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tremendouspeachduck · 6 years

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Dumb pipeline conversation

We’re Energy Independent - Yeah! It’s now time to get out of the U.N.

If Canada wants oil to get to Mexico, then USA can benefit.

Canada will do it with or without our putting people back to work

Yes, there will be spills to clean up

Don't you just love logic?

Let's praise Pres. Trump for turning it around for us

Is energy independence important to you? It means low gas prices at the pump.

To be truly energy independent, the United States would need to produce enough energy to sustain the entirety of its population and industry. Such independence seemed like a far off goal not too long ago. However, innovations in sustainable energy and the recent shale gas boom have made the idea of an energy independent future seem more attainable.

As it seems more and more possible for the United States to achieve energy independence in the not-so-distant future, it’s important to remember that this process is complicated. Though it can be achieved in different ways to different effects, energy independence will require the US to radically re-envision the way it supplies and uses energy.

Energy independence also boasts possible geopolitical benefits. The United States imports most of its energy from countries where political tensions run high. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China and Russia are all huge exporters of energy, and this has put the United States in more than one awkward position over the years.

In addition to the amount of defense money spent protecting US oil interests abroad, relying on foreign oil has prevented the US and other countries from intervening in conflicts around the world. Europe’s lack of intervention when Russia annexed Crimea is just one example of energy stability influencing foreign policy decisions for the worse.

Energy independence could free the United States from fear of trade retaliation when making foreign policy decisions. This would make it easier for the US and other energy independent countries to boycott or otherwise intervene in unjust systems and governments. It would also give other oil producers more claim over their own energy.

as of 2018, October - the USA has become energy independent - Hurrray! Thank you Pres. Trump

What comes next? Before this resource is depleted, we must retire the notion of fossil fuels and move toward wind, solar, or hydro. I prefer hydro; it has the least bad side effects.

DEMS would eliminate nearly all fossil fuels from the electric grid and force everyone in the country to buy from power companies selling only renewable energy.

Without government subsidies, renewable energy costs significantly more than many forms of traditional energy generation.

Electricity prices are, on average, increasing by 50 percent faster in those states that have created renewable power mandates compared to those that have rejected these economically destructive policies. This is especially troubling news for working-class and lower-income Americans, who spend much larger shares of their income on energy than wealthier families.

Not only are DEMs proposing to eliminate the hundreds of thousands of jobs in the fossil fuel industry in the United States, even though America recently became a net-energy exporter, they are demanding this transition occur in just 10 years, from 2020 to 2030. This mandate would be virtually impossible to achieve because wind and solar energy sources still rely on back-up generation from fossil-fuel-powered energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

DEMs also propose “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries, including by investing in local-scale agriculture in communities across the country,” as well as “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure, and upgrading water infrastructure to ensure universal access to clean water.” It’s not clear whether this would eventually mean the elimination of all gasoline-powered cars, but even if we assume private ownership of these vehicles would be permitted, the removal of affordable fossil fuels, including natural gas, from all industry would increase the cost of developing, manufacturing, and delivering all goods and services in the country. It would force companies to spend, at the very least, hundreds of billions of additional dollars more than they do now — expenses that would inevitably be passed along to consumers by raising taxes, printing money, and creating new publicly owned banks.

Please send an email to your Senator and to your House rep ASAP! You can cut/paste the VOTE NO message into your email. You may also phone the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 - plz be nice to the volunteer. Also send this message to Pres. Trump.

VOTE NO on Green Deal. The biggest reason I can think of - WE ALREADY have the Climate Change Law. Thanks to Pres. Trump

and YES on getting out of the UN.

Congressional Republicans want to defund the U.N., a 193-nation boondoggle for which the United States alone pays well over a quarter of the freight — about 22 percent of the regular operating budget, and close to 30 percent of the much larger peacekeeping budget (for which we get more scandal than peace).

At best, denying our annual $3 billion payment would accomplish nothing. Defunding measures are called for periodically, whenever the U.N. induces a congressional tantrum over one or another of its obscenities. Even as one lawmaker fumes about shutting off the spigot, another is already saying, “Well, we don’t need to defund everything — after all, the U.N. does a lot of good.”

“A lot of good,” by the way, is an exaggeration. Sure, some U.N. officials are just as well-meaning as any other preening progressive. But the institution stinks, even in its humanitarian aid work. As Heritage’s Brett D. Schaefer notes, citing a 2012 academic study on best and worst practices among aid agencies, U.N. agencies consistently rank “among the worst and least effective performers.”

More important, if $3 billion seems like chump change to you in an age of unfathomable $20 trillion national debt, that’s the way Turtle Bay’s grubby globalists see it, too. They continue to plot international tax schemes (on carbon emissions, financial transactions, etc.), as well as the lucrative skim from redistributionist rackets like the “Green Climate Fund” and the new “Sustainable Development Goals.” The real goal, naturally, is a sustainable fund for the U.N., relieving it of reliance on finicky donors.

The GOP Congress’s focus on the U.S. contribution is understandable. The American taxpayer’s U.N. tab far exceeds the combined $2.5 billion ponied up by the other four permanent Security Council members (China, Russia, Britain, and France). In fact, it exceeds the contributions of 185 countries combined (about three dozen of which pay under $30K in dues – far less than what their diplomats rack up in unpaid Manhattan parking tickets).

Yet the money is not the real problem, and cutting it off for a time won’t pack much political punch.

The Left loves the U.N. It will never seriously address the institution’s thoroughgoing anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, anti-Semitism, anti-nationalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-rectitude. Instead the media-Democrat complex – with a big assist, starting in two weeks, from the most publicly active former president in American history – would portray an aspirational U.N. valiantly fighting to save the planet from war, poverty and CO2. Duly abominated for slashing funds, the GOP would take a political hit but achieve nothing: The U.N. would find other ways to raise the dough, and Republicans – after watering the defund effort down to feckless foot-stomping – would be goaded into paying any withheld dues, with interest, probably during the next lame-duck session.

The better move is: Just leave. Withdrawal from the U.N. would make transnational progressives go ballistic, but it would hearten millions – the kind of patriotic, self-determining citizens whose fury at statism’s transition into globalism catalyzed Trump’s candidacy (and, in Britain, spurred Brexit).

Put the politics aside, though. Leaving would be the right thing to do.

The U.N. is Ground Zero of the totalitarian Islamist-Leftist quest to eviscerate Western principles and individual liberty – and, while they’re at it, the Jewish state.

You think I’m exaggerating? The U.N. is the Islamist-Leftist vehicle for nullifying American constitutionalism – its guaranteed freedoms and the very premise that the People are sovereign. In just the last few years of Obama’s eager collaborations, the U.N. has produced resolutions that erode First Amendment liberties, calling on member states to outlaw negative criticism of Islam. It has overridden the Constitution’s protections against treaties that harm American interests, endorsing the Iran nuclear deal to give it the imprimatur of international law even though it is unsigned, unratified, and would not have had a prayer of attaining the required two-thirds supermajority Senate approval.

The U.N. is the Islamist-Leftist vehicle for nullifying American constitutionalism – its guaranteed freedoms and the very premise that the People are sovereign.

And more is on the way. The Obama administration signed a U.N. arms-trade treaty that would undermine Second Amendment rights — again, under the vaporous guise of “international law.” On Obama’s watch, the U.S. has also signed the U.N.’s onerous Paris climate agreement, which international bureaucrats tell us has “entered into force” despite — again — the lack of Senate approval required for ratification under our law.

Think no ratification means no problem? You’re not getting how the U.N.’s international-law game works.

Once American presidents sign agreements, globalists insist that we’re bound by them. How can that be, since a presidential signature is insufficient under the Constitution? Because in 1970, President Nixon signed another beauty, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Its Article 18 states that once a nation signs a treaty — or merely does something that could be interpreted as “express[ing] its consent to be bound by the treaty” — that nation is “obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of the treaty.” You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to hear that the Senate has never approved this treaty on treaties, either. No matter: The State Department (who else?) advises us that, notwithstanding the lack of ratification under our Constitution, “many” of the treaty’s provisions are binding as — you guessed it — “customary international law.”

American government participation in the U.N.’s shenanigans is stripping away our rights and our capacity to govern ourselves. Just as bad, it is sullying us.

Logically, it has to be that way. When not bowing before foreign despots, Obama practically genuflects at mentions of the “international community.” But the international community is awful. It consists of a few good countries swimming in a shark-infested sea. When good seeks consensus with evil, the result cannot be good — just as when you insist, as our government does, on being an impartial “honest broker” between Israel, our democratic ally, and the Palestinian terror state-in-waiting, that is a boon for the jihadists, not the democrats. When you pretend that all states are equal, that there is no difference between the good guys and the bad guys, that is always a coup for the bad guys.

And that’s what the U.N. is: a coup for the bad guys.

Think about it: We are voluntarily entered into an arrangement in which actions affecting American national security and prosperity are subject to the Security Council veto power of Vladimir Putin and the Communist Party of China – the principal patrons of the “Death to America” regime in Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of anti-American terrorism.

We are voluntarily underwriting an institution that — with Obama having formally boarded the anti-Israel train — is joining the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The General Assembly, which is steered by the sharia-supremacist Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has just created a BDS database to target companies that do business with Israeli settlements in what the U.N. has declared is “Palestinian territory.”

WE NEED TO GET OUT of UN . . . NOW!

It would depend on the terms under which the U.S. left .If we completely withdrew all at once, our resources, our capital, our troops, and the UN’s right to even meet in the U.S., then either China or Russia would most likely maneuver to have the entity relocated for the publicity and influence.They would not be one iota as generous as the U.S. with resources or manpower. Within five years the U.N. would crumble much as the League of Nations did.Without the U.S. bankrolling the operation and actually doing the things it wants done, the U.N. would be even less than a paper tiger. It would be couple of paragraphs in a high school history book.

Any vengeance toward Israel or elsewhere could easily be handled with various independent coalitions.

Also, as a result from our recent election fiasco . . .

In each state, we must come together and demand clean elections.

#politics #energy #fossil fuels #united nations #pipeline

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thegloober · 6 years

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Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)? (Ep. 355)

Studies show kids are more creative when they aren’t promised a reward. But schools — with their incentives for performance and emphasis on quantifiable outcomes — may not be set up to prioritize creativity. (Photo: Ben_Kerckx/Pixabay)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Family environments and “diversifying experiences” (including the early death of a parent); intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations; schools that value assessments, but don’t assess the things we value. All these elements factor into the long, mysterious march towards a creative life. To learn more, we examine the early years of Ai Weiwei, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Maira Kalman, Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Egan, and others. (Ep. 2 of the “How to Be Creative” series.).

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Stephen DUBNER: I don’t understand why you’re not in prison in China. It sounds like — obviously they did it for a little while.

Ai WEIWEI: I’ll tell the truth. I tried to think about it and suddenly, just this moment, I realized the answer. The jail in China is not large enough to put me in.

DUBNER: What do you mean?

WEIWEI: I’m just too large for them. My ideas penetrate the walls.

Are your ideas big enough to penetrate walls? His, apparently, are.

WEIWEI: My name is Ai Weiwei. I’m 61 years old. I was born in 1957 in Beijing, China. But in the year I was born, my father was exiled.

In our previous episode, we asked the art economist David Galenson to name a true creative genius.

David GALENSON: I mean, Ai Weiwei is a giant. Ai Weiwei I believe is not only the most important painter in the world, he’s the most important person in art. Ai Weiwei has changed the world. With his art, he has made a contribution to political discourse. This is a unique person in art, almost in the last hundred years.

So we went to Berlin to visit Ai Weiwei. We interviewed him in his subterranean studio, a former brewery in the former East Berlin.

DUBNER: And how do you describe what you do now?

WEIWEI: That is a little bit confusing, because as a profession, most things I did relate to so-called art. So people call me artist. But since I have been also working in defending human rights or freedom of speech or human condition, they call me activist.

DUBNER: Do you care what people call you?

WEIWEI: I don’t really care. I think I’ll live my life. I do care if I still can wake up the next morning. I do care if I can walk to school to pick up my son.

(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)

You can see why people are confused by what, exactly, Ai Weiwei is, or does. He spends a lot of time making things but also a lot of time on Twitter, calling out institutional hypocrisies or cruelties. He once created a museum piece comprised of 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds; he also made a series of photographs in which he drops a Han Dynasty urn to the ground and smashes it to bits. Lately, he’s been consumed with the global refugee crisis: he hung 14,000 life vests around Berlin’s main concert hall; he installed a sprawling public-art project in New York called “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”; and he made a documentary film called “Human Flow.”

WEIWEI: The officials came here and told them, look, there’s no way you’re going to get papers to continue. Either you go voluntarily, or we arrest you.

Ai Weiwei’s enduring obsession has been to stick his finger in the eye of the Chinese government. He helped design the Olympic stadium for Beijing’s 2008 Games; but by the time it was built, he’d attacked the organizers for cronyism and corruption. After the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed tens of thousands, he launched a citizens’ investigation into the poorly-built schools where so many children died; he gathered up the mangled rebar from quake sites and turned it into a sculpture called Straight. When the government placed him under surveillance, he responded by making a sculpture called Surveillance Camera. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was kidnapped and jailed by the Chinese government, charged with “subversion of state power.” Upon being set free, he decided it was best to leave China.

