John Hanno – Page 43 – The Tarbabys Blog

The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered

Los Angeles Times – Opinion

Opinion: The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered

Joel Edward Goza – August 25, 2024

FILE - In this March 30, 1981 file photo, President Ronald Reagan acknowledges applause before speaking to the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO at a Washington hotel. In 1981, Reagan signed an executive order that extended the power of U.S. intelligence agencies overseas, allowing broader surveillance of non-U.S. suspects. Recent reports that the National Security Agency secretly broke into communications on Yahoo and Google overseas have technology companies, privacy advocates and even national security proponents calling for a re-examination of Reagan's order and other intelligence laws. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File) — President Reagan, shown in 1981, based many of his policies on ideas from the Heritage Foundation publication “The Mandate for Leadership.” Project 2025 makes up a majority of the latest edition of this title and recommends many of the same extreme policies. (Ron Edmonds / Associated Press)More

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook that would overhaul much of the federal government under a second Trump administration, has sparked fear and concern from voters despite the former president’s attempt to distance his campaign from the plan. But while Project 2025 might seem radical, most of it is not new. Instead, the now-famous document seeks to reanimate many of the worst racial, economic and political instincts of the Reagan Revolution.

Project 2025 begins with its authors (one of whom stepped down last month) boasting of the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership,” which helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework. It hit its mark: Reagan wrote 60% of its recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Heritage Foundation. Yet the 900-plus-page Project 2025, itself a major component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” does not contain any analysis of the economic and social price Americans paid for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.

If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes. Perhaps no day in Reagan’s presidency better embodied his policy transformations or the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation than Aug. 13, 1981, when Reagan signed his first budget.

This budget dramatically transformed governmental priorities and hollowed out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that began during the New Deal. Once passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits, while removing significant provisions from another 300,000. Radical cuts in education affected 26 million students. The number of poor Americans increased by 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty rose to a staggering 34.2%.

Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education. Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%, and its science budget decreased by more than 50%. Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed. And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education, in the words of author Jonathan Kozol, “back almost 100 years.” As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.

All the while, protections provided to the wealthy ballooned. Tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue and capital gains plummeted. For example, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%. He would eventually lower it to 33%.

To ensure that wealth would be a long-lived family entitlement, Reagan instituted a 300% increase in inheritance tax protections through estate tax exemptions in his first budget. In 1980, the exemption stood at $161,000. By the time Reagan left office in 1989 it was $600,000. Today it is $13,610,000. This means that today nearly all wealthy children enjoy tax-free access to generational wealth.

And beginning during Reagan’s presidency, the number of millionaires and billionaires multiplied, increasing 225% and 400%, respectively, while the poverty of Americans across racial lines intensified. Even white males were more likely to be poor following Reagan’s presidency. Today poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S., even though this is the wealthiest nation in the world.

If we feel like we live in a country that isn’t working for anyone who isn’t wealthy, these are some of the core reasons why. Looking back at the Reagan era and the Heritage Foundation’s original “Mandate for Leadership,” we must remember that our domestic wounds are largely self-inflicted, results of buying into racial, economic and environmental lies that continue to be sold. It is precisely the types of policies that devastated the nation during the Reagan administration that Project 2025 now seeks to resuscitate. Perhaps the only truly new thing Project 2025 suggests is using more authoritarian means to enact its agenda.

History has hinges, moments that change the trajectory of nations. The greatest progress in our country has almost always emerged during turbulent times. It is up to the United States’ most committed believers to close the door on terror and trauma and open one that leads to new democratic possibilities.

Our current moment represents more than an election. It is a turning point that has the potential to transform the United States for generations to come. We don’t need the version of the past that Project 2025 is trying to sell us. It didn’t work for most Americans then, and it won’t work for most of us now. But perhaps Project 2025 is the push the Democratic Party needed. While the Republican Party veers further into authoritarianism, Democrats must be equally determined to develop a truly equitable democracy and bind the wounds of a deeply divided nation.

Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America.”

Harris leading Trump by 7 points: Poll

The Hill

Harris leading Trump by 7 points: Poll

Miranda Nazzaro – August 25, 2024

Vice President Harris holds a 7-point edge over former President Trump nationally in a new poll, marking the latest gain for the Democratic presidential candidate as the general election approaches.

A survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University, released last Friday, found Harris leading Trump with 50 percent support to 43 percent nationally, while 7 percent of respondents said they will vote for someone else. Trump and Harris fare equally well with voters from their party, each having 95 percent support from their partisans, pollsters found.

