These simple money hacks can save you $$$ - hundred and thousand $$$ annually

1. Take Surveys and Get Paid: earn shopping points for taking surveys, watching videos or playing games at swagbuck.com  - redeem points for cash or gift cards.

2. Discount Movie Tickets: AARP members pay $9.50 for Regal Cinemas ePremiere Tickets purchased online, conditions may apply.

3. Clean Windows Cheap: mix equal parts vinegar and water in a spray bottle for a solution that leaves windows sparkling. Some experts also add a few drops of dishwashing liquid. Save $4.50 or more by not buying window cleaner at the store.

4. Sell To Amazon: the online retailer accepts a slew of old items, including video games, books and Kindle e-readers for trade-in, in exchange for a gift card. Search the Trade-In Store and if your item is listed there, print a free shipping label and send it in.

5. Design your Own Greeting Card: make cards for free at spark.adobe.com/make/card-maker  Save up to $10 a card.

6. Eat For Cheap: get a list of discounts at about 70 restaurants chains at theseniorlist.com – ARRP members save ten percent at Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s Italian Grill and Bonefish Grill. 15% off at Denny’s.

7. Shop Unit Price: focus on costs per ounce not the total price. Example, a 1-liter bottle of seltzer cost 32 cents a pint, versus 55 cents a pint for a 12-ounce can, could save you $10 annually.

8. Get Free eBooks: download nearly 60,000 public domain eBooks, including many classics, at Gutenberg.org – save $3 to $10 per eBook.

9. Mulch For Free: Google your county name and “free mulch” to see if it (or free compost) is offered. Save $3 per 2 cubic feet of mulch or $5 per cubic foot of compost.

10. BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag): a growing number of communities require a 5-cent to 10-cent charge per bag provided by the store. Use your own bags and you could easily save $25 annually.

11. Max Out Couponing: use more than one grocery store app per item. One person combined iBotta, Checkout51 and Shopmium and saved $500 a year.

12. Go Small: research shows when the size of your shopping cart is double, you buy a whopping 40 percent more. Right-size your cart and save up to $233 a month for two.

13. Learn Patterns: Grocery chains put certain products on sale at regular intervals. A store may offer a “buy one, get one free” deal on your favorite ice cream or snack every sixth week. Discover the pattern and easily save $300 annually.

14. Sleep in a Man’s tee: a woman’s sleep shirt costs around $30, but a man’s t-shirt is equally comfortable, save $15.

15. Dilute Shampoo: commercial shampoos are concentrated and may dry out hair if used at full strength. Try diluting with 50 percent water and save up to $15 per bottle.

16. Dine Out For Less: Restaurants.com offer discounted gift certificates to eateries all over the country. Pay $10 for a $25 gift certificate and save $15 on a night out.

17. Discounted Gift Cards: Raise.com sell discounted gift cards 16 percent on average. Buy a $100 gift card for $84 and save $16.

18. Generic Pet Meds: for example, Heartgard Plus cost $43 to treat a large dog for six months. HeartShade Plus, a generic version, has the same active ingredients for $20, save $23.

19. Leverage Your Library Card: at many NY public libraries you can pick up free admission to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, save $25.

20. Round Up and Save: Acorns is an app that automatically rounds up your credit card purchases to the nearest dollar. The extra change gets invested in stocks and bonds. Save and invest $30 a month.

21. Call Before You Pay: banks and credit card companies will usually waive the fee for a rare late payment, save up to $35 for one fee.

22. Host Morning Parties: brunch gatherings can be just as much fun as evening parties, and the foods you serve – eggs, breads – tend to be cheaper than what you serve for dinner. Plus, you likely won’t go through as much wine. Savings:  at least $40 on the food and wine, depending on the menu.

23. Amtrak’s Senior Discount: 65-plus can get 10 percent discount on most Amtrak train travel. The senior discount can’t be combined with other discounts.

24. Skip Rental Car Insurance: most of the time you already have adequate coverage through your personal insurance, check and save up to $40 per day.

25. Stamp Out Stamps: sign up to have all bills paid by automatic withdrawal. If you stop mailing five bills a month, you can save $30 annually on stamps – and avoid the hassle of visiting the post office.

26. Give Your Time As a Gift: write out redeemable coupons for babysitting, free drives to someone who doesn’t drive, or home-cooked meals to someone who could use them, save the $50 or more you might spend on a gift.

27. Use Cruise Control: it can reduce your fuel use by seven percent. If half of your miles are on the highway, that’s a savings of $70 annually.

28. Postseason Stockup Shopping: the best time to replace worn-out clothes, gear or supplies is when their season has just ended. For example, a gas grill at the Home Depot was listed at $299 last summer, then marked down to $249 after the season, savings $50.

29. Use the Same Insurer: companies often charge up to 15 percent less if you buy both home and auto policies from them. You can save over $100 a year on insurance costs.

30. Check Engine belts: broken belts are a major cause of breakdowns. Be sure to check yours before you go on a long trip. Avoid one breakdown and save $100 in towing fees.

31. America the Beautiful Senior Pass: 62 or older, $20 a year will get you and a carload of people admission to more than 2,000 national parks and recreation sites. That’s a saving of $60 over a regular annual pass.

32. Groom Your Own Pup: you can spend $70 at a dog groomer. Plus you have to make an appointment and take the time to go there. Learn to do it yourself – YouTube has instructions for many breeds.