WEIWEI: Since I was born, I would be seen as a son of the enemy of the people. They see you are dangerous. They see you are someone who could have a potential to make big trouble.

DUBNER: They were right.

WEIWEI: They’re perfectly right. But I try to live up to that kind of conditions, too. I am not satisfied with what I did.

Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was a prominent poet and intellectual. Before the Communist revolution, he was considered a leftist subversive. When Mao took over, Qing started out in the new regime’s good graces but eventually fell out of favor, and the family was exiled from Beijing.

WEIWEI: So I grew up in the Xinjiang province, which is Gobi Desert. And spent about 18 years in that location.

DUBNER: So when you were a kid, you’re growing up in — we call them labor camps or reeducation camps. I don’t know what you call it?

WEIWEI: We call it reeducation camps to remake you, to become a better part of a society.

DUBNER: It didn’t seem to have worked.

WEIWEI: It did work on me.

DUBNER: Well, if the state was trying to reeducate you —

WEIWEI: But that reeducation is very important, because it builds your reactionary to this kind brainwashing or trying to limit individual’s rights and freedom of speech. So you get, somehow, immune to these attacks.

For several years, the family lived underground, in a cavern. For two decades, Ai Ching did not write.

WEIWEI: My father is so scared. There is no single day he comes home not physically shaking because he’s been so mistreated and —

DUBNER: He tried to kill himself several times.

WEIWEI: He did. He attempted three times.

DUBNER: How did he try? Do you know?

WEIWEI: He once, the electric — how do you call that?

DUBNER: Socket.

WEIWEI: Socket. Of course, the whole light went off because of the shortage. And he once tried hanging himself, and it’s so lucky the nail was loosened.

DUBNER: And you were a teenager then or younger?

WEIWEI: I was about eight or nine.

DUBNER: And did you know what happened?

WEIWEI: I didn’t know at all. He told me.

DUBNER: Later.

WEIWEI: Yeah.

Concerning Ai Weiwei’s upbringing, at least two questions come to mind, both of them probably unanswerable. The first: what are the odds that that boy, living in a labor camp in the Gobi Desert, would become one of the most influential artists in the world? And: how much did that environment have to do with who he became?

* * *

Ai Weiwei’s childhood was of course atypical. And a lot of his art is clearly a response to his family’s treatment during China’s Cultural Revolution. But is there any way to say that his upbringing was a cause of his creativity?

Dean SIMONTON: Yeah, that’s very important. We actually have a term for it. We call it “diversifying experiences.”

Dean Simonton is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California-Davis. He’s spent decades studying the biographies of great artists and scientists to help understand where creativity comes from.

SIMONTON: What “diversifying experiences” means is you’re exposed to one or more events, in childhood or adolescence, that puts you on a different track from everybody else. So instead of being raised just like all the other kids on your block in a very conventional fashion, you all of a sudden find yourself different. You see yourself as different. You have different goals. And these diversifying experiences can take a lot of different forms, and often you look at the lives of a lot of creative geniuses and you see more than one of them operating.

DUBNER: So you’re saying that diversifying influences would tend to lead to higher creativity then, yes?

SIMONTON: Tend to lead to creative genius.

Pat BROWN: I didn’t realize that he was a spy until I was a teenager.

That’s the scientist Pat Brown. He grew up all over the world — in Paris, Taipei, in Washington, D.C.

BROWN: The way I figured it out was that a good friend of mine, my dad was his boss in a way, and he made some mention of the fact that his dad worked for the C.I.A., and I thought, “Well, that’s weird because —”

DUBNER: “My dad doesn’t.”

BROWN: Yeah.

For a time, Brown was best known as an inventor of a method of genetic analysis called the D.N.A. microarray, which has become useful for the study of cancer.

DUBNER: Was this research primarily within the context of solving cancer, addressing cancer, or no?

BROWN: No. Let’s put it this way. It’s kind of hard to, for so many of these things that I would do, any scientist would do, it’s not necessarily that there’s a single reason why you’re doing it. You just realize that, if we could do this, there’s all these cool things that you could apply it to. Okay. And in fact, in the early days when we had first got this thing working, we had a few good ideas there was reason enough to do it. And then as you’re actually doing experiments you realize, “Oh we could do this. Oh we could do this.”

Until a few years ago, Brown was a sort of high-end researcher-without-portfolio at Stanford. And then he took a massive left turn and founded a startup with rather modest goals.

BROWN: I’m currently the C.E.O. and founder of Impossible Foods, which is a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

I asked Brown whether he saw any connection between his globe-trotting childhood with a C.I.A. dad and his scientific career.

BROWN: I think the fact that I traveled and lived in multiple places in the world. And in those days kids were a lot more like free-range at a young age. And I felt like I had a lot of freedom to explore all these places and so forth, I think had an impact on me in the sense that it just it just made me aware of the fact that there is basically no place on earth that’s inaccessible.

Maira KALMAN: Probably the base of everything that I do is a fantastic curiosity about people, intense empathy that we’re all struggling, we’re all heroic to just even wake up in the morning.

That’s Maira Kalman.

Maira KALMAN: I am an illustrator and author.

And she’s got a son.

Alex KALMAN: My name is Alex Kalman and I’m a designer, a curator, a creative director, a writer, an editor, and someone with generally many ants in their pants.

DUBNER: Can one or both of you — you can take turns, you can interrupt, whatever you want — just describe briefly the family. That’s a small topic, but just a little bit about the family growing up and until now.

Maira KALMAN: Did you say that’s a small topic?

DUBNER: Yeah.

Maira KALMAN: Oh my God. That’s an epic. I think that’s the epic topic. There is no bigger topic than the family.

Maira Kalman is best known for her children’s books and her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style and her work for The New Yorker, including one of its most famous covers ever, called “New Yorkistan.” Her work manages to be whimsical and melancholy at once. Paintings of cake and dogs and demure old ladies in plume-y hats. She once bought a pair of the conductor Arturo Toscanini’s pants at auction, just to have them. Actually, she bought the whole suit …

Maira KALMAN: But his pants have a lot more panache when you say his pants.

For years, Maira Kalman was best-known as the right-hand woman to her husband Tibor Kalman, a wildly creative and influential designer. He died young, nearly 20 years ago, when their two children were young. I’ve known them since around that time.

DUBNER: Pretend I don’t know either of you at all.

Maira KALMAN: Okay.

DUBNER: And we’re sitting next to each other on an airplane or something and I say, “Who are you?” Oh, you guys are a mother and son, tell me a little bit about yourselves. What kind of family was this? Where did you live and what was that household like?

Alex KALMAN: I think we’d say, “Do you mind if we swap seats so that we don’t have to sit next to each other on our flight.” Yeah. We’d prefer not to talk, actually.

Maira KALMAN: I’m going to say, I’m going to be in business class and he’s going to be in — no, anyway, so go on.

Alex KALMAN: Mom!

Alex and Maira are collaborators too. They created an installation called Sara Berman’s Closet — Sara Berman being Maira’s mother and Alex’s grandmother — and the installation consisted of the contents of Sara’s closet, artfully curated and arranged. It’s appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So I was curious what the Kalman house was like to grow up in.

Alex KALMAN: It was a really joyful and wild and fun childhood. We were all very close and we went on many adventures. And days were filled with looking around and making books when we were bored and cooking dinner and listening to music from all corners of the earth and just a real — really deep exposure to everything and anything that was not familiar in our day to day.

Maira KALMAN: And I thought that a house where we’re making books and dancing and making costumes and turning the furniture upside down is — How could you not do that? So the creativity in the home, in the family, was a sense of play and a sense of loving language and art and music.

Alex KALMAN: I think that real creativity isn’t this thought to say, “Okay now let’s be creative.” It’s just a natural feeling or understanding of saying, “All these rules are opportunity to create new rules or bend certain rules.” And the joy in that type of experimentation and that type of play, hopefully with some result that is meaningful or profound or funny or entertaining.

Nico MUHLY: My parents to their enormous credit were really not that pushy.

That’s the composer Nico Muhly, the youngest person to ever have a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, in New York. He grew up in New England with a painter mom and a documentary-filmmaker dad.

MUHLY: And it’s the usual, you have to be driven to the thing and then you have to get all the books and you have to pay for these classes and whatever. So my parents were really great about that, but it wasn’t this version of the thing where it’s as if we were going to press you so hard to become a concert violinist. Nor was it, isn’t this a cute hobby but you need to work for Goldman Sachs. I think they found the good middle point.

It’s less about them being artists and more about them creating a household in which ideas were spoken about. And I think that’s the real luxury of my childhood was not necessarily being surrounded by art in that way, but by people who read and thought about a million things and channeled that into, not just artistic expression. I mean, we all know, we all have horror stories of people raised by artists.

Horror stories, maybe. But also success stories. Growing up in a creative household means learning not only that a creative life is possible; but if you pay attention, you can learn how to do it. That was the case with Elvis Costello, the singular singer-songwriter, whose father was a singer with a popular dance band.

Elvis COSTELLO: Nobody would regard them as hip in the slightest way but the leader, Joe Loss, he managed to front a band from the late 20’s to the 80’s. He was a remarkable character in English light entertainment. They weren’t by any means up with the rock and roll vibe or anything like that.

Young Elvis — actually his name was Declan MacManus back then — young Declan would hang out in the darkened balcony of the Hammersmith Palais in London during the band’s Saturday afternoon set. Watching his father emerge into the limelight, in jacket and tie. Which is why to this day, Elvis Costello pretty much always wears a jacket and tie.

COSTELLO: You have a sort of admiration for your parents’ ability to do whatever it is they do. That was one perspective of performance. And he brought music into the house that he was learning for the weekly broadcast. Later on, after my parents separated, his life transformed. He then sort of took on an appearance closer to sort of Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? He grew his hair long and he started to wear fashionable clothes and listen to contemporary music, because he left the safety of the nightly gig with the dance band and decided he wanted to do his own thing.

So that striking out and being independent thing was sort of from his example, no matter what the music was or the style — and bear in mind my taste in music changed just like any teenager; it was all about one thing, the next day it was all about another; it was always about the song. I had spent the last two years of schooling in Liverpool which at that time was musically very quiet in the early 70’s, and tried to make my own way playing my own songs. I had a partner, we sang in bars and any evening where they would let us on the stage, really.

We were making tiny little bits of money, just about covered our expenses, and I learned a little bit how to do it, but I never really thought that I was — I looked at the television every Thursday to see Top of the Pops and saw the distance between the way I looked and felt and sounded and what was a pop singer right then, which was a lot of people in baker foil with eye makeup on; that was the music of that moment, the glitter, glam moment. That seemed very distant from a 17-year-old.

DUBNER: Did you wish you could do that?

COSTELLO: No, I never wanted to do that. I might be the only person in English pop music that made a record that never wanted to be David Bowie, while still loving everything he did.

Wynton MARSALIS: My father really struggled a lot. He couldn’t make money playing modern jazz.

Wynton Marsalis is one of the most celebrated musicians alive — a jazz and classical trumpeter who also composes, teaches, and runs the landmark Jazz at Lincoln Center program. His father, Ellis Marsalis, is also an accomplished jazz musician: a piano player.

MARSALIS: He played with great musicians, but the people didn’t really want to hear the style of music they were playing.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when Wynton was growing up in New Orleans, the dominant popular music was funk and R&B; not the modern jazz his father played.

MARSALIS: I’d grown up around the music, so my father and them played, they listen to their music, no one else was listening to it, but I heard it.

So Ellis Marsalis supported the family by teaching.

MARSALIS: Well my daddy, the first jobs my father had paid $5,000 a year, $6,000. He was a band director for segregated high schools and in towns like Opelousas, Louisiana. Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

But Ellis was still an influential musician in New Orleans — and for his son.

MARSALIS: Musicians knew what he was. People in the neighborhood respected him for his opinions. Yeah you can’t say nothing to jazz musicians; they know stuff. The barbershop or something. And also because in the barbershop, at the height of black nationalism, my father was always the one who was not nationalistic and that was a great embarrassment for me.

I’d be saying, “Man, why are you always talking to stuff that’s against what everybody is saying?” And he would always be very philosophical: “Man, you don’t attack people that’s not there. You gotta tell the people in front of you what they don’t want to hear.” And he was always, a big one, he used to say, “All of everybody never does anything.” If you said, “they,” he would always say, “Who is they, man? Can you tell me who they is? Do you know them? Who are their names?”

Wynton’s mother was also a big influence.

MARSALIS: My mama was unique, and she had an originality. Her food tasted different, she had her own way of doing stuff. She was a big creative person.

DUBNER: The way she decorated your house, I understand was artistic? Yeah.

MARSALIS: Everything about her, everything. She grew up, she’s from the projects. So, she’s very unusual, because she very much had the street element which has become a cliché now. Then it wasn’t as cliché. And she was also it was her first to graduate from college, she went to Grambling University. She was extremely intelligent in terms of just her ability to do, she could do my chemistry homework when I was in high school and any spatial problem she understood. But she also had a very deep social consciousness that was not, it was not cliché.

And Wynton Marsalis distinguished himself at a very young age.

MARSALIS: Well, I played the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic when I was 14. And the Brandenburg Concerto with the New Orleans Youth Orchestra when I was 16.

DUBNER: How did you recognize that trumpet was going to be what you were good at?

