Well, this is a point of view.
In all sincerity, I like Americans a lot; I’ve met many lovely people in the United States, and I empathize with the shame many Americans (and not only “New York intellectuals”) feel at having such an appalling clown for a leader.
However, I have to ask—and I know what I’m requesting isn’t easy for you—that you consider things for a moment from a non-American point of view. I don’t mean “from a French point of view,” which would be asking too much; let’s say, “from the point of view of the rest of the world.”
On the numerous occasions when I’ve been questioned about Donald Trump’s election, I’ve replied that I don’t give a shit. France isn’t Wyoming or Arkansas. France is an independent country, more or less, and will become totally independent once again when the European Union is dissolved (the sooner, the better).
The United States of America is no longer the world’s leading power. It was for a long time, for almost the entire course of the twentieth century. It isn’t anymore.
It remains a major power, one among several.
This isn’t necessarily bad news for Americans.
It’s very good news for the rest of the world.
I’m not sure the rest of the world actually agrees with this, though.
Comment → -President Trump’s long-time personal attorney Michael Cohen has been sentenced of 3 years in prison, after having plead guilty to 9 charged crimes in federal court.
Before leveling his sentence, U.S. Judge William Pauley said “Cohen pled guilt to a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” and “lost his moral compass,” according to a Newsday reporter inside the courtroom.
Judge Pauley added that “as a lawyer, Mr. Cohen should have known better.”
Cohen pleaded his case for leniency in front of a federal judge in Manhattan, accusing President Trump – his former boss – of causing him to “follow a path of darkness rather than light” and “cover up his dirty deeds,” according to the Newsday reporter.
Prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York charged Cohen with eight felony counts in August, including tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, and campaign finance violations. Special counsel Robert Mueller, tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, tacked on an additional count of lying to Congress last month.
Cohen has pleaded guilty to all nine counts.
Cohen, who once defiantly declared he would “take a bullet for Donald Trump,” will have to settle for a prison term instead, not to mention a decidedly less than supportive former employer:
Comment → -“He’s a weak person,” Trump told reporters on the White House South Lawn before departing for Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“He was convicted with a fairly long-term sentence with things unrelated to the Trump Organization,” Trump said, citing Cohen’s legal issues with mortgages and the IRS.
Trump speculated that “what he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence.”
Ammon Bundy Quits Militia Movement in Solidarity With Migrant Caravan
Ammon Bundy is best known as a leading light of the American militia movement (a motley coalition of various different flavors of firearms enthusiasts who hate the federal government). He’s famous for getting into armed standoffs with federal agents and violently occupying bird sanctuaries. His friends are the kind of folks who co-chair pro-Trump veterans groups; his father is the kind of man who says, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro” — and proceeds to explain why black people were “better off as slaves.”
So, this being 2018, Bundy naturally just disavowed the militia movement in solidarity with the migrant caravan, suggested that nationalism is actually the opposite of patriotism, and said that Trump’s America resembles nothing so much as 1930s Germany.
Last week, Bundy posted a video to Facebook in which he criticized President Trump for demonizing the Central American migrants who were traveling in a caravan to seek asylum in the United States.
This is the biggest return character plot twist since Scott Ritter came back as an anti-war activist.
Comment → -Conor Sen: A Steady Job Beats a Higher Paycheck
Despite this “hard economic data,” the “soft economic data” — public sentiment — shows that the economy and labor market are perceived to be about as good as they’ve ever been. Gallup has been asking the public every month since 2001 what it considers the nation’s most important problem, and in November only 13 percent responded with an economic problem. The just-completed midterm elections were largely a referendum on health care and President Donald Trump, not on the economy. […]
As a worker, I’d rather be in a labor market with lots of job postings, a low level of jobless claims and a sustainable level of wage growth. It’s certainly preferable to being in one fueled by speculative excess, where I have to constantly worry about when the mania is going to collapse. I’ll take 3 percent wage growth today with good prospects for being employed tomorrow over 4 percent wage growth today and unemployment tomorrow. […]
The good news for workers today, and perhaps why their optimism is higher than some economic data might suggest, is that there’s no reason why this labor market can’t continue for at least several more quarters. The excesses of the past couple years have been in financial markets, not in the real economy. Bubbles in cryptocurrencies, cannabis and private technology companies should not lead to a heavy-handed response from the Fed. Household leverage remains low, and business investment remains modest.
It’s remarkable how much of the employment web site ads I see are aimed at employers rather than people looking for work. That’s a new phenomenon. And like Sen, I don’t think a recession is necessarily right around the corner, as many are predicting. Wishful thinking? Maybe.
