Spiritually ambitious Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Once you give up survival at any price, 'then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in astonishing ways." It teaches friendship. You learn the most valuable thing is "the development of the soul."

And so Sozhenitsyn concluded, "Bless you, prison, for having been in my life."

David Brooks Sidney Awards, Part 1, including Gary Saul Morson's essay, "Solzhenitsyn's Cathedrals" in The New Criterion, NYTimes, 12/16/2017

President Trump's declaration that Jerusalem is Israel's capital unites foes in Malaysia

"Today, regardless of our political beliefs, we gather to show that as Muslims in Malaysia we are united in opposing Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

"There are 1.6 billion Muslims. There are only 13 million Jews. It does not make sense if 1.6 billion lose to the Jews. If we don't unite, we will be looked down on."--Prime Minister Najib Razak Malaysia

Mr. Najab has been embroiled in a corruption scandal involving billions of dollars missing from the government's 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund which he led. While the US Treasury Department maintains that the IMDB's coffers were the source of hundreds of millions of dollars that ended up i Mr. Najib's bank account, the Malaysian prime minister has developed a close relationship with Mr Trump. Withe the IMBD case hanging over him, Mr. Najib has expressed gratitude for the support from Mr. Trump.

But at Friday's rally, Mr. Najib said his personal ties with Mr. Trump did not change his support for Palestine. "It is our duty as Muslims to uphold the first Shariah principle, which is to defend Islam."

excerpts from NYT article, December 23, 2017

Dmitri Hvorostovsky

The charismatic Siberian baritone who won critical acclaim and devoted fans around the world for his burnished voice, uncanny breath control and rueful expressivity, died on Wednesday in London. He was 55.

There "have been many beautiful voices," the soprano Renee Fleming said, "but in my opinion none more beautiful than Dmitri's."

In recent years, Mr. Hvorostovsky felt an increasing attachment to his homeland. IN his interview with The New Yorker, he recalled a concert he gave at 22 with fellow singers and instrumentalists in a bread factory in central Siberia in below-freezing weather. The audience, wearing fur hats and warm boots, was overcome.

Those tears, Mr. Hvorostovsky said, "were more precious to me than all the applause I could ever get again."

NYT November 23, 2017

Trump's NAFTA negotiations

The United States has called for raising that threshold for the automobile industry to 85 percent, up from 62.5 percent previously. And it has asked for a new requirement that half of a car be manufactured solely in the United States--a provision at odds with the wishes of American automakers, who fear it will drive up their costs and make them less competitive globally.

Canadian and Mexican officials did not make specific counterproposals to these requests. Instead, they presented data showinbg the harm the proposition would inflict on the auto sector and pressed the United Stats to explain its reasoning.

That response frustrated the United States.

NYT November 22, 2017

Hurricanes and government flood insurance and disaster funding

"We ought to call federal flood insurance what it actually is," as Phil Bedient, an engineer and colleague of Mr. Blackburn's at Rice, put it. "It is subsidized floodplain development." The Netherlands--the global gold standard for water management--does not offer a national flood insurance program for just this reason.

The problem is that hurricanes and floods, worsened by climate change, do not recognize political borders or county lines Their toll is shared by everyone. The latest estimate from Moody's puts recovery from Harvey at $81 billion, much of which will end up paid by taxpayers across the United States.

Harris county demands that new developments retain enough rainwater on site to neutralize the effects of a 100-year storm. But those 100-year numbers date back years. They are based on mitigating a storm that averages 13.2 inches of rain in 24 hours. Harvey brought 25.9 inches in 24 hours. The Memorial Day flood dropped 11 inches in three hours. The Tax Day flood dumped 17 inches in 12 hours in the Katy Prairie.

"Looking back, should we have spent more to avoid some of the flooding?" Judge Emmett asked, rhetorically, when we met in his office. "Sure. Did taxpayers want to pay more to do those things? No." 

" We need a whole new structure of governance," he insisted. "We've built in watersheds, paved roades and highways because we don't have mass transit. Inevitably, it all catches up with us."

NYTimes November 12, 2017, "Houston After Hurricane Harvey"

Redesigning an adobe house in Arizona

Inside the original building, used mainly for sleeping, they designed four movable wardrobes in order to separate each bedroom. These can be reconfigured to create up to five rooms, as needed.

The addition has an all-glass facade with a view of the lush lawn and serves as a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and, separated by a bookshelf wall, a workspace. The two buildings are connected through shaded walkways on either side of the courtyard.

"To us, there's a ritual to it," Matthew said. "Of having to walk in between and experiencing nature. I grew up in a Chinese courtyard house on Maui, where you had to go outside to go between each room. Most of the rooms were not joined. And it's a wonderful experience, because it provides that mental break between one side of the house and the other. And it reconnects you with nature, even if it's just for a few seconds.

Arizona Republic/USA Today, November 10, 2017

Alan Bennett on libraries

"Closing libraries is child abuse."

Review of Keeping On Keeping On, by Alan Bennett, NYTimes, November 8, 2017

Richard Hambleton, conceptual artist

"I was alive when I died, you know. That's the problem."