MARSALIS: Well, I didn’t know till I was 12 that I was going to be interested in it and then it was just a matter of applying, practicing and stuff. I noticed, if you practice you got better. Because a guy in my neighborhood was always picked on. And he saw Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon, and he decided to get some nunchucks. And man he would swing these sticks and then all of a sudden, maybe five months of him swinging these sticks every day, he became a virtuoso at it.

Then there was no more picking on him, calling him fat, taking his money, stuff that people liked to do him. All of a sudden it was, hey, say Fats, come swing them sticks for us. And then Fats, his name was Theodore. We called him Thedo. We grew up, we were in the country, Kenner, Louisiana the black side, segregated side. And I noticed one day, he had an encounter with a guy name we called Big Pull, and after that encounter he definitely was not picked on.

And I thought, “Man, practicing is something.” This guy, six months ago, everybody was picking on him, now he practiced swinging these sticks and his whole position in the hierarchy of this food chain has changed. I understood from watching him that just the diligence and repetition, intelligent repetition you could become better at things.

A couple of years later, Wynton and his brother Branford joined a funk band.

MARSALIS: I was good at making a bass line. I’m left-handed so they would always say, “Put a bass line on this bro,” so I’d put a bass line or something. We rehearsed in the 9th Ward, we had a band called The Creators at that time. In New Orleans, my brother and I were the two youngest musicians on the whole funk scene. I was 13 and Branford was 14. Our band was mainly older men, maybe in their early 20s and teens, late teens. There were maybe 10 to 13 bands they all had names like Cool Enterprise, Flashback, Stop Inc., Vietnam, Blackmail, the Family Players.

We would have battles of the bands, we’d play dances. We’d play gigs everywhere, wedding receptions. We did a series of talent shows that the police department would sponsor to make community relations, and people would come up out of the audience, we played the worst areas of New Orleans, and it was the most fun we ever had. And they would come up and sing or play. And we had to learn their 15 or 20 songs and we learned that, we never look at music of course, most of the times there was never music. We just learned the music and we played and it was great.

I actually didn’t want to join the band, because at that time, when I was 12, I wanted to play jazz. And my daddy is the one that said, “Man, play in the band.”

DUBNER: Oh really?

MARSALIS: Yeah he said, “Man, join the band.”

DUBNER: Because why?

MARSALIS: Because you have to have experiences to know what something is. Don’t cut yourself out of experiences when you’re young. He was always saying, don’t adopt my prejudices; develop your own.

Mark DUPLASS: Jay and I were just this little two-person team.

That’s the filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass, one half of another New Orleans brotherhood.

DUPLASS: We would sleep in Jay’s single bed together for way too late. Jay had already gone through puberty. I mean it was weird. But I think we started to develop this sense of we might try to become artists. And that seems like an impossible thing to do and be financially sustainable. So we better link arms and souls.

Mark and Jay Duplass both write, act, and direct, sometimes together, sometimes not. They had a pretty standard-issue suburban upbringing.

DUPLASS: Mom’s home with us while Dad’s cranking away 50 to 55 hours a week, building the American dream. So we can one day take a vacation that’s not in the car, one day fly to a vacation. That was the goal. So what that meant practically for me and Jay is that we didn’t have a lot of stuff. Our parents gave us a lot of emotional support and a lot of love, but they didn’t buy us a lot of stuff, so we were very bored.

And I think when cable arrived which was a marker of success. My dad was like, “We’re getting cable and we are doing it.” That’s when H.B.O. came into our lives and that really lit us up as a storytellers, because for those of you who don’t remember in the early-to-mid 80’s, there was no curation as to when certain kinds of movies were shown. They generally leave the R-rated movies for the nighttime now but back then we would come home from school and it was Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice and we were just enjoying the hard-hitting dramas of the late 70’s and early 80’s. And I think it really shaped a lot of who we were.

DUBNER: I’m curious, so you guys are what? You’re maybe 10 and Jay’s 14 or something at this point?

DUPLASS: Yeah, right around that age, yeah.

DUBNER: Yeah. So you’re watching Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice, which are not exactly teen or tween fare. Were you aware that you were outliers in that regard?

DUPLASS: It was still very subconscious, because we would take our bikes to the streets and still play with the other kids and play football. They really wanted to talk about Star Wars. And we were fine, and we watched those movies to keep up. But it was this feeling, which I think a lot of people have maybe later in high school when you start to realize, “Oh, this is not my tribe. I know how to play this game. I know how to talk about the things to get along, but when I go home, I’ve got my one or two people that are really are my tribe. And we’re talking about that stuff.” That sort of dynamic happened to me and Jay much earlier than most people talk about it happening.

The Duplass brothers pretty much built their mental model of a creative life from scratch. For Rosanne Cash, the opposite was true. She’s the daughter of country-music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian. As for Rosanne following in his footsteps:

Rosanne CASH: My mother was afraid of the life it would lead to. So she didn’t encourage me that much. My mother was very creative in other ways. She crocheted, and she painted, and she was president of her garden club and she was creative in some domestic realms. But writing and music just carried a lingering fog of fear around it for her.

But I remember my dad was on the road and I remember secretly writing him when I was 12 and saying everything I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to be a writer that I wanted to do something important, that I wanted people to read my words, that I loved language, that music was so important to me and had changed my life. I told him all of these things and he wrote me back and he said “I see that you see as I see.” It was powerful even to a 12-year-old. It gave me encouragement.

Her parents got divorced around this time; her father had become a heavy drinker and a drug addict. This made her rethink putting music at the center of her life.

CASH: Well, that was complicated for me because my dad was a very famous musician and I grew up thinking that fame was a terrible thing that happened to you, like a disease. And I thought, why would I go into that? Why would I try to attract that kind of attention? And you never have any privacy and privacy is so important to me because a writer needs privacy and I don’t want to go on the road and I don’t want to take drugs and get divorced. Well, actually I did want to take drugs in the beginning so that was — But most of that imprint came from my mom because she was really afraid of fame because of what happened in her life with my dad.

For Rosanne Cash, it was a cautionary tale but, in the end, not enough to stop her.

CASH: Yeah, I started writing songs and then I wanted to sing them myself and then I made demos and then I showed them to a record label. There was no turning back.

Rosanne Cash went on to put out many records, mostly country and pop, some of them big hits; she’s also written four books. She’s about to release a new record, called She Remembers Everything. A childhood like hers — a musician father, always traveling; drugs and alcohol; fame and its attendant burdens; her parents’ divorce: it’s practically the model for what we think of as a dysfunctional family. And having a dysfunctional family is often seen as the model for living a creative life.

Teresa AMABILE: It’s false.

That’s Teresa Amabile, a social psychologist from Harvard who studies creativity.

AMABILE: Many creative people do have dysfunctional families but not every creative person has a dysfunctional family. There’s some interesting research on this by David Feldman and Robert Elbert and a number of other people who have looked at the biographical backgrounds of people who have distinguished themselves for their creativity. Very often they faced a lot of adversity in childhood. Maybe they had a serious illness themselves. Maybe a parent was seriously ill or died. Maybe there was an ugly, acrimonious divorce or they lost a sibling.

Those kinds of events can crush a child, they can they can lead to a lot of problems; they can lead to substance abuse, they can lead to various forms of emotional illness. They can also lead to incredible resilience and almost superhuman behaviors, seemingly, if people can come through those experiences intact. I don’t know if we — we being the field in general — have discovered what the keys are, what makes the difference for kids.

It is true, however, that eminent people in a range of fields are much more likely than the average person to have lost a parent at a young age. In the U.S., the rate of parental death before age 16 is 8 percent. For high-performing scientists, the rate is 26 percent; for U.S. presidents, 34 percent; for poets, 55 percent. But, we should note, the rate of parental death is also disproportionately high for … prisoners. So it may be that a parent’s death is a shock to any child’s system, but that it’s hard to predict the direction of that shock. Too much depends on the circumstances, like how talented the kid is or whether they have some key guidance.

AMABILE: Sometimes it’s one key adult who can somehow rescue them in their lives. Sometimes it seems to just be a trait of the kid. Something within themselves.

There’s also the notion that creativity itself can be a kind of coping mechanism — as it was for the graphic designer Michael Bierut.

Michael BIERUT: I was a really good elementary school and junior high school and high school artist. I was very accomplished, I could do very realistic drawings that impressed people. And boy, did I take pleasure in impressing people. Most of my other physical attributes and mannerisms were the things that would provoke many strangers just to beat me up. But this magic ability to draw things actually seemed to be a thing that even bullies would be impressed by.

Early on, I started associating creativity not with just something that I would do in a lonely room for my own satisfaction but something that somehow would give me a way of operating in the larger world. If you were designing a poster for the school play, you got to go to rehearsals. So even if you couldn’t sing or dance or act, you got to make a contribution to the overall effort that went into bringing that play to the stage.

SIMONTON: Well, that’s another example of a diversifying experience. Being in an out group.

Dean Simonton again.

SIMONTON: Being a minority, as long as you’re not oppressed. I mean, this is the problem. A lot of minorities are oppressed, and so they’re not going to realize their potential, even though they are more inclined to think outside the box. If they can’t get a job, then it’s not going to help them much. I mean, a good example of that is that Jews in Europe are well-known to be overrepresented in a lot of domains of creativity, particularly in the sciences. For example, Nobel prizes in the sciences, Jews are overrepresented.

DUBNER: It’s something like 20 percent.

SIMONTON: But, guess what? That’s most likely to be in the case where Jews were emancipated, where they were no longer subject to the kind of anti-Semitism that they saw in medieval Europe. In Switzerland and a number of other countries. So Switzerland, that disproportion is much much higher than you see in Russia, which actually has many more Jews, but had a much longer history of anti-Semitism.

Maira KALMAN: I used to use the Nazis invading my studio as a motivator to finish an assignment that I was dragging. And I would say, “Well, if the Nazis came in two hours, would it be done? What if they came in one hour — would it be done then?” And that was expecting the worst. And I was brought up, of course my family — especially from my father that sense of you never know what’s going to happen. Horrible things will happen.

Kalman grew up in Israel, her parents having escaped Belarus before the Holocaust. But the rest of her father’s family did not make it out.

Maira KALMAN: In our family, all roads lead to the Holocaust. It’s kind of an inescapable part of a section of our lives and it’s a reference point for so many things. When we talk about politics or things being bad and we say, “Well, it’s not the Holocaust so get a grip.”

When I visited Kalman recently in her Greenwich Village apartment, one room was dominated by cardboard boxes, recently freed from storage. They contained the possessions of her late husband. She and her son Alex are planning to make a documentary about Tibor Kalman.

DUBNER: Would it be fun to open a Tibor box and just see what’s in one?

Maira KALMAN: No. I mean, it could be. Oh wait, I take that back. Let’s open this box.

DUBNER: Okay.

Maira KALMAN: This box is — no, not that box. This box — Yes. Okay. This is — he used to take this extendable fork to a restaurant. And he’d opened the extendable fork and then all of a sudden — this is — well this needs to be repaired but he would reach over to another plate from the customers next to us and take the food off their plate.

DUBNER: Oh, not at your own table?

Maira KALMAN: No, not at our own table. What would have been the fun of that? The fun of this was that he would reach over into somebody else’s table and take their food. He did it in Italy, and everything is much more jolly and festive there and everybody’s laughing a lot at this guy who’s reaching over. And these are Karl Marx communist potato chips which I made for the Tiborocity show. We created a mock store, and this is after he died of course, and I thought, shouldn’t we have Karl Marx communist potato chips, as if that was part of our collection.

The Mmuseumm is housed in an old freight elevator. (Photo: alexkalman/Wikimedia)

Maira and Tibor Kalman’s son Alex is now 33 years old. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of his creative spirit comes from his mother and his father. His main project at the moment is a small museum called Mmuseumm, he calls it “a contemporary natural history museum” and a form of “object journalism.” This is where “Sara Berman’s Closet” originated, before it landed at the Met. We visited Mmuseumm with Alex Kalman one afternoon. Mmuseumm is very, very small. How small? It’s housed in an old freight elevator. About three people can fit comfortably. And yet: it is a museum.

DUBNER: This is nicely done.

Alex KALMAN: Museum quality.

DUBNER: It is museum quality.

Alex KALMAN: It is.

DUBNER: Seriously.

Alex KALMAN: Yeah. Well the idea is that it’s a museum. There’s certain rules we felt we had to follow.

DUBNER: Yeah.

Alex KALMAN: And if we did that then, there’s other rules we could play with. So this collection is called “Modern Religion,” and it’s basically exploring how these ancient traditions stay relevant in today’s society and one way of staying relevant is redesigning the elements or the tools of that religion to fit in with modern trends. So today, everybody’s gluten-free. So now there’s gluten-free communion wafers. Or everybody’s on-the-go, so there’s on-the-go Communion kits. It’s looking at these seemingly banal objects, and —

DUBNER: And this one here is the —

Alex KALMAN: Yeah.

DUBNER: Really? It looks like a piece of Nicorette, and is that wine and a little host, then?

Alex KALMAN: That’s right, yeah. The idea in Mmuseumm is that we want to touch on many different notes of what it means to be human. So there’s things in here that are totally devastating and there’s things in here that are completely absurd and we don’t want the trick to be on you. We want you to be a part of it.