33. Buy Pills to Split: ask you doctor if it’s cheaper to get half the amount of double-strength medication and split each pill into two doses with a $3 pill splitter.  For instance, 60 tablets of the 20mg Paxil cost $14.17 at Costco according to GoodRx.com – but 30 tablets of the 40mg Paxil cost $11.87, you could save $80 to $100 annually.

34. Buy Refilled Ink Cartridges: Amazon listed new cartridges for a HP printer at $82.70 – refilled cartridges were $19.99, savings $62.71.

35. Buy Wine By the Case: most wine stores will take at least ten percent, and you could save $20. And you’ll always have a house-warming gift handy.

36. Seal Your Chimney Flue: as much as 8 percent of your heating bills could be escaping up the chimney. Seal it or install a chimney pillow and save $80 on a $1K heating bill.

37. Check Different Travel Dates: shifting an arrival or departure date by a single day can save you a surprisingly large amount of cash. Flight search engines like Matrix.ITAsoftware.com show lower-priced options. A recent round –trip ticket from NY to LAX was $81 cheaper if you flew a day earlier.

38. Amazon Warehouse: before you buy, see if the item is available at a discount. A Poulan self-propelled lawn mower selling for $300 on Amazon was available on Amazon Warehouse, slightly used, for $210, a savings of $90.

39. Scan for Unused Subscriptions: Truebill.com can help users find subscription services and determine how much they’re paying for them each year, claims that the average user can save $100 or more a year cancelling what they don’t need or renegotiating the bill.

40. Check for Promo Codes: online retailers offer discount codes, check RetailMeNot.com for codes before finalizing a purchase. Recent savings: $31.98 off a Lands’ End dress priced at $79.95 and $47.96 off a pair of Gap men’s jeans and a sweater worth $119.90 – a total of almost $80.

41. Swap Books: list books you want to get rid of on BookMooch.com and get points when you send them to people who request them. Use the points to order used books. Save up to $81 on three   hardcovers.

42. Save on Car Rentals: show your AARP card when you rent a car and save as much as 30 percent with Avis. That would get you $90 off a $300 rental.

43. Buy through Befrugal.com : this website offers coupons and cash back for purchases from 5,000 retailers. A Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon was $1,339 using a $70 coupon, that’s a savings of more than $100 over online retailers.

44. Get a Programmable Thermostat: lowering or raising your home’s temperature by 7 to 10 degrees for eight hours as you sleep can save $100 annually. Get a programmable thermostat so you don’t forget.

45. Use Gas Buddy: the Gas Guru and GasBuddy apps show you prices at all area stations. If gas is $2.85 at one station and $3.09 at another, save $2.40 for every 10 gallons you pump – up to $100 annually.

46. Join a Shave Club: pay about $2 for a razor cartridge at an online shave club like Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club. Save $2.50 or more per cartridge compared with brand name choices bought in a store, or $60 annually.

47. Buy a Refurbished Computer: why pay big bucks for the latest model? Go to sites like DiscountComputerDepot.com and pick up a refurbished laptop with a one-year warranty for $100. That’ll save you at least $100 over a new computer.

48. Ease Your Internet Speed: internet providers always push the newest, faster options, but a basic service (Mbps) is fine for the typical family to surf, email and stream videos. Optimum Online offers that speed at $29.99 a month, save $120 annually.

49. Turn Down Your Water Heater: most water heaters come from the factory set at 140 degrees, hot enough to scald. Turn it down to 120 degrees and save about $60 annually.

50. Get Magazines Cheap: subscriber to lots of magazine? Then consider the Texture app: for one monthly fee, you get access to digital versions of over 200 popular magazine. Save $10 to $50 per subscriptions.

51. Check Airline Consolidators: they buy tickets in bulk and sell them at a discount. A round trip from Boston to London was $419 through AirlineConsolidator.com versus $545 on Aer Lingus, saving $127.

52. Blind-book a Hotel: Hotwire.com offers saving up to 60 percent if you will book before knowing the name of the hotel, that’s $120 saved on a $200 room.

53. Get Gimp for Photo Editing: love to do sophisticated photo editing? Download Gimp for free and save $120 annually over paying $10 per month for Photoshop.

54. Seal Your Home: inspect for leaks at windows and doors with a lighted incense stick, sealing them could cut $1K heating bill by $200.

55. Rent a Dress: need a glamorous dress or evening gown that you only plan to wear once? Don’t buy it, rent it at sites like RentTheRunway.com – a gown that sells for $695 can be rented for $115, savings $580.

56. Use a Digital-Only Bank: it offers better saving rates. The average annual percentage yield (APY) on saving accounts is around 0.08 percent, but online banks offer APY’s around 1.5 percent. If you stash $20K for a year, the earning difference will be $286.

57. Vacation In a Dorm: college overseas rent summer dorm rooms. In Perugia, Italy, a week at Case Monteripido costs $260 versus $430 for the Primavera Mini Hotel. Save $170, go to UniversityRooms.com

58. Buy Staples by Subscription: use a service like Amazon’s Subscribe & Save to save up to 15 percent on goods you buy frequently, delivered on a set schedule. Sample savings: $15.25 per month off a total of $101.68 for a typical mix of items, that’s $183 annually.

