This week's notes: Optimist; my reading table; U.S. House; McCarthyism; national urgency; Front Line; law in the age of globalism and localism; that impractical college course; social democracy; voting; your library.

Optimist, 16 Sep. Link here. From CPR with love. Relax and compose yourself with the Washington Post's annual travel photo contest winners. A "blue zone" liberal moves into the "red zone" of the Ozarks. Tiara to helmet: quite a homecoming weekend. Hamilton, performed by three high school students at the Kennedy Center.

What I'm reading. Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, 1998, Random House. A late 20th century look at how the ever-moving western frontier shaped America. First, there was Frederick Jackson Turner's seminal essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."
     I first ran into Kaplan in his Balkan Ghosts, during the turbulent times after Yugoslavia disintegrated. This sent me back even further to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) by the long-before-her-time travel writer, Dame Rebecca West.

Flipping the House. No, not in the HGTV sense; rather, as in giving Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives on November 6th. The linked story is set in Hollywood, but the trend is being felt in other areas/states. Donors,  including those with deep pockets are donating to individual candidates in carefully selected districts, not donating as much to the national party's coffers. The story opens with a fundraiser in Hollywood, CA, for a female candidate in southeastern PA.

McCarthyism, then and now. Richard Cohen's column. Then: the late Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy of WI; now, Republican U.S. House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of CA. Then: an untruthful, virulent anti-communist witch hunter; now, a trusted confident of less-than truthful president. Pick your poison.

National urgency, then and now. Michael Morell, former deputy and twice acting director of the CIA. Then: the terrorist attack of 9-11; now: "...perhaps the most daunting the United States has faced since World War II, is how to respond to the rise of China....China’s military is also undergoing its most profound organizational reforms since the modern nation’s founding in 1949. Beijing is better capable of projecting military power than ever."     

     Morell contends, 

"The question of how an established power deals with the rise of a new global power is one at least as old as Thucydides. It is one the United States needs to answer, and answer soon.

We have not yet found a long-term strategy. But the status quo is not an option because, every day, China grows in confidence that it can go its own way....Personally, I remain hopeful that a deal may be possible — but it will take the United States convincing China that if it wants to succeed in the world, it still needs us.

     Increased military preparedness? Tighter Far Eastern alliances? Higher tariffs to lower the trade surplus with (and hurt) their "authoritarian political system and mixed economic system?"

Front Line, Dayton, OH.  Last Tuesday's "Front Line" looked at the myriad of problems facing a city that was once at the forefront of American inventiveness and ingenuity. The Wright Brothers, aviation, National Cash Register, and General Motors all left town, and then came the 2008 crash and the opioid epidemic. Wage stagnation, job loss, and the relatively few new jobs have barely allowed the city to keep its head above water. The city's past losses and the opioid crisis have left the city struggling to find employable workers.
     The story of Dayton's decline, fall, and very slow recovery are the too prevalent story across the rust belt heartland. The president's grandiose claims of job growth and wage increases have largely passed Dayton by.

Law: America and the world. Associate Justice Stephen Breyer writes that U.S. Courts cannot ignore the world. Yet, America is being steadily led onto an isolationist path, one devoid of some of its long-time allies. A good path?

Two general tendencies are at work in many fields of human endeavor, including politics, government, and law. On the one hand, there are the forces of globalism, internationalism, and interdependence among nations. On the other hand, there are the forces of localism pulling us toward our communal, even tribal, roots....I wish to suggest that such a view is wrong—that the global and the local both refer to well-functioning features of the modern world....When it comes to matters of law, the best way to preserve American values may well be to take account of what happens abroad.

Humanities courses. Enlightening? Perhaps. But, will it increase your after-graduation paycheck? Thoughts from Ronald J. Daniels, the President of Johns Hopkins University.

Last fall, on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, where I serve as president, I happened to overhear a conversation among a group of students. One student was telling the others that he had decided not to enroll in an introductory philosophy course that he had sampled during the “add/drop” period at the start of the semester. The demands of his major, he said, meant that he needed to take “practical” courses. With an exaggerated sigh, he mused that “enlightenment” would simply have to wait. For now, employability was paramount. What can you do? His friends shrugged. You gotta get a job....At many universities across the country, beset by low enrollments and a lack of university support, the number of humanities course offerings and faculty members are dwindling.

Looking back, he thinks he should have butted in to remind the students that "...[T]he founders of companies such as LinkedIn, Slack and Flickr, [and others] who are among the many tech entrepreneurs with degrees in the humanities, and who credit that training for their success."

Social Democracy. E.J. Dionne worries about the future of social democratic governments world-wide. Gains by the Democrat Sweden party, with its rightist, anti-immigrant tendencies, is the latest move to the right in Europe.

The rise of Donald Trump was shocking, but it was not a one-off. The forces that brought him to power have parallels across democracies as fears about immigration, inward-looking nationalism and discontent over economic globalization push an ever-larger share of voters to the far right.

 Voting: paper vs machine. In Georgia, there looms a real time impending battle. Story about Georgia's electronic voting system in the Washington Post. The story, of course, also involves an election contest for governor, in which Georgia's current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, is a contender; Kemp is a staunch opponent of federal "messing" in local elections. (He has been endorsed by President Trump.) The story notes,

Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity sleuth, thought he was conducting an innocuous Google search to pull up information on Georgia’s centralized system for conducting elections.

He was taken aback when the query turned up a file with a list of voters and then alarmed when a subsequent simple data pull retrieved the birth dates, drivers’ license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of more than 6 million voters, as well as county election supervisors’ passwords for use on Election Day. He also discovered the server had a software flaw that an attacker could exploit to take control of the machine.

Nationwide, not all secretaries of state have been quick to respond to the recent hack attacks; they have been remiss in investigating the security of their own state's electronic voting systems.  It seems that in Georgia, protestations not withstanding, the electronic system is less than totally secure. As you read this, the midterm elections (November 6) are uncomfortably close.

Libraries. That well known phrase might be altered slightly to, "What's [available] in your library?" One library in New York City has gone far beyond the usual. The librarian in charge of assisting job seekers to write résumés realized that many could not act on her thoughts about "dressing nicely," of not taking a backpack -- many had no neck ties, purses, or briefcases.
     So it "...began experimenting with [finding and making available on loan] new offerings: neck ties, bow ties, handbags and briefcases intended for people with limited resources who are heading for job interviews, auditions or any other events for which they need to dress up."

Who are you? Personality tests have a long, and very clouded, history. A recent study says "maybe not" so much.

Equality, on whose tab? Columnist Charles Lane examines the unusual proposals of avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders. Tucker Carlson, of Fox News, was not immediately turned off, though some liberals have been less receptive.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."   Samuel Boswell

Thank you for reading. Enjoy your early fall "leaf peeping." The weather here in CO has advanced the color display about 10 to 15 days.