I asked Kalman how his father, and his father’s death, influenced him as a human and as a creative.

Alex KALMAN: There always felt to be a really deep and natural and profound connection between Maira and Tibor and Lulu and me.

Lulu is Alex’s sister.

KALMAN: So there is just a sensibility and a way of feeling and interacting and thinking and doing and why we’re doing and what we’re doing that feels very just binding and natural. And I often think that, subconsciously, the work that I do today feels like a way of maintaining a dialogue with Tibor and he feels very present and very active in it all.

* * *

Dean Simonton, you will recall, is a psychology professor who’s studied the biographies of creative geniuses.

Dean SIMONTON: To get back to just pure psychology, there’s something called the “Big 5” personality factors.

The “Big 5” are: conscientiousness, extraversion-slash-introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and …

SIMONTON: And one of those “Big 5” factors is the openness to experience factor. And it has a lot of different facets to it. It is openness to values, openness to actions, you’re willing to try out different foods, try out different music, all sorts of different things. And this factor is so powerful as a predictor of human behavior, that you can actually tell by going to someone’s dorm room in college whether or not they’re high or low in openness to experience. Okay? Well it turns out this correlates very, very highly with creative genius. Creative geniuses tend to be very, very high in openness to experience. They’re willing to explore different values, different approaches.

We did find a lot of openness to experience in the creatives we’ve been speaking with, often starting in childhood.

Margaret GELLER: I was very much interested in the arts as a child.

That’s Margaret Geller, a path-breaking astrophysicist.

GELLER: And my mother, who was a walking dictionary and loved literature, used to take me to the beautiful Morristown, New Jersey library. It was in a very old building, and one of the things that we read together were plays by all the famous American playwrights. And from that, I really inherited a love of the language and I became fascinated by the theater and by the human condition. So I demanded that I go to acting school. I don’t think my father was that fond of this idea, but it was impossible not to do it.

Geller’s father was a chemist at Bell Labs, the famous tech incubator.

GELLER: I think he started taking me there when I was around 10 and he used to have a mechanical calculator, probably nobody listening, or virtually nobody, knows what one of those are. But they were called Monroe calculators, and the fascinating thing was all the noise they made. And the best thing was to, say, divide one by three, so it would just go, “ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk,” and just put out all the threes it could.

I learned how to load an X-ray camera, and I learned how to measure an X-ray diffraction photograph, how to use a Vernier. And people would come in and chat with me. And also Bell Labs had, in its lobby, a Foucault pendulum which I used to be fascinated by, many stories high. So that was a fascinating thing to see.

The inventor James Dyson, he of the multi-billion-dollar vacuum fortune, was not predestined for a life of engineering.

James DYSON: My father was head of the classics department at my school till he died. My brother was a classics scholar. And my mother was an English scholar. So there was no engineering, or manufacturing, architecture, or anything in sight.

So how’d that happen?

DYSON: So all I knew about creativity, or the only creative thing I did in school, was art. I went off to art school or arts university to pursue art as a career, as a painter, in fact. But when I got there — and this is in London — I discovered that you could do quite a large number of forms of design, like furniture design, interior design, architecture, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, filmmaking, and so on. And I became interested in design but ended up doing architecture.

And while I was doing architecture I discovered that I was very interested in structural engineering. I don’t know why. Except that at that time, it was the time of Buckminster Fuller and his triadic structures, geodesic structures, and Frei Otto with cable-tensioned structures. And it was a time that concrete and, for that matter bricks, were disappearing as the structure for buildings and being replaced by steel structures of one sort or another. And I realized that architecture was going to be about the structure and the engineering, and not so much the form. And I found engineering fascinating, I don’t know why. I’d never come across it in my life before.

DUBNER: I’m curious if you were at all intimidated by the notion of architecture and engineering as much as it appealed to you, did it strike you as something that lay outside the realm of possibility for a boy who came from a family where the classics were the foundation? Did it seem at first just too hard?

DYSON: Not at all. You have to remember — or maybe it’s my arrogance, but you have to remember this was the mid-60s in London, where anything was possible. And it didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t be an architect or a structural engineer or anything for that matter.

It’s probably no coincidence that moving to a big city like London changed the way James Dyson thought about his creative prospects. The same thing happened to Ai Weiwei years ago when he lived in New York City for several years.

WEIWEI: Yes, basically the whole universe is so quiet. Not everywhere is like New York City.

The world has gotten more urban over the past few decades. And that’s probably a good thing for the sake of creativity and innovation. Economists like Harvard’s Ed Glaeser argue that cities play an outsized role in economic growth.

Ed GLAESER: I think the city is our greatest invention because it plays to something that is so fundamental in humanity. It plays to our ability to learn from one another.

Our ability to learn from one another in cities. Ideas colliding, on purpose and by accident. Also, there’s competition in cities — and with that competition comes strong incentives to create. But this raises its own, larger question: is creativity best-served by external incentives and motivation, or internal? When Wynton Marsalis was first thinking about pursuing a career in music, his father warned him: he said don’t do it unless you truly love it. “Don’t sit around waiting for publicity, money, people saying you’re great,” he told him, because “that might never happen.” Things obviously worked out well for Wynton Marsalis, but he remembers his father’s message well, and passes it along to his own students in the jazz program at Juilliard, where he teaches.

MARSALIS: My first thing I have my students do is write a mission statement. And that mission statement has three sentences. What do I want to do, how do I achieve it, and why am I doing it? And based on that mission statement, I teach them. And I have, my fundamental teaching to them is, I want you to rise above the cycle of punishment and reward. I’m not going to reward you or punish you. This is information, and you can do what you want with this information. So, you’re always actualizing. And I always tell them, if you want to learn something I can’t stop you. If you don’t want to learn it, I cannot teach you.

What Ellis Marsalis taught Wynton, and what Wynton teaches his students, is supported by the academic research on creativity and children. A few decades ago, the Stanford psychologist Mark Lepper ran an experiment with nursery-school students in which he first watched them doing various activities, one of which was drawing with markers. Teresa Amabile, who studied under Lepper when she was getting her Ph.D., tells the story.

AMABILE: He then took all of the children, if they’d shown any real interest in these markers, he put them into his experiment. And had them go into a separate room and they were randomly assigned to one of a couple of conditions. The experimental condition was one where the children sat down, and the experimenter said, “Hi, I’ve got some Magic Markers and some paper here for you. I wonder, would you be willing to make a drawing for me with these materials in order to get this “good player award?” And the experimenter then held up this little award certificate with a big shiny gold star on it and a place to write in the child’s name. That was the expected-reward condition.

The kids in this group, as promised, got the certificate for making a drawing. A second group of kids were invited to make a drawing — with no mention of a reward — and got the certificate as a surprise afterwards. This was called the “unexpected-reward condition.” And a third group of kids, a control group, made drawings but were neither promised a reward nor surprised with one.

AMABILE: The results were amazing. They were very strong. The kids who were in the control condition, who were in the unexpected-reward condition, were just as interested in playing with those markers and drawing pictures in their free play time as they had been before they went into the experimental room. The kids who were in the promised-reward condition, the contracted-for-reward condition, were significantly less interested in playing with those markers. So this showed very clearly — and there were many subsequent experiments showing — that intrinsic motivation, intrinsic interest in children and in adults, can be undermined by the expectation of reward.

This finding — that extrinsic motivation can erode someone’s intrinsic desire to create — came as a surprise.

AMABILE: It was revolutionary at the time, which was the early 1970s, because behaviorism still held sway in much of psychology, the notion that rewards are purely good, that they motivate behavior, that you can shape behavior with reward and that is true. In fact it’s still true that rewards can be very powerful shapers of behavior. But Mark discovered this very counter-intuitive, unexpected, unintended negative consequence of reward.

Amabile herself, in a follow-up experiment, explored how extrinsic motivation affects the quality of creative work. She gave kids a bunch of art supplies and asked them each to make a collage.

AMABILE: Without a really strict time limit, although we generally guide people to finish the collage in 15 to 20 minutes.

The kids were divided into two groups. The first group was not promised any sort of reward; the second was told that the best collages would win an Etch-a-Sketch or a Magic 8 Ball. This was called the “competitive-reward condition.” Now all Amabile needed were some judges.

AMABILE: I brought in people from the art department at Stanford individually and asked them to rate each collage relative to the others on creativity on a nine-point scale, something like that. And when I analyzed the data, I found that the kids in the competitive-reward condition, made collages that were significantly less creative than the ones made by the kids in the other condition.

Based on this research and more, it would seem that the promise of extrinsic rewards — the kind of incentives that economists think encourage productivity — that actually discourages creativity, and decreases the quality. At least for kids, in these settings — it’s impossible to generalize. But the evidence is strong enough for Amabile to draw some conclusions.

AMABILE: I think that the biggest mistake we make in our schools, and I’m talking about everything from kindergarten now up through college, is to focus kids too much on how the work is going to be evaluated. Part of that is the extreme focus on testing in the United States right now and the past several years. Part of it is the way curricula have been structured, even before the current major push on testing.

There’s too much focus on “what is the right answer, what are people going to think of what I’m about to say?” and too little focus on “what am I learning, what cool stuff do I know now that I didn’t know last week or a year ago, what cool things can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” And I think that if we could if we could switch that focus, we would do a lot to open up kids’ creativity.

Kids come intrinsically motivated to learn, and we stamp that out of them through the educational system. I don’t think it’s impossible to reorient the way we teach. It’s not going to be easy. But I think we can do it. I think we have to do it.

Walter ISAACSON: I think we all see kids who are slightly rebellious, who talk back, who question the teacher.

That’s Walter Isaacson, who’s written biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

ISAACSON: And at a certain point, the teacher either spends more time and lets the imagination wander or punishes them and says, “Quit questioning me.” Einstein ran away from his school in Germany because he was expected to learn by rote, and he was swatted down every time he tried to question the teacher. So he was lucky — he gets to run away and go to Switzerland, where they have a new type of school system that nurtures questioning authority.

One institution that has raised the questioning of authority to an art form is the M.I.T. Media Lab. It has research units called Opera of the Future and Biomechatronics — and Lifelong Kindergarten. That last one is run by a professor of learning research.

Mitch RESNICK: My name is Mitch Resnick.

Resnick argues that randomized, controlled experimentation — the gold standard of a lot of science — just doesn’t work very well for a subject like creativity.

RESNICK: One problem is it changes one variable at a time. And I don’t think any one variable is going to be the key to creativity. I think that what we see is the most creative environments have lots of different things that work together in an integrated way. So it’s really not so easy to take the classic approach of make a tweak in one variable and see the changes. I don’t think it’s going to be the way that we’re going to get a deeper understanding of the creative process.

Resnick argues that the lack of clear, quantifiable outcomes is a big reason why schools don’t prioritize creativity.

RESNICK: Schools end up focusing on the things that are most easily assessed, rather than focusing on the things that are most valuable for kids and valuable for thriving in today’s society. So what we need to do is to focus more on trying to assess the things we value rather than valuing the things that are most easily assessed.

Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten group develop software that lets kids make things, like animated stories or interactive Lego models.

RESNICK: Very often, traditional learning has taken the form of delivering information, delivering instruction. And the view has been if we just find a better way to deliver the instruction, kids will learn more. But I think research has shown that learning happens when kids, and adults for that matter, actively construct new ideas. There’s the expression we “get” ideas. We don’t “get” ideas. We make ideas. So I think that yes, there’s some role for just delivering information. But I think the most important creative experiences come when kids are actively engaged in making new ideas through their interactions with the world.

The program is called Lifelong Kindergarten because Resnick thinks the ideas should extend well beyond childhood.

RESNICK: We focus on four guiding principles that I call the four Ps of creative learning: projects, passion, peers, and play. So we feel that the best way to support kids developing as creative thinkers and developing their creative capacities is to engage them in working on projects based on their passions in collaboration with peers in a playful spirit.

We lead most of our lives by working on projects. A marketing manager coming up with the new ad campaign is working on a project. A journalist writing the article is working on a project; in our personal life, we plan someone’s birthday party. That’s a project. So we want kids to learn about the process of making projects.

We also want them to work on things that they’re passionate about. We’ve seen over and over that people are willing to work longer and harder and persist in the face of challenges when they’re working on things they really care about. They also make deeper connection to ideas when they’re working on projects that they really care about.

The third P of peers — we’ve seen that learning is a social activity, that the best learning happens in collaboration and sharing with others. We learn with and from others.

Then the final P of play, I sometimes call the most misunderstood P. Often when people think about play they just think about fun and laughter. And I have nothing against fun and laughter but that’s not the essence what I’m talking about. I see play not just as an activity but a type of attitude and approach for engaging with the world. When someone has a playful approach, it means they’re constantly experimenting, trying new things, taking risks, testing the boundaries. And I think the most creative activities come about what we’re willing to experiment and take risks.

Jennifer EGAN: I remember when I would come home from school and no one was home and I didn’t have a plan. There was this almost mysterious excitement that I would feel about just being alone.

That’s the writer Jennifer Egan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad.

EGAN: I have to say, I feel I lost touch with that through maybe even decades of my life where I was so worried about what everyone else was doing, how I measured up, how what I should be doing as opposed to what I was doing whether there was some important thing everyone else was doing that I should be doing too. And this was before social media. I think this is a scourge for young people now. From everything I hear. But if I can get that out of my head, which I find easier and easier as I get older, there’s a feeling that there’s sort of a mystery that’s waiting for me that I can possibly enter.

