research takes place at America's research universities—often in concert with federal labs and private research partners—these spinoff companies are often located in their local communities all across the country."
4. Slashing Science Projects Hurts Workers
Ohio State University economist Bruce Weinberg described how a unique data set allowed him and his colleagues to actually follow the money on federally funded scientific research. Using administrative data, they were able to identify everyone paid to work on a research project, not just the few who appear as authors on any culminating journal articles.
"This is valuable because we're able to identify students and staff, who may be less likely to author papers than faculty and postdocs but who turn out to be an important part of the workforce on funded research projects. It's like taking into account everyone who works in a particular store, not just the manager and owner."
The majority of people employed on research projects turn out to be somewhere in the training pipeline, whether undergraduates, graduate students or postdocs.
And to do all that work, Weinberg points out, labs need to purchase everything from "computers and software, to reagents, medical imaging equipment or telescopes, even to lab mice and rats." Cut the federal funding for science and the economic effects will ripple out far beyond just university science buildings.
"'Ivory tower' view of academic endeavors suggests that science is an isolated activity that rarely pays off in practical application. Related is the idea that marketplace innovation rarely relies on the work of universities or government labs."
But is that right? To find out if basic research actually does lead to usable practical advances, they designed a study to investigate the links between patentable inventions and scientific research. Jones and Ahmad poor created a "social network" style map, which connects patents and science papers using the reference citations in each. They found that:
"Among research articles that receive at least one citation, a full 80 percent could be linked forward to a future patent. Meanwhile, 61 percent of patents linked backward to at least one research article."
It's impossible to predict which basic research projects will be important in the marketplace, but they wrote that a very high share of scientific research does link "forward to usable practical advances. Most of the linkages are indirect, showing the manifold and unexpected ways" in which basic research can ultimately pay off.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35918"><span class="small">Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page</span></a>
Sunday, 31 December 2017 12:30
Moore writes: "24 hours ago I asked all of you to take 30 seconds and sign this petition to Impeach Trump. We were 84,000 short of 4 million signatures. And now, just one day later we are only 16,000 short of the 4 million mark!"
Filmmaker Michael Moore. (photo: Sacha Lecca)
Impeach Trump: Part II
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
31 December 17
wenty-four hours ago I asked all of you to take 30 seconds and sign this petition to Impeach Trump. We were 84,000 short of 4 million signatures. And now, just one day later we are only 16,000 short of the 4 million mark! I want to have this news hand-delivered to Trump tomorrow night, on New Year’s Eve, at Mar-a-Lago that we’ve set a record-breaking 4 million signatures demanding his removal!
One other reason this petition is critical: the old guard of the Democratic Party doesn’t like this idea. The House Dem leadership opposes it — and NOT ONE SINGLE Democrat in the Senate has called for Trump’s impeachment. Can you believe this? Well of course you can — these are the same weak, misdirected party poo-bahs who allowed our defeat to happen last year when we WON the election. So why won’t they say the “I” word? Well, most politicians are afraid to support any movement where the people would have the power to demand the removal of any of them! But when millions sign a petition they start to see the writing on the wall — and they WILL act.
Let’s hit 4 million by New Year’s Eve — and then let’s get millions more out to vote next November 6th. We need this petition to kick off 2018 with the right verve! We have no other choice. THIS is the one petition that is going to be heard round the country and scare the bejesus outta Trump — and whatever frightened Dems are still around.
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man says to me, “How do you like that car?” I’m standing by a little green Kia. “It’s not mine, it’s a rental,” I say. I’m in the town of Okeechobee, Fla., parked on the main drag in front of Nutmeg’s Cafe. “Where you from?” he says.
ear Javanka,
n 2017, the Trump administration established dangerous new norms in environmental policy. For the coming year, it's become obvious what's "in" and what's "out." 
wenty seventeen may well be remembered as the year of alternative facts and fake news. Truth took a hit, and experts seemed to lose the public's trust. Scientists felt under siege as the Trump administration 