59. Ski For Cheap: multi-mountain passes from websites such as EpicPass.com or MountainCollective.com can save you big. IkonPass.com charges an adult $699 for eight days of skiing at 26 destinations. That’s $175 less than eight tickets at the window.

60. Get a Tankless Water Heater: they’re up to 30 percent more efficient than tanks that waste energy keeping water hot all the time. They typical family spends $500 annually heating water, you could save $150.

61. Switch to a New Credit Card: AARP credit card from Chase gives you $100 if you spend $500 in your first three months – and three percent case back at restaurants and gas stations. Save $103 on the bonus  and a $100 meal.

62. Don’t’ Drench Your Lawn: it needs just one inch of water per week, including rain. Sprinklers often deliver much more than that. Put a coffee mug under the sprinkler and stick in a ruler when you are done. If you collected 2 inches of water, you are spending about $158 a month during the summer on wasted water.

63. Take a Defensive Driving Course: many auto insurers will shave as much as 10 percent off your annual premiums if you take a course. AARP offers a Smart Driver course online for members, annual insurance savings: $200.

64. Share Season Tickets:  arrange with your seat neighbors tot trade tickets you can’t use. Save $200 on a pair of NFL tickets.

65. Get Retroactive Refunds: stores will refund the difference if the price drops soon after you buy an item. The Earny app finds and claims price drops. Savings: $220 when that laptop you ordered drops in price.

66. Market Your Old Electronics: many once-popular items have become collectibles. For example, a first-generation iPod was going for $150 on eBay recently.

67. Clean Your Trap: a dryer can lose 75 percent of its efficiency if lint clogs its trap. Clean it after every use and save $101 on the annual cost of operating a dryer.

68. Want a New TV for the Superbowl? The best deals often in the weeks before the game. Last year Best Buy price for a 65-inch Sony dropped by $400.

69. Raise Your Deductible: boosting the deductible on a homeowners policy from $500 to $1K could save you 25 percent, according to the Insurance Information Institute, or $307 off on an average $1,228 policy.

70. Find Free Wi-Fi: download Wi-FiFinder app that locates nearby locations where WiFi is free.

71. Free Recyclables: join your local chapter at Freecycle.org – then see if someone wants to give away stuff you are about to buy. The NYC chapter recently listed a free “hardly used” portable crib that cost $60 new.

72. Swap Clothes Online: RehashClothes.com has photos of more than 10,000 items of clothing that its members want to swap. See something you like? Offer a piece of clothing in exchange, and if the offer is accepted, swap through the mail. No money involved except postage. You might save $100 on a nice dress or jacket.

73. Stream Free Movies: go to Kanopy.com – if you belong to one of the 4,000 participating public libraries and campuses, you can stream 30,000 movies from free. If you watch one movie a week, you’ll save about $156 annually over renting movies online.

74. Get it Fixed For Free: at RepairCafe.org you can find an event near you where volunteers help fix a variety of household items that folks can’t fix themselves. You could save $100 by faxing that old lamp.

75. Swap Services: sign up at U-Exchnage.com to trade your talent for someone else’s. You might save $350 the next time you need a plumber, if you can, say, handle his taxes.

76. Join Silver Sneakers: ask your health care provider if you are eligible. The program offers free gym membership to folks 65-plus. Save $700 per year, on average.

77. Save on Bulbs: replace 40 incandescent bulbs with LEDs and you could save $1,500 over their ten-year life span.

78. Donate Stock, not Cash: say you give $5K worth of stock to your place of worship that you paid $1K years ago. If you sold the shares then donated the cash, you’d owe $1K in capital gains taxes if you’re in the 25 percent tax bracket. Donate the stock and you avoid the capital gains tax.

79. Drink the Office Coffee: if you spend $4 a day at Starbucks that $1K a year just for workdays. Avoid Starbucks and save $1K annually.

80. Seek Out Property Tax Breaks: most states offer some type of property tax exemption for homeowners over 65, including rebates, caps on assessed value, and property tax rate or assessment freezes. NY for example, will lower your property tax by 50 percent if you make $29K or less annually. That break could save you $7K annually.

81. Haggle with Your Real Estate Agent: there is no law that says agents must get 6 percent of the selling price. In today’s seller’s market, agents might accept splitting 5 percent. Save $5K selling a $500K home.

82. Wait on a Mattress Sale: never buy a department store mattress at regular price. Those stores regularly have steep discounts. A recent sale at a national chain store saw the price of a queen-size mattress and box spring set marked down from $3,589 to $1,749. Savings total $1,780.

83. Dodge Convenience Fees: many parents don’t realize until too late that lots of colleges charge a fee averaging 2.62 percent if you pay tuition and other costs with a credit card. Avoid a $1,310 fee on a $50K annual college bill or private school buy avoiding using your credit card.

84. Pay for Performance Not Prestige: go with Toyota, Nissan or Honda, not high-end Lexus, Infiniti or Acura models from the same manufacturers. A 2018 Toyota Camry XLE V6 listed at $34,400 for example, has the same engine as a 2018 Lexus ES 350 that lists for $38,950. Car comparison sites like Edmunds.com give them nearly identical ratings. Savings total $4,550.

85. Shorten Your Mortgage: the average mortgage rate in June was 4.78 percent for 30 years and 4.17 percent for 15 years. A $200K mortgage would cost you $1,047 a month for 30 years or $1,496 a month for 15 years. Yes, that’s more, but the 15-year loan saves you almost $108,000 in interest, or an average of $7,200 each year for 15 years.