There’s so many childhood narratives that are really about this. I mean, The Secret Garden, all the Narnia books about passing through a membrane or a border or a door or jumping into a pool and being in another world. It’s a really basic fantastical longing. This wish to be at a distance from one’s own life and to touch something outside it, which is first of all thrilling in and of itself. And second of all returns you to your real life charged in some way. That’s what fiction writing does for me.

ISAACSON: I think that when we’re young, we really indulge our wonder years.

Walter Isaacson again.

ISAACSON: That notion of playing and being imaginative, and having downtime where you can be creative — that’s something we sometimes lose in our school systems today.

One beneficiary of this creative downtime? Leonardo da Vinci.

ISAACSON: He had the great fortune to be born out of wedlock, which meant that he couldn’t go to one of the Latin schools that middle-class families of the Renaissance went to. And so he’s self-taught — he sits by a stream and puts rocks and different obstacles in it to see how the water swirls, and he draws it. And then he looks at how air swirls. All of these things you get to do when you’re young, you’re full of wonder, and you’re using your imagination.

We see that in Ben Franklin as a young kid, just being interested in, “Why does condensation form on the outside of a cold cup?” The type of thing that maybe we thought about, but somehow we quit thinking about. So that’s the number-one secret of being imaginative and creative, is almost being childlike in your sense of wonder. Albert Einstein said that. He said, “I’m not necessarily smarter than anybody else, but I was able to retain my childlike sense of wonder at the marvels of creation in which we find ourselves.”

But Walter Isaacson — like Mitch Resnick and Teresa Amabile — isn’t calling for a ban on conventional instruction.

ISAACSON: I think that creativity is something you can nurture, and even try to teach. But more importantly, creativity without skill — creativity without training and learning — can be squandered. If Louis Armstrong had not found somebody — King Oliver — to teach him how to play the cornet, all of his imagination would have been lost. So we should not disparage the role of training, of learning.

The same is true of Einstein — as a little kid, he’s wondering how the compass needle twitches and points north. What’s important is that he goes to the Zurich Polytech and starts understanding the concepts behind Maxwell’s equations. So people who think we should just nurture creativity without the skill sets and the training that allow creativity to be turned into action, to allow for things like applied creativity, they’re being too romantic about it. Leonardo had to work in Verrocchio’s workshop and learn how to do a brush stroke.

There are, of course, plenty of obstacles that may keep a person from gaining both proper instruction and the latitude to play and imagine. Nor is every kid lucky enough to grow up with two parents as talented and creative as Tibor and Maira Kalman. Or with parents like Margaret Geller’s, taking her to Bell Labs and indulging her passion for acting. These are privileges, not rights. They’re not always fully appreciated. Here’s John Hodgman, the comedian, author, and former Daily Show correspondent.

John HODGMAN: People who are hand-to-mouthing it and are really economically anxious, of course they’re going to have a disadvantage to, say, an affluent white dude from Brookline, Massachusetts who is an only child who had the full benefit of all of his parents’ love and never had to share anything in his life. I had a lot of time to sit around thinking and daydreaming to the point where, when I went to college, my dad said, “I don’t care what you do in college, I ask you only that you take a single course in bookkeeping and finance, so you know how that world works.” And I was like, “Dad, I love you, but no way.”

DUBNER: Really? That wasn’t a big ask on your father’s part.

HODGMAN: Even that. I know, fathers, I know.

DUBNER: What a spoiled brat you were.

HODGMAN: Totally. This is what I’m saying. I’ve regretted it every day of my life. It was an incredibly selfish and ridiculous thing to do, because I was spending his money to go to college. And yet I was like, “No, I’m going to sit on the grass and read 100 Years of Solitude for the fifth time.” You could make an argument that it paid off for me, to a certain degree.

But I mean, look: art comes out of all communities everywhere. Communities of means and communities of no means. I mean, the greatest art movement of the 20th and 21st century, that is probably the most globally meaningful art movement, is the development of hip-hop, which was creation in the South Bronx by young people who were obviously not affluent.

John Hodgman sure sounds like he’s got a grip on the causes and consequences of creativity. Wouldn’t you say? And that he’s got his own creative ducks in a row. He’s had a lot of creative and commercial success. But do not be deceived. If you think prior success insulates a creative person from — well, anything, you should think again.

HODGMAN: I mean, let me put it this way: I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying. It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day. And that I will not be able to support myself or my family, because I have now finally run out of ideas, for sure, this time, I mean it. It’s not even a fear. It is a certainty that I’m done, that I have no further ideas, and I’ve been doing this — this and only this, whatever this is — now for 21 years.

We’ll explore that fear, and many other aspects of creativity, in future episodes of this series. Until then, keep your ears open for a bonus episode, our full conversation with Elvis Costello, who’s had one of the most extraordinary careers in modern music and has just put out a wonderful new record, called Look Now.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam and Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Michael Bierut, graphic designer.

Pat Brown, chief executive and founder of Impossible Foods Inc.

Rosanne Cash, singer-songwriter.

Elvis Costello, musician, singer, songwriter, and composer.

Mark Duplass, film director, film producer, and actor.

James Dyson, inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

David Galenson, economist at the University of Chicago.

Margaret Geller, astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University.

John Hodgman, humorist.

Walter Isaacson, biographer and professor of history at Tulane University.

Alex Kalman, co-founder, director, and curator of the Mmuseumm

Maira Kalman, illustrator, writer, artist, and designer.

Wynton Marsalis, American musician, composer and bandleader.

Nico Muhly, composer.

Mitch Resnick, leader of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

Ai Weiwei, contemporary artist and activist.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

EXTRA

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitch Resnick (M.I.T. 2017).

The post Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)? (Ep. 355) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/where-does-creativity-come-from-and-why-do-schools-kill-it-off-ep-355/

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habia1veredaempinadaxahimelanc · 7 years

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Feminist opposition to the sex industry has little to do with women's 'choices'MARCH 11, 2015 by

MEGHAN MURPHY

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400SHARES

I feel quite certain that the reasons feminists oppose prostitution and pornography are clear. We have gone over the arguments many times and left little room for confusion.

In short, the sex industry exists because we live in a capitalist patriarchy that places men, as a class, in a position of power over women, as a class. Within this system women’s bodies are seen as and treated as existing “for men” — for their use, for their pleasure. Men’s desire is prioritized above women’s well-being. Men will often hire prostitutes to do that which they “can’t” do to their wives or girlfriends, thus creating a class of abusable women, dividing us into worthy or “good” women and unworthy or “bad” women. At the same time, these systems make all women into things that are publicly accessible — we are to be groped, looked at, cat-called, fucked. Pornography serves to sexualize inequality and the degradation of women. It turns violence, gang-rape, and abuse into maturbatory tools. It teaches the viewer that male power and female subordination is “sexy.” It sexualizes incest and pedophilia. Both prostitution and pornography are deeply racist — creating, sexualizing, and perpetuating racist stereotypes about women that are then attached to misogynist practices. The prostitution of women of colour is, as Alice Lee explains to Chris Hedges, “an extension of imperialism” and “built on the social power disparities of race and color.” The prostitution of Indigenous women and girls, in Canada, is directly connected to our history of colonialism.*

Despite all that, when liberal feminists or leftist men who have chosen to avoid criticism of the sex industry in favour of “women have agency,” “sex work is work,” or “my body my choice” -type arguments, they tend, more often than not, to erase our actual critique, instead creating caricatures that can more-easily be dismissed or trashed.

We see this in Pandora Blake’s recent piece in New Statesman. She writes:

Porn is one of the least marginalized jobs within the sex industry, but it still suffers from the same fallacy as every other discussion about sex work — the idea that it is only a legitimate choice if it is ‘empowering.’

This characterization always strikes me as odd when I come across it because I’ve yet to encounter a feminist critique of pornography that mentions anything about “legitimate choices.” Blake goes on to repudiate the notion that a job must be “empowering” in order to be viewed as a “legitimate choice,” noting that we don’t ask the same of film, in general, or really, of any job.

“Why do we only expect ’empowerment’ of sex work, and not of other jobs?” she asks.

Well, I think we do hope for “empowerment” in other jobs and don’t wish for anyone to be degraded at work, for starters… Feminists have fought sexual harassment, assault, and abuse in the workplace for decades. But also, the question of whether or not an individual feels “empowered” by sex work isn’t one we pose — rather, it’s a position taken by those who believe the existence of the sex industry is fine and good and justifiable because some women claim it can be experienced as empowering in certain ways. Now, whatever is inside your head belongs to you, but whatever a person believes or chooses to believe about their own sense of empowerment doesn’t change the fact that the sex industry does harm individual women and does impact all women.

Needless to say, feminists don’t “expect empowerment of sex work” nor do we ask whether or not a woman’s “choice” to enter into the sex industry is a legitimate one. The question of “legitimacy” should, rather, be asked of this imagined debate.

We see another example of this in a recent post by Anne Thériault, who says that “white feminists” need to stop “thinking that all sex workers are all miserable wretches who hate their lives.” She writes:

Like, this is literally what you’re saying: “I believe women have agency and can make decisions about their lives except for when it has to do with sex work, at which point I will assume that either someone is exploiting them or else they are self-hating gender traitors only interested in the male gaze.”

So just to clarify, you think that women can make choices except when it’s a choice you disagree with, at which point you’re pretty sure she’s being coerced. You also think that sex workers need to be “rescued,” even if they’re happy with what they do. You would rather see women further marginalized by anti-prostitution laws than find ways to keep sex workers safe.

Again, explain to me how this is a pro-woman stance?

Hmm, no… What we literally are not saying is that women in prostitution are “gender-traitors” or that we “disagree” with women’s “choices” to enter into the sex industry. Literally no feminist I know says that. And I know an awful lot of the women who fight, within the feminist movement, against the sex industry… Not only does Thériault erase all of the women of colour who are opposed to the racist, misogynist sex industry, but she chooses to erase our actual arguments, developed over decades and waves. To pretend as though only white women are feminist, fight sexual exploitation and abuse, and can see and care about the harm and abuse that happens in the sex industry is an appalling — but deliberate — attempt to dismiss the work and efforts of thousands and thousands of women, over decades, across the globe, and I think it is reprehensible.

It is only necessary to invent untrue and insulting caricatures if you are not willing or able to engage with the actual critiques and analysis at hand. I might ask how willfully misrepresenting the work, ideology, politics, arguments, beliefs, intentions, backgrounds, lives, and experiences of women as a means to justify telling them to shut up is “pro-woman?”

Feminists do not judge women who enter into prostitution — whether they have made some version of a choice (within the context of capitalist patriarchy) or not. Certainly we don’t see them as “gender traitors.” There is no “them,” for that matter, as many of “us” (feminists) have been involved in the sex industry in one way or another, and all of “us” live in this world. There is no clear dichotomy between “us” and “them.” Certainly we don’t want to see women further marginalized by sexual exploitation, considering that it is the most marginalized women (and also considering that women are marginalized as a group, under patriarchy, and therefore it is “us” who are affected) who already are most vulnerable to exploitation in prostitution.

We are largely concerned, though, with the choices men make to consume pornography, to buy sex, and to exploit and profit from the sale of women’s bodies. We are also largely concerned with the fact that we live in a culture that treats women as objects to be bought and sold. We are largely concerned with the fact that most women and girls grow up believing that their existence is legitimized by the male gaze and that we then internalize that gaze. This is a problem that hurts women — all women. Therefore it makes no real sense to “disagree” with women’s “choice” to be impacted by this gaze and the larger systems at work, since we (women) are the ones who are suffering under said systems. We will certainly disagree with and challenge women who defend these systems or who pretend as though they are good for women, but prostitutes are not to blame for prostitution and women aren’t to blame for the existence of porn. In short, the fight isn’t about women’s individual choices — it is about the fact that women’s choices are limited and shaped by patriarchy and, of course, that many women and girls have no real choice when it comes to the exploitation, abuse and violence they experience in this world.

What should be clear, at very least, is that we are feminists because we care about women. To say that we want to see women further marginalized is an incredibly bold fabrication. What could our motives possibly be except the well-being, rights, and liberty of women? These representations ignore and erase the truth of our movement. They erase the fact that women in this movement come from all sorts of backgrounds, are marginalized, have been prostituted and abused, work with and for women on a daily basis, and not only are impacted by the sex industry on a personal and systemic level, but care about the impact on all otherwomen and girls as well.

Blake writes:

If you truly care about empowering porn performers, start by reducing poverty. Fight to improve our welfare state, for a citizen’s basic income, for more flexible working options for parents and people with disabilities, and for decreased tuition fees for students. It is possible to work full time in this country without earning a living wage, while others who want to work full time may not be able to. If you want to make someone more empowered, you need to give them better options, not fewer options.

Indeed. As the women (and men) I ally with are somewhere over to the left (whether or not they identify as socialist, as I do), these issues are of primary importance. But because we are fighting for a stronger welfare state and free tuition and a living wage does not mean we drop our fight to end violence against women and the dehumanization of women and girls.