Pollsters noted race or gender played a large role in pushing Harris’s lead. When voters are asked to think about race or gender, Harris’s lead grows significantly, while support for her and Trump are virtually tied when they are not made to think about it, they said.

With independents who do not lean toward either party, Harris still leads Trump, but by a smaller margin, 38 to 33 percent, the poll found. Harris holds a large lead among self-identified liberals, 87 to 10 percent, along with progressives, 93 to 5 percent, and moderates, 62 to 30 percent.

The former president, meanwhile, leads among conservatives 76 to 19 percent, and MAGA voters, 95 to 4 percent.

Trump saw his strongest support among men “who hold traditionally masculine identities,” while women and other men who reject these identities favor Harris, according to pollsters.

“Trump has built his political career around a very specific performance of whiteness and masculinity,” Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson and the executive director of the poll, said in a release. “In the past, that’s been seen as a strength, but it’s no longer clear that it’s working.”

“Race matters in elections, but it’s not inevitable that voters are thinking about it,” he added. “Trump does reasonably well among nonwhite voters so long as they’re not thinking about race: Once they are, we see a huge shift to Harris.”

Since replacing President Biden atop the Democratic presidential ticket last month, Harris has quickly gained momentum, posing a threat to the healthy lead Trump held over the president, both nationally and in swing states.

This is the latest poll suggesting good news for Harris, though some political strategists have suggested it is too early to make conclusions about the November election.

According to a polling index by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill, Harris has a 3.6 percentage point lead over Trump.

Trump dismissed the notion Harris has made gains in the polls last week.

When asked last Thursday by Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum about Harris’s increasing support in the polls, Trump said, “No, she’s not having success. I’m having success. I’m doing great with the Hispanic voters. I’m doing great with Black men. I’m doing great with women, because women want safety.”

The survey was conducted Aug. 17-20 using a voter list of 801 registered voters nationwide. It was carried out by Braun Research and has a simple sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence interval.

Republicans Are Right: One Party Is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’

The New York Times – Opinion

Republicans Are Right: One Party Is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist – August 24, 2024

A photograph of a small child in a light blue suit holding the hand of a person in a darker suit. They are seen from behind. — Credit…Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times

In attacking Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans have been making a legitimate point: One of our major political parties has worked to undermine America’s families.

The problem? While neither party has done enough to support families and children, the one that is failing most egregiously is — not surprisingly — the one led by the thrice-married tycoon who tangled with a porn star, boasted about grabbing women by the genitals and was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault.

You’d think that would make it awkward for the Republican Party to preach family values. But with the same chutzpah with which Donald Trump reportedly marched into a dressing room where teenage girls were half-naked, the G.O.P. claims that it’s the Democrats who betray family values.

“The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” JD Vance said in 2021. Pressed on those remarks last month, he went further in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying that Democrats “have become anti-family and anti-kid.”

This is gibberish. Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).

One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.

Can anything be more anti-child?

Well, maybe our firearms policy is. Guns are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, largely because of Republican intransigence and refusal to pass meaningful gun safety laws.

It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.

Think of it this way: We’d be saving the life of one American child between the ages of 1 and 5 every three hours if we had the same child mortality level as Norway or Finland.

Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump administration that Trump is frantically trying to disavow, would make things worse. It would end Head Start, a lifeline for low-income children, and would dismantle the Department of Education.

“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” Trump posted on Friday. But even putting aside abortion rights, Republican extremism has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization, especially after an Alabama court ruled that a frozen embryo must be considered a child. The Southern Baptist Convention, a bastion of support for Trump, this summer criticized I.V.F.

Vance has supported a watered-down bill that he says protects I.V.F., but Republican senators blocked stronger legislation to defend I.V.F. fertility treatments and expand access. They are leaving hanging so many of the one in seven women who have trouble conceiving or sustaining a pregnancy.

Can anything be more anti-family?

Look, I’ve repeatedly argued that growing up in a two-parent household is the one privilege that liberals ignore, that the left wrongly demonized Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his emphasis on family structure and that Democrats can do more to remove marriage penalties and bolster opportunities for children.

I’m troubled by the collapse of marriage in America’s working class — more than 70 percent of Americans without a high school diploma are unmarried. If we care about child poverty, we must face the reality that households headed by single moms are five times as likely to live in poverty as those with married couples. So concerns about family and children are legitimate, and Democrats should do better.