86. Drive Don’t Fly: that is, if your family vacation is less than 500 miles away. Four tickets from Washington, DC to Cincinnati over a recent week cost about $315 each. Gas for driving would have been under $70. That would save you $1,190 – and you’d have your car and gear with you.

87. Take a Farming Vacation: learn about organic farming and enjoy a trip overseas by volunteering to work with World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A room and food are free. You could easily save $1,500 over a week at hotels and restaurants.

88. Negotiate Car Lease: always make a deal based on the full price of the lease, not the monthly rate. You can negotiate among dealerships based on overall cost, and go with the best deal. Save $1K over the lease of a car.

89. Cut College Costs: state universities charge by the credit hour but accept credits from community colleges. Twelve credit hours at the University of Maryland, for example, cost $4,224. Take the same basic classes at nearby Montgomery College for $1,728. Save $2,496.

90. Free Hearing Test: take a confidential hearing test by phone every year.  Go to aarp.org/hearing

91. Save on British Airways: AARP members save $65 to $200 on tickets bought online to over 130 cities.

92. Save on Cirque Du Soleil: AARP members save 15 to 20 percent on tickets to select shows, some conditions may apply.

93. Seniors can Save with Grocery Coupons: AARP members can print free coupons from leading brands at the Grocery Coupon Center powered by Coupons.com

Reprinted from AARP Bulletin, July 2018.

Origins of the Right To Privacy and the U.S. Supreme Court

In 1948, the District of Columbia, in an arrangement with Muzak, the company that sells background music for stores and hotel lobbies, began piping radio broadcasts into the city's trolleys and buses. The broadcasts were mostly music, with some commercials and announcements, and were not loud enough to prevent riders from talking to one another. On the other hand, riders could not not hear them. Complaints were received, and a survey was duly commissioned. The survey found that ninety-two per cent of bus and trolley riders did not have a problem with the broadcasts. So they continued.

Two customers, however, chose to take a stand. They were Franklin Pollak and Guy Martin, and they happened to be lawyers. These gentlemen sued the city. Being compelled to listen to a radio program not of their choosing on a public bus, they maintained, represented an unlawful deprivation of liberty under the Constitution. The case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

The Court handed down its decision in 1952. A bus, it said, is not like a home. It is a public space, and in a public space the public interest prevails. As long as the city government has the comfort, safety, and convenience of its riders at heart, it can run its transportation system anyway it wants. Pollak and Martin had no more right to demand quiet on the bus than they had to tell the driver where to stop.

The vote was 7-1. One Justice, Felix Frankfurter, recused himself. Frankfurter explained that his own aversion to Muzak was so visceral-"my feelings are so strongly engaged as a victim," he wrote-that he was incapable of attaining the degree of disinterestedness necessary to render a judgment. (This posture is pretty much Felix Frankfurter in a nutshell.)

The lone dissenter was William O. Douglas. Douglas was a judicial renegade, with little concern for precedent. "We write," he began his dissent, "on a clean slate." Finding no rule, he provided one. Freedom was the issue, he explained, and "the beginning of all freedom" is "the right to be let alone"-that is, the right to privacy. To Douglas, more was at stake than annoying background music. Forcing people to listen to the radio, he said, is a step on the road to totalitarianism. If you can tell people what to listen to, you can tell people what to think. "The right of privacy," Douglas concluded, "is a powerful deterrent to anyone who would control men's minds."

                Douglas did not coin the phrase "the right to be let alone." It appears in one of the most famous law-review articles ever written, "The Right to Privacy," by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. (Warren and Brandeis took it from an 1879 treatise on tort law.) And "The Right to Privacy" is where Sarah Igo begins "The Known Citizen" (Harvard), her mighty effort to tell the story of modern America as a story of anxieties about privacy

Igo's first book, "The Averaged American," was a well-received study of how twentieth-century social researchers created the idea of a "mass public." Her new effort has to be mighty because, as she admits at the start, privacy is a protean concept-"elastic" is the term she uses-and, once you start looking for it, it pops up almost everywhere. Every new technological, legal, and cultural development seems to have prompted someone to worry about the imminent death of privacy. In the nineteenth century, people were shocked by the introduction of postcards, which invited strangers to read your mail. Mail was supposed to be private.

                The Muzak case is not in Igo's book, but plenty else is. She takes on telegraphy, telephony, instantaneous photography (snapshots), dactyloscopy (fingerprinting), Social Security numbers, suburbanization, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, abortion rights, gay liberation, human subject research, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, "60 Minutes," Betty Ford, the 1973 PBS documentary "An American Family," the Starr Report, the memoir craze, blogging, and social media. Igo is an intelligent interpreter of the facts, and her intelligence frequently leads her to the conclusion that "privacy" lacks any stable significance. Privacy is associated with liberty, but it is also associated with privilege (private roads and private sales), with confidentiality (private conversations), with nonconformity and dissent, with shame and embarrassment, with the deviant and the taboo (Igo does not go there), and with subterfuge and concealment.

                Sometimes, as in Douglas’s dissent, privacy functions as a kind of default right when an injury has been inflicted and no other right seems to suit the case. Douglas got a second crack at applying his theory of privacy as a constitutional right in 1965, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut. At issue was a Connecticut law that made the use of contraception a crime. “Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights,” Douglas wrote for the Court, “have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” The right to privacy was formed out of such emanations.