A woman can “choose” to do sex work, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s ok for a man to buy her. A woman can “like” or “dislike” performing in porn, but that doesn’t make porn “good” for women, nor does it negate the fact that the sex industry reinforces male power and entitlement.

Part of the reason feminists fight prostitution and pornography is, yes, because of the violence and abuse so many women and girls suffer within it. But it is not those women and girls’ “choices” we disagree with… Prostitution and pornography are social problems that exist on a larger spectrum that includes objectification, rape culture, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, body image, self-esteem, sexual assault, incest, and more. The way we understand heterosexual relationships, the way we understand sex, the way women and men relate to one another, the way we understand marriage and beauty and our value as human beings — it’s all connected and affected. Pop culture, film, television, advertising are all affected too. The connections are palpable to anyone willing to see.

If the point, in terms of this debate, were whether or not any individual felt they were being empowered by porn at any given point in time or whether or not one person “liked” another person’s “choice” to do sex work, then we could simply argue back and forth about who feels personally empowered by what and who personally “liked” or did “not like” any given thing or idea, divorced from a larger context, political movement, or ideology, for eternity, and get nowhere. Oh wait…

I honestly don’t know how a person can be a feminist and fail to understand all this, but if they truly don’t, the least they could do is represent our arguments fairly. Otherwise it simply appears as though you are unable to engage with the ideology at hand, cheaply resorting to red herrings and sexist tropes, which not only detracts from your argument, but does the feminist movement no good.

*Editor’s note, 03/11/2015: This paragraph was added in to clarify the arguments for those who might be unfamiliar with the feminist analysis of prostitution and pornography.

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oldguardaudio · 7 years

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Daily Dose of FAKE NEWS -> Teflon Trump gets blamed less by base for Obamacare fail than Senate GOP

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Teflon Trump gets blamed less by base for Obamacare fail than Senate GOP

Donald Trump prepares to swing a Marucci bat, from Baton Rouge, during a “Made in America” product showcase at the White House on Monday. (Alex Brandon/AP)

BY JAMES HOHMANN with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: President Trump has a funny way of talking about Republicans as if he’s not one of them, let alone the leader of the party.

Maybe it’s because he was a registered Democrat until as recently as 2009.

Or maybe he still sees himself as the outsider who hijacked the GOP from the establishment in a nominating contest that no one but him thought he could win.

Or maybe it’s because, until late in life, he was an outspoken advocate of universal health care. Trump heaped praise on Canada’s single-payer system and said the United States should emulate it in a book he wrote called “The America We Deserve” in 2000.

Another plausible explanation for why Trump doesn’t want his own brand too closely associated with Republicanism is that he likes to have scapegoats handy if things go poorly. He will happily take credit for legislative victories and run away from defeats.

As the Senate GOP all but admits defeat in its seven-year quest to overturn the Affordable Care Act, Trump’s reaction gives credence to this theory. “I’m not going to own it,” the president told reporters in the Roosevelt Room yesterday. “I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us.”

— Whatever the reason, Trump has often talked about Republicans in the third person since taking office. Consider these examples specific to the health-care debate:

“I say to the Republicans, if you really want to do politically something good, don’t do anything,” Trump said in a speech to the National Governors Association meeting in February. “Sit back for a period of two years, because ’17 is going to be a disaster—a disaster!—for Obamacare if we don’t do something.”

“Action is not a choice, it is a necessity,” he said the very next day in his address to a joint session of Congress. “So I am calling on all Democrats and Republicans in Congress to work with us to save Americans from this imploding Obamacare disaster. … On this and so many other things, Democrats and Republicans should get together and unite for the good of our country.”

“The Republicans, frankly, are putting themselves in a very bad position — I tell this to Tom Price all the time—by repealing Obamacare, because people aren’t going to see the truly devastating effects of Obamacare,” Trump said in March after a “listening session” with “Obamacare victims.”

In an interview with the Fox Business Network to reflect on his first 100 days in office, Trump explained that he had been unable to accomplish as much as he promised partly because of the Republicans. “You have certain factions,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “You have the conservative Republicans. You have the moderate Republicans. So you have to get them together, and we need close to a hundred percent. That’s a pretty hard thing to get.”

After the House passed its health bill in May, Trump predicted it would quickly get through the Senate. “The Republicans are very united like seldom before,” he said. “The Republicans came together all of a sudden two days ago, and it was like magic. They just came together. They are very, very united. Every group from the Freedom Caucus to the Tuesday Group to every single group.”

He’s also tweeted about congressional Republicans as if they are a very distinct entity:

After holding a premature celebration in the Rose Garden when the House passed its bill, Trump privately complained that their measure (which he had publicly endorsed) was “mean.” He then complained to Fox News when Barack Obama called the bill mean, on the grounds that he had actually been the first to use that word. You really can’t make that up:

Trump admits he called GOP health bill ‘mean’

— Across the mainstream media, this morning’s press clips are brutal for Trump. Ahead of his six-month anniversary in office Thursday, there are hundreds of stories out there about how the president is not living up to his promises and has shown himself unable to make big deals.

But, but, but: That is not the vibe you get at all when you check out the right-wing sites where many of the president’s supporters consume their news. Many conservative outlets are pinning the blame on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and moderate Republican senators, just as they blamed Speaker Paul Ryan when the health-care bill ran into speed bumps in the House.

Here is a taste of what Trump’s base is seeing:

“Why the GOP Congress will be the most unproductive in 164 years,” by The Week’s David Faris: “It turns out that the GOP-controlled Congress can’t seem to pass any meaningful laws at all. Either they have forgotten how, or the divisions in their own increasingly radicalized caucus are proving too difficult to surmount. Whatever the explanation, thus far these GOP legislators are on track to be the least productive group since at least the Civil War.”

“The ObamaCare Republicans,” by the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board: “This self-inflicted fiasco is one of the great political failures in recent U.S. history, and the damage will echo for years. … If the ObamaCare Republicans now get primary opponents, they have earned them. … If Republicans can’t be trusted to fulfill a core commitment to voters — whether repeal and replace, or simply to reduce the burden of government — then what is the point of electing Republicans?”

“The GOP’s Arrogance Was Thinking That 52 Votes Is A Majority,” by Forbes’ Stan Collender: “The GOP’s numerical majority is not an ideological majority, and the collapse of the health care debate shows definitively that Senate (and probably House) Republicans are anything but ideologically aligned on major issues.”

— On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh launched a gendered attack against the three moderate senators who announced that they would not vote for full repeal of Obamacare: Susan Collins (Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). “Now we find out the Republican caucus in the Senate is infected with essentially leftist members,” Limbaugh said on his program, which attracts millions of listeners each afternoon. “Collins, Murkowski, Capito – these three female leftists in the Republican caucus are running the Senate, not Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell is not running the Senate! These three women are running the Senate. The conservative Republicans in the Senate are not running the Senate. Three liberal women who call themselves Republicans are running the Senate!”

A favorable write-up of Limbaugh’s comments is getting played high on Breitbart.com this morning.

— “Behind the scenes, White House officials were pointing fingers at Republican leadership,” Politico reports.

Washington reacts after collapse of GOP health-care bill

— Because the meltdown of the repeal effort just happened, there is no current polling on who will get blamed most. But a good indicator is probably how people reacted when the House bill failed the first time. In a poll conducted during the first week of April, the Kaiser Family Foundation asked: “Who do you think is to blame for the fact that the health care bill did not pass?” Among GOP voters, only 10 percent blamed Trump while 27 percent blamed Republicans in Congress. (The rest either blamed Democrats or said they didn’t know.) Among people who approved of Trump’s job performance at the time, slightly more blamed the House GOP and even fewer blamed Trump.

Relatedly, despite all evidence to the contrary, 74 percent of Republicans in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll said Trump was making significant progress on his agenda.

Senate health-care bill collapses under opposition

A FLAWED STRATEGY:

— “Senators pushed Trump to the sidelines. He happily stayed there. Republicans are paying the price,” by senior congressional reporter Paul Kane: “Behind closed doors, the thinking went, GOP senators would reach the consensus … without the din of Trump’s tweetstorms getting in the way. This week, however, brought a painful reminder for Republicans of how difficult major legislative undertakings can be with a president who is doing other things, picking fights with TV news hosts and devoting an inordinate amount of time to a mounting scandal about his 2016 presidential campaign. … Overall, the effort to shore up support for the proposal really lacked a central salesman.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Trump’s onetime primary rival who has been backing him up on health care, reflected candidly on McConnell’s theory of the case after things fell apart: “Let us work through the process and allow it to work its way through the system, and then you can come in at the end and close it. That’s the advice (Trump) took. … The flip side is it’s very difficult to do big things without the involvement of the president. So it’s kind of a Catch-22. … The bottom line is there are members here who understood the president’s preference and were willing to vote against it anyway. … This is the Senate. Leadership sets the agenda, but senators vote in the interests of their states. … Republics are certainly interesting systems of government, but certainly (it’s) better than dictatorship.”

— “The failed promise to repeal and replace Obamacare surely will affect the mood and enthusiasm of the Republican base heading toward 2018,” writes Dan Balz, The Post’s chief correspondent. “When the Gallup organization asked Americans about the future of Obamacare recently, 30 percent of Americans said they favored ‘repeal and replace,’ but 70 percent of Republicans picked that option. GOP lawmakers will have left them empty-handed, perhaps disillusioned. … In normal times, a party would look to its president to hasten the healing process and pick up the pieces. But these are not normal times. Trump operates by his own standards. And this is a Republican Party that has yet to come to terms what is has become and what is expected of a majority party.”

— Congressional Republicans, not Trump, are on the ballot next November. If the midterm elections are bad for the GOP, can you imagine him taking responsibility the day after or seeing it as a repudiation of his leadership? Of course not.

Trump says he’s ‘very surprised’ by Lee and Moran’s opposition to health-care bill

— Trump is not behaving like someone who believes he’s in a foxhole with Senate Republicans.

The White House has been not-so-quietly trying to recruit a Trumpist primary challenger to principled conservative Sen. Jeff Flake in Arizona. Trump himself has been encouraging people to take on the incumbent next year. “Kelli Ward, who has already launched her campaign, and Robert Graham, a former state GOP chair and Trump adviser who is considering it, both told CNN on Monday they have had multiple conversations with White House officials about opposing Flake in the Senate primary,” Eric Bradner reports. “Another potential candidate — state treasurer Jeff DeWit — has had multiple conversations with Trump… Trump was furious at Flake last fall when the Arizona senator called on Trump to withdraw from the presidential race after the emergence of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape. He told a small group of Arizona Republicans last fall — including Graham — that he would spend $10 million on defeating Flake in the 2018 Senate primary…” (Politico’s Alex Isenstadt also had some great reporting on this earlier in the week.)

— “Trump made explicit what Republicans had been hoping since the repeal fight started — that whatever happened, voters would blame the Democrats for their health-care costs,” David Weigel reports. “It’s an audacious strategy that flies against current polling and electoral history. It counts on messaging, distracted voters and a built-in electoral advantage to guide the party past the rocks. …

“In interviews Tuesday, Democrats who face re-election in 2018 expressed disbelief at the idea that they, not Trump, would be held accountable for problems with the health-care system. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who may be challenged by longtime ACA opponent Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), said that he was eager to work with Republicans on shoring up the subsidies. Voters back home, he said, clearly saw the Trump administration as the impediment to fixing the law. ‘Let me tell you, people are coming out of the woodwork,’ said Nelson. ‘I go to the Tampa Bay Rays game, I throw out the first pitch, and people are begging: Don’t let them take away my health care. People are onto this.’ Nelson is one of 10 Democrats up for reelection in states won by Trump last year, a factor that Republicans once thought would scare incumbents into making deals. Instead, Democrats have grown more confident about their 2018 chances, with few top-tier candidates jumping into ‘Trump state’ races, and credible Democrats running for seats in Nevada and Texas.”

Graham on health care: ‘I’d like to see a bill that people actually liked’

WHAT’S NEXT?

— “At the heart of the failed Senate effort to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act were irreconcilable differences over the proper role of entitlements and how far the party should go to pursue its small government mantra,” Damian Paletta writes. “Both wings of the GOP revolted — senators who rejected steep cuts to Medicaid, a health program for low-income Americans, and others who felt the cuts were not deep enough. Now, with the split unresolved, the party is struggling to find a way to govern despite controlling the White House and Congress. And that may leave it at risk of failing to pass any landmark legislation. … With the Republican Party divided, these fights are expected to continue, and potentially intensify. Trump has shown an ideological openness to support most any GOP bill that has a chance of passage, hoping to notch a legislative victory after experiencing numerous defeats.”

— With Obamacare intact (for now), the 10 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplaces still face lingering uncertainty. Amy Goldstein and Paige Winfield Cunningham report: “These consumers could face a rocky few months at the least, as the insurers on which they rely decide how to respond to the political chaos. Some companies could become more skittish about staying in the marketplaces for 2018, while others could try to ratchet up their prices depending on how events in Washington unfold. … Most immediately, the administration has the power to decide whether to halt the billions of dollars in payments to health plans that help their lower-income ACA customers afford deductibles and other coverage expenses. Those cost-sharing subsidies benefit 7 million Americans. … The other decision is whether to ease off enforcement of the ACA’s penalty for Americans who shirk the coverage mandate.”

