What makes a midwestern city thrive? Immigration and universities. What do midwestern voters want? Not that.
I hope this is fake: A note from an old family friend, declining a invitation to celebrate an anniversary because although it’s a special occasion and they’re old friends, they just can’t spend any time with liberals anymore.
Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) isn’t exempt from sprawling tentacles of Trumpian corruption. They’ve nominated a guy from Accuweather to run the weather service, someone who has lobbied to make NOAA data harder to access for individuals (so that his company can make money processing and displaying it with ads).
After stalling on Obama’s nominees, most notably to the Supreme Court… McConnell advocates for a rule change to make it easier to put his ideologues in federal judiciary positions.Nursing homes in Germany use ostalgie as therapy – that is, recreating communist-era East German scenes for dementia patients who have forgotten everything after about ’89.
Trump
Read these two articles carefully: The NYT interview and the Washington Post article about how it happened. Stated but not underlined in both: The president is deeply unwell, easily swayed by anyone who talks to him, and frequently incoherent. His organization operates a for-profit club in which the wealthy can buy access to him; because he is so easily swayed, there is very little check on corruption beyond how many other competing corrupt influences are pushing in different directions.
The transcript of the interview is terrifying:
I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected.
Theory
Dense but worth the effort, a 1983 Harvard Business Review article of the morality and ethics of business management:
The core of the [Protestant work] ethic, even in its later, secularized form—self-reliance, unremitting devotion to work, and a morality that postulated just rewards for work well done—was undermined by the complete transformation of the organizational form of work itself.
…
It is within this complicated and ambiguous authority structure, always subject to upheaval, that success and failure are meted out to those in the middle and upper middle managerial ranks. Managers rarely spoke to me of objective criteria for achieving success because once certain crucial points in one’s career are passed, success and failure seem to have little to do with one’s accomplishments. Rather, success is socially defined and distributed.
One thing that interests me here is the degree to which the failings and mechanisms covered here have changed and evolved in the intervening decades. Risk avoidance is still a problem, but it’s a widely-acknowledged one with a lot of procedures in place – and a greater willingness (or at least, stated willingness) to accept and learn from failure. Conformity is still there, but different kinds of conformity are rewarded or punished. Quarterly-results-driven shortsightedness? Ooooh boy.
Cultivating optimism
THIS SCIENTIST FIGHTS CRIME. AGAINST BIRDS.
Cultivating joy
DogRates year in review.
Secretly Ironic 