But for Republicans to blame Democrats is ludicrous, for the G.O.P. has seemingly gone out of its way to undermine families and children.

Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.

Likewise, one way to raise marriage rates may be to help teenage girls avoid pregnancy; then they may be more likely to marry in their 20s. But Republicans have often been suspicious of comprehensive sex education and have tried to defund Title X family-planning programs, and it’s no accident that the states with the highest rates of births to teenage mothers are all red states.

Republicans like the House speaker, Mike Johnson, object to no-fault divorce laws, which make it straightforward for couples to obtain divorces. They claim this is a pro-family stance. (Trump, understandably, appears more sympathetic to divorce.) But the evidence is overwhelming that before easy access to divorce, large numbers of women were trapped in violent marriages that terrorized them and their children.

One careful study by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the introduction of no-fault divorce in America was associated with about a 20 percent reduction in female suicides, at least a 25 percent reduction in wife-beating and an apparent decline in husbands murdering wives.

Is it really pro-family to increase the number of moms who are beaten and murdered?

I’m glad Republicans are squawking about the challenges facing families and children. But if Trump, Vance and other Republicans want to blame those most responsible for the plight of families and children in America today, they should look in the mirror and hang their heads in shame.

Trump Doubles Down on Hating America: Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show

Miami Herald

Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show

Antonio Maria Delgado – August 24, 2024

Former President Donald Trump has said on different occasions that Caracas, the Venezuelan capital with a reputation for a sky-high crime rate, has now become a “safe” city because most of its criminals have entered illegally into the United States.

On Thursday night he repeated the claim in an interview with Newsmax. “We’ll go to Caracas, because it will be safer than any place in our country,” he said.

On Aug. 5, he told livestreamer Adin Ross that “If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city and now it’s very safe,” he said. “In fact, the next interview we do, we’ll do it in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’s safer than many of our cities.”

But is Caracas, which just a few years ago was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere, safer now than large American cities?

The Nicolas Maduro regime has not broken out numbers for crime in Venezuelan cities for years. But there are organizations that keep track of the figures — and they show the Venezuelan capital is still significantly less safe than most American cities.

Those numbers show that while crime has come down in recent years, a visit to the Venezuelan capital still is not recommended for the fainthearted. According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a Caracas-based non-profit group widely regarded as the authority on the nation’s homicide rate, Caracas had a rate of 50.8 homicides per 100,000 people.

That’s more than six times the U.S. national average of 7.8 registered in 2020, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national homicide average for Venezuela in 2023 was 26.8, almost four times higher than the rate in the U.S.

According to the group, the Caracas homicide rate rate for 2023 came down a bit from previous years. Part of the reason is that 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past few years, and among them are a comparatively small numbers of criminals, according to experts on Venezuelan crime. In 2020, for example, Caracas closed the year with a homicide rate rate of 56.2 per 100,000 people.

Caracas’ 2023 homicide rate is surpassed by only two large U.S. cities: New Orleans, at 58.4, and St. Louis, at 57.2, according to 2022 numbers from the CDC.

Most large American cities have numbers between the mid single digits and the low double digits. In 2022, for example, the city of Miami’s homicide rate was 8.6, while Jacksonville stood at 15.3, according to the CDC numbers.

Despite their high rates, New Orleans and St. Louis could be considered relatively peaceful in comparison with Venezuela’s most violent cities, all located in the mining region of the southern state of Bolivar. These are El Callao, with 424 violent death victims for 100,000 people, Sifontes, with 151, and Roscio, with 134, according to the violence observatory.

Concerns about the lack of security in Venezuela led the U.S. State Department to maintain a level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory on Venezuela, originally issued on January 2023, warning Americans that they would be at risk in the South American country given its high crime, civil unrest and the risk of becoming victims to kidnappings or ill treatment from local police.

“Violent crimes, such as homicide, armed robbery, kidnapping, and carjacking, are common in Venezuela. Political rallies and demonstrations occur, often with little notice. Anti-Maduro demonstrations have elicited a strong police and security force response, including the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against participants, and occasionally devolve into looting and vandalism,” the State Department warned in its advisory.