On the other hand, there are still some indications that our labor market still has some work to do.
Comment → -I will believe the labor market is too tight for employers when employers act like the labor market is too tight for employers. https://t.co/2SsOTyF7b4
— Will Truman (@trumwill) October 25, 2018
… if you’re still using our original URL.
As we finish up the server migration, one of the last steps will be moving over the ordinary-gentlemen-dot-com domain. During this process, it may stop forwarding to ordinary-times-dot-com. This is temporary, but we should all probably go ahead and update our bookmarks anyway and now seems like a pretty good time to do so.
Comment → -Support has dipped a bit, but opposition is up and the gap has closed:
President Donald Trump’s approval rating among active-duty military personnel has slipped over the last two years, leaving today’s troops evenly split over whether they’re happy with the commander in chief’s job performance, according to the results of a new Military Times poll of active-duty service members.
About 44 percent of troops had a favorable view of Trump’s presidency, the poll showed, compared to 43 percent who disapproved.
The results from the survey, conducted over the course of September and October, suggest a gradual decline in troops’ support of Trump since he was elected in fall 2016, when a similar Military Times poll showed that 46 percent of troops approved of Trump compared to 37 percent who disapproved. That nine-point margin of support now appears gone.
“The troops are turning Democratic!” is a thing I’ve been hearing since 2004. Maybe it’s happening now, or maybe it’s just Trump.
Comment → -Sometimes people don’t like that they kind of want peace:
Comment → -Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Hamas to ISIS earlier this week and said that there was no diplomatic solution for the conflict, but also said that war should be a last resort, and Israel will do what it can to avoid it. The responses were not particularly accepting. Yet the cabinet’s decision – or lack of a decision – on Tuesday seemed to follow that reasoning.
There was no vote in the cabinet on what to do next, since no ministers put up a fight against security officials’ suggestions, which Netanyahu strongly supported – Israel should follow a “quiet for quiet” formulation, meaning that it will hold its fire as long as Hamas does.
A strange thing happened almost immediately after sources briefed reporters that the cabinet unanimously decided to accept a ceasefire with Hamas: ministers began denying it.
This doesn’t surprise me at all, actually.
According to a new study carried out in the US and UK, handsome men are more likely to be seen as a threat by their bosses and are hence less likely to score equally powerful positions. The study involved researchers at University College London’s School of Management and the University of Maryland in the US carrying out four separate experiments in four different offices, according to the Daily Mail. They found that when men were hiring other men to work with them, their decision was negatively affected by the attractiveness of the candidate and the type of job. Women’s perceived hotness, shockingly, did not prevent them from being desirable additions to the boardroom.
“Managers are affected by stereotypes and make hiring decisions to serve their own self-interests so organizations may not get the most competent candidates” said professor Sun Young Lee, lead researcher at the University of Maryland. “With more companies involving employees in recruitment processes, this important point needs attention. Awareness that hiring is affected by potential work relationships and stereotyping tendencies can help organizations improve their selection processes.”
Men have a tendency to be really catty (for lack of a better term) when it comes to attractive actors. It took a decade before guys would admit that Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio had talent, and I think a lot of that is based on assumptions that they were just pretty boys.
I remember a guy back when I was in college or just out of it. Took me a long time to warm up to him. I realized at some point it was because I was making assumptions about him based on his gorgeous appearance. It wasn’t even jealousy in any real sense. It was just a sense of “guys that look like that.”
Comment → -
Linky Friday, Ordinary Times’ end-of-week tradition of bringing you links from across the web and around the world. This week, A Bit of History with stories, photos, videos, music, and more for you to read, share, and discuss.
Linky Friday: categories this week are sports and culture, art and nature, economics and politics, and war and peace.
It’s Linky Friday and now you have a way to malinger productivity while reading random links embedded in wry comments that are only funny after you read the articles!
Burt Likko fills in for Will Truman for this week’s aggregation of dozens of links to themed web randomness!
In Linky Friday #29, Will highlights a recent column in The Atlantic by Hugo Scwhyzer that asked, “What If Men Stopped Chasing Much-Younger Women?” His argument, that the Old Man/Young Woman relationship dynamic intrinsically harms society, was not received well by commenters, either here or at The Atlantic. His concerns about this type of relationship, valid…
Social security as it actually exists is not a Ponzi scheme in any meaningful sense of the term. It's a pay-as-you-go social transfer. We just need to be honest about what that means.
This is another issue where the rhetoric on either side makes it much more difficult to clearly assess the issue and find a way forward.
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