                What places contraception beyond the state’s police powers – its right to pass laws to protect the health and welfare of its citizens? The answer, Douglas said, is something that predates the Constitution: the institution of marriage. “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred,” he wrote. It is beyond politics and even beyond law. (Douglas, incidentally, was married four times.) Eight years later, Griswold was a key precedent in another case about reproductive rights, Roe v. Wade. “The right to privacy,” the Court said in that case, “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

Excerpt from “Nowhere to Hide – Why Do We Care About Privacy” by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, June 19, 2018.

   

Kendrick Ascendant

The Gospel According to Kendrick by Lisa Robinson (excerpt)

I ask Kendrick how he balances his enormous success and celebrity with his extreme work ethic. “You can get put in an environment that can bring down your integrity and your fight,” he says. “What gives me an advantage in my upbringing is the duality of seeing one of the most beautiful moments of me being 6 years old, to the most tragic moment of being 13 or 14, and make that connection so the person [listening] can really see the conflict. It was a mindfuck, for sure. I would wake up one morning, and it would be cartoons and cereal and walking back from school. And a 4 P.M., we’d be having a house party ‘til 11 P.M.  . . . and people [were] shooting each other outside the door. That was my lifestyle. And it’s not only mine; it’s so many other indviduals’. And I wanted to tell that story.”

I ask him about the guns in his Piru (aka Bloods) neighborhood in Compton, and he says, “I have compassion for, and more understanding rather frustration with my homies, because I know it’s not 100 percent their fault. When I look at how society has shaped out communities, it’s been generations passed down of putting people in cages to battle each other.”

Vanity Fair, August 2018

Summer of Rage by Rebecca Traister

Whose anger is considered righteous, and whose is condemned as uncivil and dangerous?

Look at how the Democratic Party leadership freaked out when California representative Maxine Waters told supporters that if they saw "anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere." Waters wasn't urging violence; she was appealing for assembly and protest of the cruel separation of migrant families. And she has a long history of respecting the fury of the powerless.

Back in 1992, when looting and fires followed the acquittal of four white cops in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, Waters was in her first term as a congresswoman representing parts of South Central Los Angeles: "I accept the responsibility of asking people not to endanger their lives;' she said. "I am not asking people not to be angry:' She labeled the events not as a riot but an "insurrection;' recognizing that the unleashed wrath of the oppressed is a form of political rebellion, one not so distant from the cherished revolution of 1776.

Yet in 2018, leaders of Waters' own party-Senator Chuck Schumer and the House's Nancy Pelosi-saw fit to censure her publicly and didn't bother to defend her when the president, in a tweet, falsely accused Waters of advocating "harm to [his] supporters" and grimly admonished: "Be careful what you wish for Max!"

To publicly rebuke a black woman's endorsement of protest and not the white male president's implicit call to violence against her is to play to the exact same impulses that Trump does: racist and sexist anxiety about noncompliant women and people of color. (And yes, some upholders of minority power are themselves women-women working in service of a brutal white patriarch.) Even left-wing hero Bernie Sanders opined about the Trumpites' "right to go into a restaurant and have dinner:' To hear Sanders-who in 2016 was extravagantly extolled for channeling the anger of the electorate (unlike one Hillary Clinton)-trying to douse another form of righteous rage was pretty rich.

But of course, the fury the press and political Establishment in 2016 deemed so important, so American, was that of white men: mad because the economy wasn't working for them as it once did, but also mad because of a fantasized sense of devaluation in a country that had elected one black president and was considering a woman for the job.

The hand-wringing over white men is what has kept newspapers printing endless stories about the unwavering devotion of Trump's base while ignoring the grassroots rage spreading through the majority: the young, often female, and often women-of-color candidates who've been streaming into American politics for the past year and a half, winning in special elections and Democratic primaries from Virginia to Nebraska to the Bronx.

reprinted from the Intelligencer, New York magazine, July 9, 2018

The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege by Ken Wytsma

Is privilege real or imagined?

The story of race and privilege in America is only picking up speed. More and more people are anxious and desire to go deeper to understand more specifically why America is the way she is and, more importantly, what we can do to intentionally promote unity and equality, starting with the church.

It's clear that issues of race and equality have come to the forefront in our nation's consciousness. Every week yet another incident involving racial tension splashes across headlines and dominates our news feeds. But it's not easy to unpack the origins of these tensions, and perhaps we wonder whether any of these issues really has anything to do with us. Ken Wytsma, founder of the Justice Conference, understands these questions. He has gone through his own journey of understanding the underpinnings of inequality and privilege. In this timely, insightful book Wytsma unpacks what we need to know to be grounded in conversations about today's race-related issues. And he helps us come to a deeper understanding of both the origins of these issues and the reconciling role we are called to play as witnesses of the gospel. Inequality and privilege are real. The Myth of Equality opens our eyes to realities we may have never realized were present in our society and world. And we will be changed for the better as a result.

“There is a lot of confusion around issues of race and privilege,” say Ken. “Far too often, people, in the dominant culture or evangelicals, either don’t understand the complexity of race, their complicity in the systems and structures that have oppressed others, or their biblical responsibility with regard to their neighbors.”