How U.S. cities rate

Here are the homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants in the 10 largest U.S. cities in 2022, according to the CDC:

▪ Philadelphia, 34.1

▪ Chicago, 18.2

▪ Houston, 13

▪ Dallas, 11

▪ New York, 9.7

▪ San Antonio, 9.4

▪ Phoenix, 8.5

▪ Los Angeles, 7.3

▪ San Diego, 3.4

▪ San Jose, 2.2

The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow

The New York Times – Opinion

The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow

By David French, Opinion Columnist – August 25, 2024

Students, seen from behind, bow their heads in prayer in a classroom in Texas in 1962. — Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images

This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.

As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.

But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.

One of the most valuable and humbling experiences in life is to experience an American community as part of the in-group and as part of the out-group. I spent most of my life living in the cultural and political center of American evangelical Christianity, but in the past nine years I’ve been relentlessly pushed to the periphery. The process has been painful. Even so, I’m grateful for my new perspective.

When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.

Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.

But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.

Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.

After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.

First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.” It was “soft” in part because America never possessed a national church on par with European establishments, but it was certainly hard enough to mandate Bible readings and prayer in schools and to pass a host of explicitly anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments that were intended to blunt Catholic influence in the United States.

This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.

In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.

The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.

I started my legal career in 1994, when equal access was very much in doubt. I spent the better part of two decades filing lawsuit after lawsuit that made essentially the same claim: State actors must treat religious speech the same as they treat secular speech. The proper interplay between the free exercise clause and the establishment clause ought to mean that private religious speech should neither be favored nor disfavored by the government. The state can’t run the church, and the church can’t run the state.

The Supreme Court has spent much of the past two decades correcting the overcorrection that began in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, religious liberty proponents haven’t lost a significant Supreme Court case in 14 years. During that time, the court has established (often through supermajorities that include justices from the left and the right) that people of faith enjoy equal access to school facilities, equal access to public funds (including tuition assistance to fund private religious education) and extraordinary independence from nondiscrimination laws that would otherwise interfere with the hiring and firing of ministerial employees.

Conservative and liberal justices have created a different, sustainable equilibrium, but the religious liberty culture war rages on anyway — in part because millions of Americans don’t want to strike a balance. They actually prefer domination to accommodation. Many conservative evangelicals miss the old Protestant establishment, and they want it back. This is part of the impulse behind the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for example, or the recent effort in Oklahoma to establish a religious charter school, a public school run by the Catholic Church.

Combine these efforts at religious establishment with red-state legislation aimed at progressive and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and one could fairly assert that Christians are persecuting their opponents.

But there’s more to it than that. There are secular Americans who do take aim at Christian expression and at Christian institutions. They don’t want separation of church and state so much as they seek regulation of the church by the state, to push the church into conformance with a secular political ideology.

Then both sides tear into each other with an inexcusable level of fury and malice. When I was representing conservative Christian organizations, I could regale Christian audiences with stories of extreme secular intolerance, and I never ran out of material — especially when discussing religious liberty on college campuses.

Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.

Every culture war battle has casualties. Take a 2022 Supreme Court case about a praying high school football coach. He was seeking the right to pray on the field, and he won. The Supreme Court said his personal prayer was constitutionally protected. But that’s not the entire story.

Employees in the coach’s school district endured their own ordeal. I was struck by the opening sentence of an essay I read by a former teacher in the district: “‘That was another death threat,’ our high school secretary said to me after hanging up the phone.” A legal dispute isn’t proof of persecution, but threats most definitely count.

Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”

A stark social divide: Adults without a college degree more likely to have no close friends, survey finds

NBC News

A stark social divide: Adults without a college degree more likely to have no close friends, survey finds

Aria Bendix – August 25, 2024

People swim at the Astoria Pool on the opening day (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) — For those without a college degree, there may be fewer opportunities to engage in social activities.

The Summary

In a survey, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults without a college degree said they had no close friends.
People without a college degree also reported less participation in social activities like going to parks or restaurants than college-educated adults.
The findings come amid a documented rise in loneliness and social isolation.

Nearly all U.S. adults used to have close friends.

In 1990, the share of the population that said they didn’t was low and roughly the same no matter one’s education level: just 2% for people with college degrees and 3% for those without.

But a recent survey suggests that share has risen overall, particularly among those who did not graduate college — creating a kind of class divide in people’s level of social engagement and connection. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults with a high school diploma or lower education level said they had no close friends. The number was even higher for Black adults in that group: 35%.

Just 10% of those with a college degree said the same.

The findings come from a survey of around 6,600 adults conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, a nonprofit that researches how people’s lives are shaped by culture, politics and technology.