— Trump has repeatedly toyed with the idea of ending the subsidies, the next round of which are supposed to go out to insurers by tomorrow. Politico’s Paul Demko and Josh Dawsey report: “Trump has repeatedly told aides and advisers that he wants to end the subsidy payments, and he has not changed his position, according to several people who have spoken with him. … ‘My advice to the plans this morning was, “If you get it, cash the check quickly,’ one health care lobbyist who represents insurers said Tuesday. Two White House officials said a final decision on the subsidies had not been made. One person said various aides and advisers had issued conflicting opinions in recent days. Asked whether Trump would actually pull the plug, a different administration official said this time is ‘different’ — and that administration officials had begun looking at how they would end the payments. ‘But no decision has been made,’ the official said.”

— McConnell announced last night that, at Trump’s request, he will hold a vote on the motion to proceed to debate on the bill early next week. Axios’s Caitlin Owens reports: “[Collins, Murkowski and Capito] are being encouraged to vote yes on the first vote, which begins debate on the bill … There would then be debate and an opportunity to amend the bill while it’s on the floor. So while [McConnell] has told members the vote will be on the 2015 repeal bill, the final bill voted on could end up being something else. … But two of the three holdouts would have to agree to vote yes on the motion to proceed if the vote is held before Sen. John McCain returns from surgery. That’s a big if, and some are skeptical: ‘No one believes a deal can be made at this point. The three ladies are waaaay smarter than that,’ a third senior aide told me.”

— With little hope among Republicans for a one-party solution, Chuck Schumer is repeating his offer to work with his GOP colleagues to reach a bipartisan solution. (Ed O’Keefe and Sean Sullivan)

— Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), whose state expanded Medicaid under the ACA, wrote a New York Times op-ed urging the Senate GOP to work on fixing the current law: “In the uncertainty created by the Senate plan’s collapse, Congress should guard against a hasty next step. Just taking up the fatally flawed House plan is not an answer, and this idea should be immediately rejected for the same reasons senators rejected the Senate’s own proposal. Also, simply repealing Obamacare without having a workable replacement is just as bad. Both would simply yank health coverage out from under millions of Americans who have no other alternative. After two failed attempts at reform, the next step is clear: Congress should first focus on fixing the Obamacare exchanges before it takes on Medicaid.”

Cory Gardner, John Barrasso, Mitch McConnell, Roy Blunt, and John Cornyn speak to reporters yersterday after a Senate Republican lunch. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

HOW IT’S PLAYING:

— “Tuesday brought more tension,” Robert Costa, Kelsey Snell and Sean Sullivan report in a detailed tick tock. “There was finger-pointing and faction-forming as (Vice President) Pence and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus worked to repair relationships with senators … During a Senate lunch, when McConnell broached voting Wednesday on a bill that would simply repeal Obamacare, he was met with resistance … McConnell had speakers lined up to support his plan, but a number of senators, fuming over the Monday drama and other issues, asked for a pause rather than quick legislative action.”

— “Republicans, ignore Trump’s call to ‘let Obamacare fail.’ Do this instead,” by The Post’s Editorial Board: “Mr. Trump is apparently indifferent to the pain that sabotaging the individual health insurance market would cause millions of Americans. Congress must therefore act responsibly. … [Chuck Schumer] on Tuesday morning endorsed bipartisan cooperation to stabilize insurance markets. If Mr. Schumer is serious, he should appoint a panel of Democrats who are willing to cooperate to serve as his side’s negotiators.”

— “Trump Finds That Demolishing Obama’s Legacy Is Not So Simple,” by the New York Times’ Peter Baker: “Determined to dismantle his predecessor’s legacy, Mr. Trump in the space of a couple of hours this week reluctantly agreed to preserve President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and failed in his effort to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care program. The back-to-back events highlighted the challenge for a career developer whose main goal since taking office six months ago has been to raze what he sees as the poorly constructed edifices he inherited.”

— “Why repeal-and-replace was doomed from the start,” by Post columnist Kathleen Parker: “During almost a decade of writing sporadically about health care in its various iterations, I’ve interviewed dozens of people from a mix of related fields — medical, business, legislative and political. Not once have I found a single person who thought the GOP could pull off a repeal-and-replace.”

— “Trump Seems Much Better at Branding Opponents Than Marketing Policies,” by the Times’s Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy: “He has promised ‘great healthcare,’ ‘truly great healthcare,’ ‘a great plan’ and health care that ‘will soon be great.’ But for a politician who has shown remarkable skill distilling his arguments into compact slogans — ‘fake news,’ ‘witch hunt,’ ‘Crooked Hillary’ — those health care pitches have fallen far short of the kind of sharp, memorable refrain that can influence how millions of Americans interpret news in Washington.”

— “Health care collapse a blow to McConnell,” by Politico’s John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett: “It’s a serious defeat for McConnell, and one that leaves deep bitterness among rank-and-file GOP senators, as moderates and conservatives blamed each other over who is at fault for the setback.”

— “Why Obamacare Passed but the GOP Health Bill Failed,” by The Wall Street Journal’s Naftali Bendavid: “Democrats entered the 2008 election expecting to win and planning to push health care as a top priority. In contrast, many Republicans didn’t expect to capture the presidency in 2016, and the GOP didn’t have a health proposal ready.”

— “The Health Bill’s Failure: Resistance Works,” by the Times’s David Leonhardt: “[Sen. Jerry Moran] clearly felt political pressure to oppose the bill, and his recent meetings with constituents were a big part of that pressure.”

— “Trump Is Showing The World What A Weak American Presidency Looks Like,” by BuzzFeed’s Tarini Parti, Adrian Carrasquillo and John Hudson: “Trump’s struggles go beyond health care. More than six months into Trump’s presidency, Republicans have no legislative accomplishments other than the confirmation of (Gorsuch), a confusing foreign policy, and a White House that is perpetually in damage control mode. From lawmakers and governors to donors and foreign policy experts, a certain realization is sinking in within the party, based on more than a dozen interviews in recent days: Donald Trump has been a historically weak and ineffective president.”

— “Medicaid shows its political clout,” by Politico’s Rachana Pradhan: “Medicaid may be the next “third rail” in American politics. Resistance to cutting the health care program for the poor has emerged as a big stumbling block to Obamacare repeal, and Republicans touch it at their political peril.”

— “Trumpcare Collapsed Because the Republican Party Cannot Govern,” by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait: “The cohesion Republicans possessed in opposition disintegrated once they had power, because their ideology left them unable to pass legislation that was not cruel, horrific, and repugnant to their own constituents.”

— “GOP may not be punished if it can’t pass repeal,” by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Drew Altman: “When you look at the polling, the idea that the base will rise up and punish Republicans if they don’t repeal the ACA appears to be exaggerated, and possibly even a political fiction.”

— “Murkowski, Sullivan hope for a path forward on failed health care bill,” from Alaska Dispatch News’ Erica Martinson: “Alaska’s Republican U.S. senators are not ready to give up on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, though they have differing viewpoints about how to get there amid a failing process in Congress. … Murkowski called for Republicans to start over, run the bill through an open and bipartisan committee process and leave Medicaid reform at a later date. Sullivan urged his Republican colleagues to continue negotiating among themselves on the draft that was on the table. … At the Senate GOP policy meeting Tuesday afternoon, both Murkowski and Sullivan said they spoke up among their colleagues. Murkowski made clear why she wasn’t willing to vote for a repeal without a replacement plan. Sullivan offered a plea for continued negotiations.”

— “Capito, Manchin oppose repealing ACA without replacement plan,” by Charleston Gazette-Mail’s Jake Zuckerman: “In 2015, Capito voted in favor of an Obamacare repeal bill that then-President Barack Obama vetoed. Ashley Berrang, a spokeswoman for Capito, said the senator needs a working replacement before she votes for a repeal, and the most recent versions are not up to snuff. … Manchin said he questions whether a repeal vote will go the distance, and that he’s planning to work with the other senators who used to serve their states as governors to find an approach to reform the ACA with people who are used to working in a bipartisan fashion. … He said he had not spoken to Capito yet on the new tactic but that she is invited in on the brainstorming sessions.”

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WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:

Trump speaks to Vladimir Putin during their second conversation at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg. (Evan Vucci/AP)

THERE’S A BEAR IN THE WOODS:

— Trump had an undisclosed hour-long meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month, the White House confirmed last night. The informal session came after the leaders met for more than two hours that same day.Karen DeYoung and Philip Rucker report: “[The second meeting] took place at a dinner for G-20 leaders, a senior administration official said. Halfway through the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump was alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter. … Trump’s newly disclosed conversation with Putin at the G-20 dinner is likely to stoke further criticism, including perhaps from some fellow Republicans in Congress, that he is too cozy with the leader of a major U.S. adversary. The only version of the conversation provided to White House aides was that given by Trump himself, the official said. Reporters traveling with the White House were not informed, and there was no formal readout of the chat …

“[The session was first reported by] Ian Bremmer, president of the New York-based Eurasia Group, in a newsletter to group clients. Bremmer said in a telephone interview that he was told by two participants who witnessed it at the dinner, which was attended only by leaders attending the summit and some of their spouses. Leaders who reported the meeting to him, Bremmer said, were ‘bemused, nonplussed, befuddled’ by the animated conversation, held in full view — but not listening distance — of others present.”

— “Russia specialists said such an encounter — even on an informal basis at a social event — raised red flags because of its length, which suggests a substantive exchange, and the fact that there was no American interpreter, note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present,” the New York Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports. “If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” said Stephen Pifer, a Russia specialist and the former ambassador to Ukraine.

— Trump called the reports of the meeting “sick:”

Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah, speaks at a clean energy summit in Las Vegas. (David Becker/Getty Images)

WAITING ON THE KREMLIN:

— White House aides said in early March that Trump planned to nominate Jon Huntsman to become the U.S. ambassador to Russia, but they didn’t formally make the announcement until last night. “The White House had delayed formally naming Huntsman and sending the nomination to the Senate for confirmation as the United States waited for the Kremlin to approve his selection,” Abby Phillip and Lisa Rein report. “Huntsman’s nomination was announced one day after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met at the State Department with Undersecretary of State Thomas Shannon. The Kremlin approved Huntsman’s appointment Monday night about the same time that the United States approved Russian politician Anatoly Antonov to serve as Russia’s ambassador in Washington.” Huntsman, the former Utah governor, was U.S. ambassador to China and then ran for president in 2012.

Untangling the web of Donald Trump Jr.

THE EIGHTH MAN:

— A U.S.-based employee of a Russian real estate company attended the meeting last summer between a Russian lawyer and members of the Trump campaign, including Donald Trump Jr. — bringing to eight the number of known participants at the session. Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger report: “Ike Kaveladze’s presence was confirmed by Scott Balber, an attorney for Emin and Aras Agalarov, the Russian developers who hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in 2013. Balber said Kaveladze works for the Agalarovs’ company and attended as their representative. Balber said Tuesday that he received a phone call from a representative of [special counsel Robert Mueller] over the weekend requesting the identity of the Agalarov representative. … The request is the first public indication that Mueller’s team is investigating the meeting. … Balber said Kaveladze works as a vice president focusing on real estate and finance for the Agalarovs’ company, the Crocus Group.”

— The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee is requesting more information about another one of the meeting’s attendees. Politico’s Austin Wright reports: “Chuck Grassley is demanding more information from the Trump administration on Rinat Akhmetshin, the pro-Russian lobbyist who attended a controversial meeting last year with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. … Grassley said the request is part of a committee investigation into agents of the Russian government who lobbied against the Magnitsky Act but have not registered as foreign lobbyists under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

— Grassley’s vice chair also shared the committee’s plans to request that Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort testify at an open hearing in the coming weeks. Karoun Demirjian reports: “The special counsel in charge of the FBI’s investigation, Robert Mueller, has given the committee the go-ahead to publicly interview Trump Jr. and Manafort, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said, although it remains unclear if either will appear. Feinstein said she expects the testimony to be scheduled for sometime before Congress departs for the August recess — a break that has now been delayed until the middle of the month. … Manafort and Trump, Jr. may not be invited to appear before the committee alone. According to Feinstein, [Grassley] wants to merge their testimony with an examination of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA — something the committee had scheduled for Wednesday, but has now been postponed.”

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert reports to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn., last year. (Andrew Link/The Rochester Post-Bulletin via AP, File)

GET SMART FAST:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert was released from federal prison in Minnesota on Tuesday and placed into a halfway house in Chicago. Hastert, who served nearly 13 months in prison, pleaded guilty last year to violating anti-money laundering laws, which stemmed from hush money payouts to conceal his sexual abuse of teenage boys. He now serves two years of supervised release with limited travel, drug screenings and psychological testing to determine whether he is still a threat to repeat his offenses. (Chicago Tribune)

A former House staff member pleaded not guilty to charges connected to the circulation of nude images and video of his former employer, Virgin Islands U.S. House Del. Stacey Plaskett, and her husband. Juan McCullum, who formerly worked as a legislative counsel in Plaskett’s office, was one of two staffers charged in the case. (Spencer S. Hsu)

More than 540 former members of Germany’s most storied Catholic choir for boys were physically or sexually abused, a new report found. The latest revelation about the Domspatzen choir, which was led for many years by the brother of Pope Benedict XVI, comes amid mounting charges the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the mistreatment of young boys. (Isaac Stanley-Becker)

Investigators said that the Minneapolis police officers who shot and killed Justine Damond were “startled by a loud sound.” The account provides the first information on what happened in the moments before the Australian woman died on Saturday. (Mark Berman)

A Turkish court ordered the formal arrest of an Amnesty International director and five other human-rights workers on terrorism charges. Rights advocates have characterized the arrests as “politically motivated persecution” that has increased in the wake of a failed coup attempt last summer. (Kareem Fahim)

A Chipotle franchise in Virginia was temporarily closed after it received multiple reports from customers who said they got sick after eating there. The incident drew comparisons to another string of foodborne illnesses that plagued the chain in 2015 — and already sent the chain’s stock plummeting six percent. (Caitlin Dewey)

An international group of researchers tasked with reviewing dozens of studies about artificial sweeteners has found that the sugar substitutes are “significantly associated with modest long-term increases” in body weight, BMI and waist circumference. (Cleve R. Wootson Jr.)