48 hours in Seattle

The first impression upon arriving in Seattle is how overwhelming green everything is. No wonder it is called the “Emerald City”.  Our flight arrived on time and while we only had carry-on as to avoid the luggage carousel, it took about 20 minutes to walk from the gate to the outside of the terminal (what felt like two miles – be forewarned).  The cab to downtown was $45 (including a $5 tip); but for the more adventurous, there is a “SkyLink” monorail from the airport to downtown for $3 (but it is a 38 minute ride).

We planned to visit the most memorial sites in Seattle, which included the Space Needle and the Pikes Place Market – but to avoid the drama and crowds, plan your visit for early in the morning or at the end of the day.  We walked Pikes Market for about three hours, slowly visiting almost a hundred stalls and shops.  Barbara was so happy to purchase a handmade leather belt customize to her size and she picked out the buckle.  The craftsman guaranteed the belt for a lifetime and we believe Barbara will be happy with it for at least this lifetime.

We ended our first day’s visit at Pikes Place Market with a stop at the first Starbucks café.  There was a line and about a 20 minute wait.  It offers the same coffee you can find at any of the 27,00 Starbucks cafes (I suspect that more than half are in Seattle) – but the real reason for the visit is to obtain a Starbuck’s mug unique to that first store.  I saw one person purchase the ten mug limit - I guess to give as gifts.

Visiting Seattle for the first time requires a visit to the top of the Space Needle – yes it is a tourist trap, but the view is worth the price of admission ($28 adult). Be mindful, that unless you arrive first thing in the morning or much later in the evening, there could be a one-hour wait to buy tickets and another one-hour wait to take the 42-second elevator ride to the observation deck. We did the Space Needle early in the morning and avoided the lines plus we purchased a combo ticket to admission to Chihuly Glass Gardens located at the base of the Needle, which Barbara enjoyed more than the Needle.

For the afternoon of the second day we took an enjoyable two-hour live-narrated one way cruise through the Chittenden Locks.  While it was a little windy on the top deck, seeing Seattle from the water was truly enjoyable.  We purchased our tickets in advance.

For food, we can recommend three stops, Tai Tung, 665 S. King Street, excellent Chinese cuisine.  Ask to sit at the “Bruce Lee booth” if available, which is where Bruce ate lunch on almost a daily basis.  Oddfellows Cafe, 1525 Tenth Avenue, the best Biscuits & Eggs in Seattle. It is next to Elliott Bay Bookstore, the largest independent book store in Seattle, where I spend three hours browsing for books.  Top Pot Doughnuts, 2120 Fifth, their custom donuts were heavenly, which President Obama visited when he was in Seattle.

The Hitler Vortex - How American Racism Influenced Nazi Thought

The Hitler Vortex - How American Racism Influenced Nazi Thought
by Alex Ross

"History teaches, but has no pupils," the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it's said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue includes "I Was Hitler's Pilot," "I Was Hitler's Chauffeur," "I Was Hitler's Doctor,"" Hitler, My Neighbor," "Hitler Was My Friend," "He Was My Chief," and "Hitler Is No Fool." Books have been written about Hitler's youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in interior design ("Hitler at Home").

Why do these books pile up in such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany's plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler's undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his creation-finalized after "innumerable attempts," according to "Mein Kampf") Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism," declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not only in S&M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag wrote, a "response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality." Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler's negative mystique.

Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world's goodhearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler's darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had "gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.  "When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for "living space" in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman's"Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi RaceLaw" (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in "Mein Kampf," Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by "excluding certain races from naturalization." Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as "the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call 'radical evil."' But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.

The vast literature on Hitler and Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War?  The second is sociopolitical: How did a civilized society come to embrace Hitler's extreme ideas? The third has to do with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler's rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar.

Since 1945, the historiography of Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an "opportunist entirely without principle." German thinkers often skirted the issue of Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt's "The Origins ofTotalitarianism" suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the loneliness of the modern subject.

In the sixties and seventies, as Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis - the idea that Germany had followed a "special path" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop along healthy liberal democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying that Nazism was something that he did to us. Mommsen outlined a "cumulative radicalization' of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned as a "weak dictator," ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester's 1968 book,"The Arms of Krupp," ends with a lurid image of "the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting."

The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became known as the Historikerstreit ("Historians' Dispute"), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim Fest, who had published the first big German language biography of Hitler, also stood apart from the Sonderweg school. By portraying the Fuhrer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to accept responsibility for the Nazi terror.

Outside Germany, many critiques of the Sonderweg thesis came from the left. The British scholars GeoffEley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book "The Peculiarities of GermanHistory," questioned the "tyranny of hindsight"-the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform, public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair or the Tiszaeszlar blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also questioned whether elitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the Germans.

Ian Kershaw's monumental two volume biography (1998-2000) found a plausible middle ground between "strong" and "weak" images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of "working towards the Fuhrer": when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler's leadership go back and forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated- and, for the moment, rejected- the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

People have been trying to fathom Hitler's psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book "ExplainingHitler," gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother's death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or-a personal favorite- that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the "lost safe-deposit box" mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a "man without qualities." Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler's private life. The first volume, "Hitler:Ascent 1889-1939," was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich's Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. "The putative void was part of Hitler's persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader," Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler's love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men's home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer's psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann's startling essay "Bruder Hitler," the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title "That Man Is My Brother." Aligning Hitler's experience with his own, Mann wrote of a "basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity-based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing."