“Our social fabric seems to have two layers now,” said Daniel Cox, the center’s director and a co-author of a report published this week summarizing the findings. “It has one for college-educated folks that seems to be relatively intact, and then one for those without college degrees, which seems to be in tatters.”

The findings come amid a documented rise in social isolation nationwide. Around 30% of adults say they’ve felt lonely at least once per week over the past year, and 10% say they’re lonely every day, according to a January poll from the American Psychiatric Association.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic last year, citing its links to heart disease, stroke, dementia and premature death. San Mateo County, California, which includes part of Silicon Valley, subsequently declared a public health emergency over high rates of loneliness among residents.

“There’s been considerable decline and atrophy in American social connection,” said Cox, who is also a senior fellow of polling and public opinion at the conservative Washington think tank American Enterprise Institute, adding that although the pandemic helped bring the issue to light, “this decline had gone on for decades before.”

He offered a few ideas that might explain the trend. One is that being alone is less boring now, thanks to video games and streaming services, so people may be less likely to join social groups or spend time with friends or family. Another is that for those without a college degree, there are fewer opportunities to engage in social activities, perhaps because their access to free public spaces is more limited or they lack the time or money to frequent venues like bars and restaurants.

Cox’s survey found that college-educated adults were more likely to go to restaurants or coffee shops and to strike up conversations with neighbors, compared to people without a college degree. They were also more likely to be members of a neighborhood association, sports league or hobby group (like a book club or regular poker game).

“We put so much of the onus of creating and maintaining friends on individuals instead of institutions,” Cox said. “We’ve shifted all the work, all the effort, onto individuals who now have to coordinate, organize, schedule their social engagements, as opposed to having them occur organically out of the things that they’re already doing.”

People with a college degree were also more likely to be part of a labor union or to regularly attend church, the survey found — two venues that have historically given people with less formal education opportunities to socialize.

The survey even found an educational divide when it comes to free public venues like libraries and parks. Nearly 4 in 10 college-educated adults said they had visited a park or community garden at least once a month in the past year, compared to less than a quarter of those without a college education. And nearly half of college graduates said they had visited a library at least a few times in the past year, compared with a quarter of adults with a high school diploma or less.

“The places that are legitimately free — community centers and libraries — their hours of operation aren’t regular enough for a lot of folks,” Cox said. “Many of those places are closed in the evenings, and then there’s just not enough of them to meet the need.”

Part of the issue may have to do with geography: A 2022 study found that neighborhoods with higher poverty rates have fewer public gathering spaces. And many communities don’t have the money to invest in their public spaces, Cox said.

Limited free time and poor access to transportation likely play a role, as well, said Adam Roth, an assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, who wasn’t involved in the survey.

“If you live out in the suburbs and you have to change buses or trains or get in your car and do that however-long commute, that is going to be a prohibitive factor,” Roth said.

The story isn’t entirely bleak, though. A collection of surveys from 2022 and 2023 found that even though people in the U.S. desired to be closer to their friends, less than 3% reported having no friends at all. The surveys looked at both close friendships and casual acquaintances.

“Our data didn’t really spell doom and gloom,” said Amanda Holmstrom, a communication professor at Michigan State University who conducted that research. “People have friends — they feel like they don’t necessarily have the time to nurture those friends.”

Casual friendships still offer benefits, of course. Roth said that people report better psychological well-being on days when they have more interactions with a wider variety of people, including ones they barely know. Social interactions in general help reduce or stave off symptoms of anxiety and depression. Face-to-face interactions and engagement in community events have even been linked to lower levels of inflammation.

“The bottom line is, all types of social interactions and relationships matter, particularly for health and well-being,” Roth said. “But the probability of actually experiencing certain types of social interactions is at least partially dependent on the communities we live in.”

Putin Is Getting Rattled

The New York Times

Putin Is Getting Rattled

By Serge Schmemann – August 23, 2024

A picture of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, sitting at a table. — Credit…Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov

Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times.

In purely military terms, Ukraine’s surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the Donetsk front, a main focus of the current fighting, and the physical cost in dead or captured troops and evacuated citizens does not concern Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

The more significant potential of the invasion lies on the other front — that of information, propaganda, morale, image and competing narratives. That is where the fight is being fought to keep the West involved, to keep Ukrainians hopeful and to get Russians worried about the toll of the war in lives and treasure. And this is where Ukraine may see an advantage.