NYTimes obituary, November 4, 2017

Rexnord worker as jobs leave for Mexico

As a kid, she'd hated buying groceries with her mother, ashamed of the food stamps they had used. In adulthood, Shannon liked the ritual of consumption. She'd never felt much like the citizen of a democracy. "People like us," she said, "aren't heard." But her job had transformed her into a conumer of things--another respected role in American society. She had achieved a status: the kind of person who buys Heinz ketchup instead of the generic brand.

Shannon, who'd derived her self-worth from the quality of the bearings she made, felt unsure about who she'd become.

New York Times, October 15, 2017

Nazi trials

"It was a reminder of how 20th century history marched through the lives of perpetrators and victims--and that we all always have choices, and make them."

True, but what choices do the victims have?

Christo's ephemeral art

It's about exploiting "the incredible chemistry of humans" from all walks of life, each member of the team focusing energy "on something that does not exist"--the point where it does.

Article in the NYT about the floating walkway in San Paolo at Monte Isola

Goals and direction

We skate to where the puck is going.

Wayne Gretsky

Dominic McGreal to his childen

You are not fully dressed until you put a smile on your face.

Quoted by Roy McGreal, March 9, 2015

First woman member of the legislative assembly 1918

In Vancouver, women won the vote in 1917. In 1918, Mary Ellen Smith was elected the first woman member of the legislative assembly (MLA).  The actress who personified her on our tour of the Parliament Building in Victoria quoted her saying, "Without economy, none can be rich; with it, none can be poor."

Jack Rosenthal on writing

In the end, writing--no matter how conversational the style--is writing. That means it is permanent. In speech, to be casual is to  be friendly. In writing, to follow the rules is to be clear

To 'talk it over' means to weigh and test; to put something into 'black and white' means to decide, to freeze the thought. Spoken English may soften the strictures of written English, but the need for rules endures. There's a time to say 'well, kind of' and a time for writing to right wrongs.

--Jack Rosenthal, principal editor of the Kerner Report on the 1967 racial riots after MLK's assassination,  quoted remarks on the 150th anniversary of The New York Times, in his obituary 8/25/2017, NYT

Paul Fussell writes about Class in America

Fussell posits a way out of the class cages he has so ruthlessly described. You can escape them by becoming what he calls an "x person." He writes:

"You earn x-personhood by a strenuous effort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are indispensable."

--Dwight Garner review of Class: a guide through the american status system, New York Times, July 28, 2017

Howard Raiffa on negotiation and decision making

Howard Raiffa taught a course on negotiation analysis which became the most popular course at the Kennedy School at Harvard.

"His students engaged in sometimes cutthroat simulated negotiations, which prompted The Harvard Crimson to ask him in 1979 whether the curriculum taught students to lie in actual business dealings. He replied by citing a letter about the former president of the University of Chicago.

"'When, in the 1950s,' the letter began, 'Robert Hutchins was hauled before a congressional committee and asked if it was true that the University of Chicago taught communism, he replied: "Yes. And in the medial school we teach cancer."

"'It's a valid analogy,' Professor Raiffa replied, according to the The Crimson. 'To deal with a problem, we have to teach about it.'

"The newspaper said he concluded his course with this wish: 'When we see we could improve our profit or further maximize our desired result, we might ask, Is this a "dirty dollar" or a "clean one" that we could earn here? What would happen if everybody did this? Would we be able to sleep at night if we did this? How would we feel if we had to explain this to our families?'

"'I hope that in answering these questions, you will favor the course of action embracing a higher moral standard.'"

--NY Times, Howard Raiffa, mathematician who studied decision making, dies at 92, July 13, 2016

President Trump speaks in Poland

"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at an cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"

NYTimes, July 7, 2017

Facebook using artificial intelligence to uncover extremist posts

"Ideally, one day our technology will address everything. It's in development right now." Human moderators are still needed to review content for context.

--NYT June 16, 2017

Civil rights investigations in Betsy Devos' Department of Education

The Department of Eduation is scaling back investigations into civil rights violations at the nation's public schools and universities, easing off mandates imposed by the Obama administration....

The new guidelines were to ensure that 'every individual complainant gets the care and attention they deserve...Justice delayed in justice denied, and justice for many complainants has been denied for too long,' said.

--Erica L. Green, NYT, June 17, 2017

Comment: apparently the new education secretary thinks that the solution to justice delayed, is to have no recourse to justice at all.

The importance of critics and criticism

There is a danger when we see criticism as nothing but an expression of resentment. For in politics, as in art, the right to criticize is really the right to make an independent judgment of reality....

Plurality--the existence of profoundly different points of view on questions of morality and politics--can never simply disappear. It must be actively suppressed, which is why Communist and fascist states that emphasized the  unity of the people's will relied so heavily on secret police forces....

We will alwyas need political dreamers; but for the sake of our democracy, we must hope that the future belongs to the critics.