The claims of "Mein Kampf" notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment's commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany's "inner internationalism."

The historian Thomas Weber, who recountedHitler's soldier years in the 2010 book "Hitler's First War," has nowwritten "Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi" (Basic), a study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful, though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the Army because, as Weber writes, it "provided a raison d'etre for his existence." As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was no sign of the Fuhrer-to-be.

The unprecedented anarchy of postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine; politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in "The Vanquished: Why the First World WarFailed to End" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), emphasizes the whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had "broken with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of Wilson's Fourteen Points for a 'just peace.' "The harshness of the terms of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric.

The day after Germany ratified the treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a "tired stray dog looking for a master." Having noticed Hitler's gift for public speaking, Mayr installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers' Party, a tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks. Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

If Hitler's radicalization occurred as rapidly as this-and not all historians agree that it did-the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler's embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich's "Hitler: Biographie," a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler's skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, "It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity."

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career. At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first part of "Mein Kampf," in which he completed the construction of his world view.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early tl1irties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizesthis dismal period in "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power andthe Downfall of the Weimar Republic" (Henry Holt). Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself. At Stalin's urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy-the "social fascists. "The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, "the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again."

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word "German" out of his title. On the book's final page, he lays his cards on the table: "Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way-as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality-strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar." Yes, it does.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his metier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means. This is the focus of WolframPyta's "Hitler: Der Kiinstler als Politiker und Feldherr"("The Artist as Politician and Commander"), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic-Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann - Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels's propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it. "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple," he wrote.

The true artist does not compromise. Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of Hitler's infamous "prophecy" of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: "I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. ... I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again-if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler's "prophecy" was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an "almost uncanny" fashion. This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. "Concentration camps were not invented in Germany," Hitler said in 1941. "It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations." The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin's slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions - lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler's "scientific anti-Semitism," as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler's ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a Russian forgery from around 1900, fueled the Nazis' paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, "Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?" The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin's deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of TimothySnyder's profoundly disturbing 2010 book, "Bloodlands," which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman's "Hitler's American Model," with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel's "The American West and the NaziEast," a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kiihl's "The Nazi Connection," which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to "eliminate" or "extirpate" Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, "Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property." General Philip Sheridan spoke of "annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction. "To be sure, others promoted more peaceful-albeit still repressive-policies. The historian Edward B.Westermann, in "Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars"(Oklahoma), concludes 'that, because federal policy never officially mandated the "physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics," this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America's knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be "our Mississippi," he said. "Europe-and not America will be the land of unlimited possibilities." Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands-tens of millions of them-would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels's less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler's regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public relations strategy-an "everybody does it "justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. "Race Law in the United States," a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featuredthem in "The Great Gatsby." (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 tract "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy," says, "The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be will be utterly submerged.") California's sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon- B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso-a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, "Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers. "Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Evian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it "astounding" that other countries would decry Germany's treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who "believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals." Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim's "Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the NationalSecurity State" (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered "demoralizing"); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists' backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a "first class cyanide fumigating job."

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, "Given its billion or so users, You Tube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century. "When I did a search for "Hitler" on You Tube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled "Best Hitler Documentary in COLOR!" - the British production "Hitler in Color." A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them." Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler's strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard-the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler's malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven rightwing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Bruning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a "vague notion of being reserved for something else," may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.  

The New Yorker, April 30, 2018.

Redemption: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Last 31 Hours by Joseph Rosenbloom

    In the summer of 1968, the city of Memphis was still reeling from the shock and horror of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As a young reporter interning at the Commercial Appeal, Joseph Rosenbloom vowed to one day write the story of the last hours leading up to King's death. Returning to Memphis between 2006 and 2014, Rosenbloom interviewed two dozen people connected to the events of that fateful day. The result is Redemption, which Charles Blow of the New York Times hails as "immersive, humanizing, and demystifying."

    Rosenbloom, a former Frontline investigative reporter, examines in detail the last thirty-one hours and twenty-eight minutes of King's life, from the bomb threat against him that delayed his flight from Atlanta on the morning of April 3, 1968 to his murder the following night. Drawing on fresh material from the recently opened King archives elucidated other facets of the story, including a lack of progress towards the launch of the Poor People's Campaign and King's state of mind in the spring of 1968. By digging into the hearing transcripts of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Memphis police records, Rosenbloom highlights how a previously unreported lapse in police security left King vulnerable. Police director Frank Holloman received warning calls that something was liable to happen to King in Memphis—yet he neglected to notify King of the threats and only provided security for King and his team for 6 hours after their arrival in town. All these years later, reports Rosenbloom, African-American security officer Ed Redditt, who was assigned to a surveillance team monitoring King from a distance, still feels anguish that had he been adequately guarding King, he might have been able to prevent the assassination.

    Revealing the accumulating toll the movement was taking on King, who was emotionally and physically exhausted, Rosenbloom examines the extraordinary pressure he was under to recruit volunteers and raise funds for the Poor People's Campaign, his ambitious project to eliminate poverty in the United States. He had spoken out against the Vietnam War and was facing blowback from the Johnson administration and dissension within his staff, while rioting had spread throughout the nation's cities and there was a growing perception that King was "old news" compared to the new Black Power movement.