The very invocation of Kursk, the region where Ukraine made its advance, is familiar to every Russian as the site of not only a great World War II Soviet triumph but also the catastrophic accident that sank a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in 2000. By moving into Kursk, Ukraine’s military has loudly advertised its boldness just when it looked like its troops might never regain the initiative.

The surprise and speed of the Ukrainian attack and the flaccid Russian response have given new strength to calls by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the United States and his other Western supporters to abandon their insistence that he not use their weapons to attack Russian territory. Mr. Zelensky calls this the “naïve illusion of so-called red lines,” and so far, his allies have not complained about the Kursk invasion. They may see little value in scolding Ukraine, the plucky David in this war, right after he has landed an audacious strike against a plodding Goliath.

Just as important, Ukraine’s move into Kursk highlights the inherent contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the conflict as a proxy war against Western powers trying to deny Russia its destiny, and one in which a calm, united and prosperous Russia is certain to prevail. But that illusion falls apart once Ukrainian forces have succeeded in slicing into Russia and forcing tens of thousands of Russians to flee their homes.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The overriding imperative of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to enforce the belief that whatever is happening, however grave it may seem and whatever the cost, the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin, to be precise — is in full control. The depth of the disaster precipitated by Russia’s war is revealed by the intensity of the effort — the euphemisms, insinuations, scapegoats and excuses — marshaled toward propaganda.

Mr. Putin, a product of the old K.G.B., is well practiced in this dark art. From the moment the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, he has been ruthless in enforcing a ban against even calling it a war. Russians are subject to arrest if they fail to call it a “special military operation,” even though Mr. Putin himself has occasionally slipped. When the Russian caterer and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash after sending his mercenaries who were fighting in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin kept a straight face as he offered his condolences, noting only that his latest victim had “made serious mistakes in life.”

So when the Ukrainian army launched its unexpected drive into the Kursk region on Aug. 6, the Kremlin propaganda mill got to work. There was no invasion, of course, only an “armed provocation,” a “situation,” a “terrorist attack” or “events in the Kursk region.” And of course, the insidious West was to blame. At a televised meeting at his residence with security chiefs and regional governors six days into the Kursk invasion, Mr. Putin declared that once again, it was “the West fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” He insisted that Russian forces would retaliate appropriately and still accomplish “all our goals.”

When the acting governor of the Kursk region, speaking over a video link, began giving some actual details of the invasion, including the number of towns and villages affected and the amount of territory seized by the Ukrainian army, Mr. Putin sharply cut him off, saying he should leave such detail to the military and focus on the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who probably never imagined having his remote province invaded by anyone, must have assumed that his president wanted to learn what was really happening. Perhaps he was unaware that his job was not to worry the population with facts, but only to show that the government was in control and taking care of its people.

Mr. Putin has so far held firm to the line “We have everything under control.” He has not bothered to visit Kursk, and he has not delivered a rousing speech calling for a grand defense of the motherland. The state-controlled media has focused on showing the government ensuring that evacuees are safe and cared for and that the nation was rallying with an outpouring of humanitarian aid. The latest report from Russia’s emergencies ministry on Tuesday said more than 122,000 civilians had been relocated, including more than 500 in the previous 24 hours, many to shelters across Russia.

At the same time, the Kremlin has not reined in bellicose bloggers and commentators who are demanding a brutal retaliation for Kursk or shaming evacuees for not standing and fighting against the foreign invaders. Such critics actually serve a purpose for Mr. Putin. Hawks who call on an authoritarian ruler to be even more authoritarian are a useful foil, presenting the ruler as relatively reasonable.

Though public opinion is hard to gauge in a country where candor is dangerous, some discontent over Kursk has been gleaned on social media, and it does seem that Mr. Putin has been rattled. His irritation with the acting governor was one sign; another was his display of anger when he declared that the Ukrainian initiative undermined the possibility of negotiations. “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities?” he asked, oblivious to the rich irony of his words.

Whether the rant revealed that Mr. Putin was considering negotiations or that he was warning the West that it has to keep Ukraine in check if it wants negotiations is unclear. Mr. Zelensky has said only that the goal was to push the Russians further back from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in Kursk after the initial assault, while to the south, Russian troops are advancing on their next major target, the city of Pokrovsk.

Whatever happens next in this unpredictable war, the importance of the information front must not be underestimated. Any operation that raises Ukrainian morale, bolsters Western support and jolts Mr. Putin’s narrative is a battle won.

Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.