--Adam Kirsch, NYTBR essay, June 18, 2017

Charter school looks past 'No Excuses' to a more forgiving policy

Borrowing from practices of a program called the Responsive Classroom, Ascend began to retrain teachers to focus on social and emotional development. This provided the framework for creative problem solving to help prevent conflicts between students, or between teachers and students, from escalating.

The chair circle is a regular feature. Just before Christmas a group of girls who were arguing over boys and accusations that had been made on social media asked him to convene a circle. He told them, as he often does, to "attack the situation rather than one another." When it's over, he has the students pose for a circle selfie.

Across the network, suspension rates dropped to 4.2 percent in the 2015-16 school year from 9.5 percent in 2012-2013.

"Our big purpose here is to create agency," Mr Wilson told me. "Our view is not about grit. Our students have a lot of grit, look at their lives. But if all you have experienced is unrelenting structure how do you emerge with autonomy?"

New York Times, March 12, 2017

"We're a coalition country"

"In Europe we all see the developments in the United States, and that's not where we want to go because we see it as chaos," said Janka Stoker, a professor in the School of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. "We're a coalition country, we don't always like the coalitions, but we know it gives stability and people know here that we have to work together," Ms. Stoker said.

--New York Times, March 17, 2017, after election that added seats in Parliament for the Green Party and fewer seats for right wing populist Geert Wilders

Italian musicians are deported

Members of the Italian post-punk trio Soviet Soviet, booked to play at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, were detained in Seattle on Wednesday and eventually deported by United States Customs and Border Protection officials as immigration enforcement under the Trump administration continues to cause tension.

On Facebook, Soviet Soviet said that its three members were separately interrogated for four hours before they were handcuffed and taken to jail, and that they were denied the opportunity to make phone calls. "We were relieved to fly back home and distance ourselves from that violent, stressful and humiliating situation."

New York Times, March 13, 2017

Dialogue

"If the two sides decide that the only way forward is to just launch strikes on each other, then that is just what they decided to do. But a good cup of tea and some dialogue never hurt nobody."--Bilal Abdul Kareem, raised as Darrell Lamont Phelps in Mount Vernon

"An American in Syria Offering a Window on Jihad" NYTimes March 11 Saturday Profile by Ben Hubbard

Newness and God

"Unrelenting newness made for something like blindness. It was as if sight did not function properly in the absence of understanding." (p.96)

"...[W]hat he truly felt was that God was just a way for a man to interrogate his own heart." (p. 286)

The Lieutenant, Kate Grenville 2009

An alternative "built on ideals and hope and optimism"

"A lot of people are disappointed in politics. What we want to do with Greens is be an alternative for center parties. But this is not an alternative built with fear and hate, but an alternative built on ideals and hope and optimism."

--Jesse Klaver, 30, "Greens make inroads before Dutch election as leader of the far right appears to falter, NY Times, March 11, 2017, reportrd by Alissa J. Rubin and Christopher F. Schuetze

TJ and Dave in New York

"At their finest, the two men examine the minutiae of everyday life with the precision of a keenly observational stand-up set; that they are doing so on the fly makes it all the more exhilarating to watch."--Elise Czajkowski, "Creating a universe in under an hour," NYTimes, March 10, 2017

Robots and inequality and politics

"The earnings from automation have been shared unequally, with business owners getting a much larger share than workers....'How to make the forces of technology and globalization work for people and not against them is the biggest public policy challenge in America. The rise of populism, both on the left and the right, is because middle-income voters feel that their elected leaders don't have the answer to this question.'"

--"How to help humans when the robots come to take our jobs," by Claire Cain Miller, NYTimes, March 8, 2017. Quote from Jim Kessler, senior vp for policy at Third Way

Obamacare becomes "Republicare"

"Republicans gave the Affordable Care Act a name--Obamacare--in a calculated strategy to undermine the law. Their scorched-earth effort to 'repeal and replace' needs a moniker, too, one that holds them accountable. If the Democrats call it 'Republicare,' voters will get the message loud and clear."--Jonathan Gibson, Shrewsbury, Vermont

Letter to the editor, NYTimes, March 9, 2017

"You say to brick" says architect Louis Kahn

"You say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?' Brick says to you, 'I like an arch.'"

Other "Lou-language": "Need is so many bananas. Need is a ham sandwich. But desire is insatiable and you can never know what it is."

--from Dwight Garner's review of You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser, NYTimes, March 8, 2017

Do the right thing...it's less polarizing

"I think first you do the right thing for the country, and then you think about the political ramifications, and in this case, doing the right thing would be less polarizing."

Tom McCarthy, Republican congressman, New Jersey, speaking about changes to the ACA, quoted in the NYTimes, February 24, 2017, "Health Law Repeal Faces Hurdles Even in House.

Averaging a triple-double

Averaging a triple-double is like having a helicopter that is also a boat that can also write the Great American Novel.
--"The Mysteries of an Everything Man" by Sam Anderson
feature on Russell Westbrook, NYTMagazine, 2/5/2017

President Trump wants more thorough briefing on his executive orders

"For the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president's dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump's anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban."

--Trump and staff rethink tactics after stumbles, Glenn Thrush, NYT, 2/6/2017