    Rosenbloom underscores how dangerous it was for King and his associates to venture into Memphis. King knew little of the city’s political and racial environment, yet he was determined to organize a peaceful march. At the same time, he was trying to broker talks with a local Black Power group, the Invaders, In the hopes that they would not only keep the peace, but also provide security as parade marshals during a violence-free march. Rosenbloom details how King, his mood increasingly darkening, was unable to convince the invaders to commit unequivocally to nonviolence. "He was trying to redeem his reputation as a nonviolent leader by leading a nonviolent march in Memphis," reflects Rosenbloom. "He was drawing deeply on his faith in the redemptive power of sacrifice for a noble cause, as he risked his life—a faith rooted In the biblical example of Jesus."

In vivid detail, Rosenbloom recreates the city of Memphis, the Lorraine Hotel, and the cast of characters surrounding King. There is Mayor Henry Loeb, who was unwilling to negotiate a settlement to end the garbage workers' strike; King's legendary local lawyer, Lucius Burch, who worked with King to fight the federal injunction against his proposed march; his brother, A.D.; his wife Coretta Scott King with whom he regularly talked on the phone; and his staff and fellow activists, including Dorothy Cotton, Ralph Abernathy, Bernard Lee, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson. Rosenbloom also writes of then-Senator Georgia Davis, who arrived in the pre-dawn hours of April 4^'^ and spent the king with King, momentarily lifting his spirits.

    Rosenbloom also traces the story of James Earl Ray, a petty criminal and drifter who tracks King through news reports and eerily makes his way to Memphis. There, writes Rosenbloom, Ray set up the perfect sniper's nest in the bathroom of a derelict rooming house across from the Lorraine Hotel. Crouching near the window, Ray posed a Gamemaster 760 rifle on the ledge, and waited to kill the nation's foremost civil rights leader.

    The book culminates with King's now-famous and prophetic "From the Mountaintop" speech at Mason Temple, during which he was often overcome with emotion as he exhorted his audience to understand that the choice today was between nonviolence and "nonexistence." Then his speech took a highly personal turn, notes Rosenbloom. "it was unusual for King to dwell openly on the depth of his despair as he pondered his own death. This night in Memphis, however, he seemed near panic, anxious that he might be the target of an assassin's bullet at any moment."

About the Author: Joseph Rosenbloom is an award-winning journalist who has been a staff reporter for the Boston Globe, an investigative reporter for Frontline, and a senior editor for Inc. magazine. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, American Prospect, among other publications, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

   http://www.amazon.com/dp/0807083380/?tag=kappabetasigmach

Studying Text - "Learning is the process of turning information into knowledge"

“Learning is the process of turning information into knowledge.  That is, establishing information in your memory that can be recalled and used.  The two main strategies are repetition and elaboration.”[1]  “While the Common Core State Standards share many features and concepts with existing standards, the new standards also represent a substantial departure from current practice in a number of respects.”[2]

The Common Core Standards set consistent and clear expectations for what students must know at the completion of each grade from Kindergarten through high school.  The standards establish expectations in three academic areas: mathematics, English language arts, and Literacy.  “The literacy standards establish reading and writing expectations for students in social studies, science, and technology. These standards provide few specifics on what students need to read or write, focusing instead on how students should read and write in these courses and how to evaluate what qualifies as good writing.”[3]  There are a number of fundamental literacy components in the Common Core Standards that educators, students, and parents should focus on adopting.  They include: improving reading comprehension, honing writing skills, and cultivating speaking and listening skills.  “Instructional materials will need to challenge students to read and understand more complex texts, build vocabulary, and extract details from texts to use as supporting material in essays and other written work.”[4]

“What I find troubling is the lack of concern of what a colleague of mine calls unwarranted self-regard.[5]

Marlene Zuk is a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota and has published several treatises on evolution and science.  A reviewer of her book “Paleofantasy – What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live” wrote, “As Zuk compellingly argues, such beliefs incorrectly assume that we’re stuck—finished evolving—and have been for tens of thousands of years. She draws on fascinating evidence that examines everything from adults’ ability to drink milk to the texture of our ear wax to show that we’ve actually never stopped evolving. Our nostalgic visions of an ideal evolutionary past in which we ate, lived, and reproduced as we were “meant to” fail to recognize that we were never perfectly suited to our environment. Evolution is about change, and every organism is full of trade-offs.[6]  Zuk’s article regarding student self-esteem is along similar lines of thought.  That students de-couple their own level of intelligence and reasoning from test scores or exam results.  Zuk states, “Maybe it’s all that self-esteem this generation of students was inculcated with as youngsters, or maybe it’s the emphasis on respecting everyone else’s opinion, to the point where no answer, even a mathematical one, can be truly wrong because that might offend the one who gave it.”[7]  While her opinion is forceful and direct, it is opinion and not fact.  Students may or may not on the whole have high sense of self-esteem.  Equally students have a low sense of self-esteem and are in a critical phase of self-identity and self-confidence which compounds their ability to learn or properly engage in the classroom.  Issues of high self-esteem are not nearly as important as educational resources and supportive instructional curriculum.

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[1] Londe. The Biology of Learning. 1

[2] Rothman. Nine Ways the Common Core Will Change Classroom Practice.

[3] California Common Core State Standards, http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/finalelaccssstandards.pdf

[4] Idib.

[5] Zuk. Right, Wrong..What’s the Dif?

[6] http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=24733

[7] Idib.