Fed’s Powell says ‘time has come’ for interest rate cuts

Yahoo! Finance

Fed’s Powell says ‘time has come’ for interest rate cuts

Myles Udland and Jennifer Schonberger – August 23, 2024

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sent a straightforward message to markets in a key speech on Friday, saying “the time has come” for the central bank to begin lowering interest rates.

Speaking at the Kansas City Fed’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Powell said: “The time has come for policy to adjust.”

“The direction of travel is clear,” Powell added, “and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks.”

Powell’s speech comes just over three weeks out from the Fed’s Sept. 17-18 meeting, which should see the central bank announce its first interest rate cut since 2020.

Powell acknowledged recent softness in the labor market in his speech and said the Fed does not “seek or welcome further cooling in labor market conditions.”

The July jobs report rattled markets earlier this month, revealing that there were just 114,000 jobs added to the economy last month while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, the highest since October 2021. Data earlier this week also showed that 818,000 fewer people were employed in the US economy as of March, suggesting reports have been overstating the strength of the job market over the last year.

“It seems unlikely that the labor market will be a source of elevated inflationary pressures anytime soon,” Powell said.

Ahead of Powell’s speech, investors had priced in nearly 100% odds the Fed would lower rates next month, with odds on a cut of 0.25% vs. 0.50% standing at roughly two to one.

“Four and a half years after COVID-19’s arrival, the worst of the pandemic-related economic distortions are fading,” Powell said.

“Inflation has declined significantly … Our objective has been to restore price stability while maintaining a strong labor market, avoiding the sharp increases in unemployment that characterized earlier disinflationary episodes when inflation expectations were less well anchored. While the task is not complete, we have made a good deal of progress toward that outcome.”

Powell’s remarks on Friday were reminiscent of those he delivered at Jackson Hole in 2022, in which the Fed chair offered a direct assessment of the economic outlook and, at the time, the need for additional rate increases.

FILE PHOTO: Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve walks in Teton National Park where financial leaders from around the world gathered for the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium outside Jackson, Wyoming, U.S., August 26, 2022. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart — Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, walks in Teton National Park, where financial leaders from around the world gathered for the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium on Aug. 26, 2022. (REUTERS/Jim Urquhart) (Reuters / Reuters)

“At this podium two years ago, I discussed the possibility that addressing inflation could bring some pain in the form of higher unemployment and slower growth,” Powell said.

“Some argued that getting inflation under control would require a recession and a lengthy period of high unemployment. I expressed our unconditional commitment to fully restoring price stability and to keeping at it until the job is done.”

Friday’s speech more or less suggests that the job is indeed done.

“All told, the healing from pandemic distortions, our efforts to moderate aggregate demand, and the anchoring of expectations have worked together to put inflation on what increasingly appears to be a sustainable path to our 2% objective,” Powell said.

Wet Winter Whirlwind; What Farmers’ Almanac Predicts for the 2024-2025 Winter

WJET Erie

Wet Winter Whirlwind; What Farmers’ Almanac Predicts for the 2024-2025 Winter

Joshua Hallenbeck – August 23, 2024

(WJET/WFXP) — Farmers’ Almanac has released its 2024-25 Winter Outlook, describing this winter as a “Wet, Winter, Whirlwind.”

Overall, this description perfectly fits the general trend predicted in the outlook, no region is expected to see higher-than-normal snowfall. This, however, is just a general prediction broken down by regions. A more area-specific list will be released alongside the release of the 2025 edition of the Farmers’ Almanac on August 27th.

It is important to look at the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of these predictions. A study conducted by John E. Walsh and David Allen, published in the 1981 edition of Weatherwise, showed that only 50.7 percent of the monthly temperature forecasts and 51.9 percent of the precipitation forecasts were verified with the correct sign. This is essentially the same as flipping a coin for each day.

Why are the tropics eerily quiet right now? | Tracking the Tropics

This year’s winter outlook is largely affected by a major climate pattern known as La Niña which can cause a major shift in winter weather. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), La Niña is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific, compared to El Niño, which is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific.

La Niña [Click to Expand] || Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

El Niño [Click to Expand] || Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

During a La Niña year, winter temperatures are warmer in the Southeast and cooler in the Northwest. La Niña brings cooler waters off the West Coast, which brings cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface. These cold waters push the Polar Jet Stream northward, increasing the chance of drought in the Southern U.S., and heavy rain and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. According to the National Weather Service, El Niño and La Niña are typically strongest during the period from December to April because the equatorial Pacific sea-surface temperatures are normally warmest at this time of the year

NOAA data reveals July 2024 ranked hottest on record

A La Niña year is also associated with a more severe hurricane season, which is a concern this hurricane season. NOAA previously predicted an 85% chance for an above-normal hurricane season. However, some of the strongest recorded hurricanes occurred during a period known as the neutral phase. Neutral indicates that conditions are near their long-term average.

Despite the atmospheric cooling this pattern presents, the Earth’s average temperatures continue to rise with 2024 on track to be one of the warmest years ever recorded.

Russian Attitudes About Putin Might Be Shifting

The New York Times

Russian Attitudes About Putin Might Be Shifting

Negative remarks on social media have increased since Ukrainian troops launched an incursion, according to a firm that tracks Russian attitudes.

Julian E. Barnes, from Washington – August 22, 2024

A statue with part of its head blown off stands in front of a damaged building. — A heavily damaged statue of Vladimir Lenin in Sudzha, Russia, after Ukrainian troops crossed the border in a counteroffensive this month. Credit…Yan Dobronosov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Negative feelings about President Vladimir V. Putin have appeared to increase across Russia since Ukrainian troops pushed into Russian territory two weeks ago, according to a firm that tracks attitudes in the country by analyzing social media and other internet postings.

While news outlets in Russia have tried to put a more positive spin on the developments in the war, focusing on the Russian government’s humanitarian response, some Russian social media users have expressed discontent.

Many of the online postings, according to the analysis by FilterLabs AI, say Ukraine’s advance is a failure of the Russian government and, more specifically, Mr. Putin.

It is difficult to accurately gauge public opinion in Russia, or any other authoritarian country, because people responding to polls often give answers that they think the government wants. To address that shortcoming, FilterLabs tracks comments on social media sites, internet postings and news media sites, using a computer model to analyze sentiments expressed by ordinary Russians.

Positive attitudes about Mr. Putin took a hit last year after a short-lived armed rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a Russian paramilitary force. But the shift in sentiment has appeared sharper in the days since Ukrainian troops launched their incursion into the Kursk region of western Russia.

“Putin’s response to the incursion was seen as inadequate at best and insulting at worst,” said Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs.

Attitudes toward Mr. Putin remain more positive in Moscow, where Russia keeps a firmer hand on the news media and public debate. But views of Mr. Putin have soured even there, though not as quickly as elsewhere in the country. In Russia’s outlying regions, frustration with the Kremlin is growing, according to the analysis.

American officials cautioned that it was too early to know whether any damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation would be lasting. Mr. Putin’s standing in Russia quickly rebounded after Mr. Prigozhin ended his rebellion, the officials said, and the Russian president has consistently demonstrated an ability to manipulate the public view of himself.

Still, a permanent loss of popularity could complicate the Kremlin’s ability to wage war in Ukraine.

“It is right now difficult to determine the effect of the Ukrainian counteroffensive,” Mr. Teubner said. “But it is clear that is shocking and, for Putin, embarrassing. Kremlin propaganda, spin, and distraction can only do so much in the face of bad news that is widely discussed across Russia.”

Sentiment toward Mr. Putin has fallen sharply in the regions of Russia where the Kremlin focuses its military recruiting efforts. The Kremlin’s recruiting strategy depends on its ability to manage perception of the war.

“If Putin’s prestige and popularity fall in these key regions (especially if Russians feel that the war is going badly), the Kremlin may find it more difficult to fill its military ranks,” the FilterLabs analysis said.

The Kremlin continues to exert influence on how Russia’s national news outlets cover the war, with few running prominent stories, the analysis showed. But regional news outlets are less likely to sugarcoat the news, Mr. Teubner said.

FilterLabs also tracks Russian disinformation. Mr. Teubner said the firm found that the Kremlin began targeting Russians in border regions with a propaganda campaign after the Ukrainian counteroffensive began.

The campaign, which was reminiscent of Soviet propaganda, warned that Ukrainian “psychological operations” were targeting Russians.

But even as localized news sites pushed out the propaganda, they also mixed it with reports of the Ukrainian incursion, information that was harder to find in Moscow. In the Soviet Union, the technique of wrapping bad news in propaganda, Mr. Teubner said, was known as “rotten herring.”

One article, for example, featured paintings of Russian military might even as it chronicled the artillery duel Ukrainian troops were forcing in Kursk.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.