An Australian lawmaker who earned international attention after breast-feeding her baby in parliament in May has resigned because she has dual citizenship, which is banned for lawmakers in that country. (New York Times)

A Florida state attorney voiced alarm after a 10-year-old boy died with both heroin and fentanyl in his system — a highly dangerous opioid mixture that made him one of the youngest victims of the state’s drug epidemic. Investigators do not believe the boy was exposed at home, and said he began vomiting shortly after returning from a community pool. (Lindsey Bever)

Tragedy struck in New Hampshire this week after a father attempted to teach his youngest daughter how to water ski — but ended up running his boat over the 12-year-old girl, killing her. Authorities said the boat was in neutral at the time. (Avi Selk)

The remains of a Swiss couple that disappeared over 70 years ago in the Alps were likely discovered. Two bodies were found as a glacier melted in the area where they disappeared. (CBS News)

An Audi commercial in China compared women to used cars. (Amy B Wang)

Netflix said it will aim to release 40 original films by the end of the year — an ambitious goal from the streaming giant, and one that analysts say could pose a big challenge to the traditional Hollywood model of moviemaking. (Hamza Shaban)

Chris Christie was booed by Mets fans after he caught a foul ball at Citi Field. A TV announcer added to the jeers by commenting, “Nice to see him get from the beach here to the ballpark.” (Des Bieler)

A golden retriever is being hailed as a hero after it rescued a baby deer from drowning off the coast of Long Island. Dramatic video shows the dog paddling furiously toward the three-month-old deer, before grabbing it by the neck and swimming with it back to shore. (Lindsey Bever)

What we know about Trump’s voter fraud commission

TRUMP’S AGENDA:

— Trump’s controversial voter commission will meet today for the first time – but even ahead of that sit-down, the panel has already gotten off to a rough start. John Wagner and Sari Horwitz report: “[The commission to advise Trump] on ‘election integrity’ includes the publisher of ‘Alien Invasion II,’ a report on undocumented immigrants who mysteriously showed up on the voter rolls in Virginia. Another championed some of the strictest voter identification laws in the country during her days in the Indiana legislature. And yet another warned nearly a decade ago of the ‘possibility for voter fraud on a scale never seen before in this country.’ During his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, the Social Security numbers of 1.2 million state voters were accidentally posted on the agency’s website. Even before this panel of 12 holds its first official meeting … it has sparked more controversy — and more questions about its competency — than any presidential advisory commission in memory.”

On Tuesday, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a federal lawsuit against Trump’s voter commission, alleging that it was “formed with the intent to discriminate against voters of color in violation of the Constitution.” They are at least the seventh party to file a federal lawsuit against the commission in the past month. (Christopher Ingraham)

“In states where data requests have been rebuffed, the commission is contemplating filing public-records requests to obtain what it wants,” our colleagues write. “In other instances, members said, they are willing to comply with procedures that require payment for the data. … The commission includes no members who live west of Kansas — meaning the nation’s most populous state, California, is not represented, nor is the rapidly growing Southwest. The only Latino named to the panel … has already resigned. [And] the commission’s only African American member is former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, a Republican who was accused of voter suppression during his tenure by ordering county clerks not accept voter registrations on anything less than 80-pound stock paper, the thickness of a postcard.”

What you need to know about the House GOP budget plan

— “House GOP leaders are resorting to Plan B on their spending strategy after falling woefully short of the support needed to pass a massive government funding package without Democratic votes,” Politico’s Jennifer Scholtes, Sarah Ferris and Rachael Bade report. “Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced Tuesday night that the House will vote next week on a measure that includes just four of the 12 bills needed to fund the federal government. … After launching a whipping operation Monday night to gauge interest in voting on the full spate of spending bills, GOP leaders walked away with a tally of dozens of Republican lawmakers who said they couldn’t commit — as well as several hard ‘no’s’ — to voting for the partisan bundle of 12 bills, according to Republican lawmakers and aides. The survey underscored GOP leadership’s ongoing difficulty in appeasing the party’s most fiscally conservative wing while still holding onto support from moderates.”

— A member of the Freedom Caucus is threatening to torpedo Paul Ryan’s tax reform proposal during a budget markup today. Politico’s Rachael Bade reports: “Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) is considering an amendment to the fiscal 2018 budget that would hasten the death of the so-called border adjustment tax. While the exact language is not finalized — indeed Sanford is not even sure he’ll pull the trigger — the proposal would be aimed at preventing the Ways and Means Committee from using the controversial tax increase on imports to finance tax cuts, a Ryan brainchild. … The amendment could cause a ruckus in the budget markup. While multiple budget sources say the committee is expected to easily pass the fiscal blueprint, they acknowledged the amendment could easily create havoc.”

— In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, Democratic and Republican lawmakers argued that too many women are being incarcerated for low-level offenses. Vanessa Williams reports: “From Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.) to Republican Rep. Mia Love (Utah) and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), there was bipartisan agreement that most of the women in jails and prison would be better served by drug rehabilitation and mental health services, rather than harsher sentences. They noted that most women in the criminal-justice system are victims of domestic abuse or sexual violence. And because most incarcerated women have small children, locking them away can destroy an already fragile family. The discussion came during a day-long conference called ‘Women Unshackled.’”

— House members are considering a new GI Bill expansion that would remove a 15-year-cap on education benefits for military veterans and their families – offering a “lifetime window” for college-tuition assistance. The expansion would also make eligible reservists who deploy on active duty, and surviving spouses and dependents of veterans who die during their service. (T. Rees Shapiro)

— The administration will have their first formal economic talks with China today in D.C. The Wall Street Journal’s Jacob M. Schlesinger reports: “After Donald Trump’s November election, ‘many kept their fingers crossed, worrying that China-U.S. trade relations would enter a stormy…winter and even run the risk of a trade war,’ Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang told a luncheon of business executives here Tuesday. But Mr. Trump has since dropped his threats to impose drastic penalties against Chinese imports—an across-the-board tariff, or a formal charge of currency manipulation—and has so far focused on small market-opening agreements, instead. … U.S. business groups, which had originally braced for the hostilities Mr. Wang referred to, are now growing worried the Trump administration may not press China hard enough for broad reforms they consider necessary to pry China’s economy open.”

A hiker stands at the Glacier National Park in Montana. (family photo)

— Mark Zuckerberg visited Montana’s Glacier National Park last weekend to learn about climate change firsthand – but while he was there, he was unable to meet with the area’s resident climate scientist. Lisa Rein reports: “Three days before the tech leader’s July 15 visit to Glacier, research ecologist Daniel Fagre said he was told that his scheduled tour with Zuckerberg of Logan Pass on the Continental Divide was off. ‘I literally was told I would no longer be participating,’ Fagre, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey, said in an interview Tuesday … He said he asked the public-affairs officer who notified him why the briefing was being canceled. ‘I’ve gotten nothing back,’ he said. ‘We’ve definitely been left in the dark.’ Zuckerberg did meet with park rangers … But with the park a ground zero of sorts for the unmistakable signs that warming and melting of glaciers is speeding up, the decision to keep a visitor — and a celebrity at that — from meeting with a scientist-in-residence … struck some observers as a deliberate effort by the Trump administration to minimize climate issues.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomes Jared Kushner during his June visit. (EPA/Amos Ben Gershom)

THE NEW WORLD ORDER:

— Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday that he was “skeptical” about the peace efforts being brokered by Trump’s administration. Haaretz’s Barak Ravid reports. “During the meeting in Paris, Macron told Netanyahu that he supports Trump’s efforts and that the settlement-building plans that Israel has advanced in the past six months have made an already complicated situation that much harder, the sources said.”

— A day after certifying that Iran has been complying with the nuclear deal brokered under the Obama administration, Trump’s White House added 18 more entities and individuals to its sanctions list for Tehran. Karen DeYoung reports: “Senior administration officials had made clear that the certification was grudging and indicated that new sanctions would closely follow for Iran’s ‘malign activities’ in nonnuclear areas, such as ballistic missile development and support for terrorism. … The last certification of Iranian compliance, in April, was also followed by new sanctions on Iranian individuals and companies that the administration said played a role in ballistic missile tests not covered by the nuclear agreement.”

— “A high-stakes power struggle between Iran’s moderate president, [Hassan Rouhani], and his hard-line opponents in the judiciary appeared to escalate with the arrest of the president’s brother and the conviction of an American student for espionage this weekend — rulings that seemed timed to embarrass the Iranian leader at home and abroad,” Erin Cunningham reports: “[The] moves by Iran’s judiciary … also undermine Rouhani’s attempts to build better relations with the West, which more-reactionary Iranian institutions such as the judiciary oppose. And they suggest an effort by ruling clerics to pressure the president to back down from confrontation on the domestic front, particularly ahead of the official inauguration of his second term next month, when Rouhani will pick his new cabinet.”

— Rex Tillerson is considering closing the State Department’s cybersecurity office or merging it with another office, Politico’s Tim Starks reports. The news came less than a day after it was reported that Christopher Painter, the Trump administration’s top cyber diplomat, will leave his State Department job at the end of the month. “’It’s a step back from everything done over the last ten years,’ said [a source familiar with the meeting], who added that Tillerson was also considering ‘limiting the number of people who work on cybersecurity’ at State. ‘They basically gave [Painter] two weeks notice,’ the source [said]. “’It’s clear they’re thinking about reorganizing it. … Clearly they don’t think it’s that important.’”

— Americans’ fear of a major war in the near future is increasing at a rapid clip. NBC News’s Andrew Arenge, Hannah Hartig And Stephanie Perry report: “An overwhelming majority of Americans — 76 percent — are worried that the United States will become engaged in a major war in the next four years, according to a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey National Security Poll out Tuesday. The number has jumped 10 points since February, when 66 percent of Americans said they were worried about military conflict. Although Americans are concerned about a number of national security threats, a strong plurality (41 percent) believe that North Korea currently poses the greatest immediate danger to the United States, emerging as a more urgent concern than ISIS (28 percent) or Russia (18 percent), according to the poll[.]”

SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ:

Some greeted the president’s suggestion to “let Obamacare fail” with skepticism:

From two House Democrats:

The criticism extended way beyond Washington:

Others literally ran from the discussion:

From one of our congressional reporters:

Or they hid behind trash cans:

From Obama’s former top adviser:

In light of his recent comments about Democrats owning Obamacare, this Trump tweet was circulating again:

From NBC’s Capitol Hill correspondent:

From the Boston Globe’s chief national correspondent:

For those keeping score:

From one of Time’s D.C. editors:

An old Nixon-era column made the rounds again:

A Wall Street Journal reporter reacted:

From a New York Magazine writer:

Once again, the White House’s theme of the week got sidelined:

A Democratic member of the House ribbed Trump’s Made in America week:

Trump stepped up to the plate:

The White House misspelled–again:

And the Internet had more fun with Tropical Storm Don:

Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

GOOD READS FROM ELSEWHERE:

— Politico Magazine, “How the GOP Became the Party of Putin,” by James Kirchick: “I was no fan of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. I criticized his Russian ‘reset,’ his Iran nuclear deal, his opening to Cuba, even his handling of political conflict in Honduras. … What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. My message for today’s GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 called—it wants its foreign policy back.”

— New York Times, “Bathroom Bill Tests Clout of Rare Moderate in Increasingly Conservative Texas,” by Manny Fernandez and David Montgomery: “When Texas lawmakers gather here for the start of a 30-day special legislative session on Tuesday morning, they will most likely decide the fate of the Texas version of North Carolina’s bitterly divisive legislation regulating the access of transgender people to public bathrooms. But something else will be on the line, too: whether moderate Republicans have a role to play in a state party increasingly dominated by far-right Christian conservatives, and whether the last powerful moderate Republican in Texas[, State Representative Joe Straus, the speaker of the Texas House,] can keep his job and his influence. … Pro-business, Bush-style, country-club Republicans no longer set the agenda in Texas. What happens in the session … will provide the clearest signal of whether there is any effective brake left on social-conservative Republicans in Texas.”

— Politico Magazine, “Is the President Fit?” by Ben Strauss: “In the modern history of American presidents, no occupant of the Oval Office has evinced less interest in his own health. He does not smoke or drink, but his fast-food, red meat-heavy diet, his aversion to exercise and a tendency to gorge on television for hours at a time put him at odds with his predecessors. … And on the campaign trail, he made a point of mentioning his taste for fast foods like Kentucky Fried Chicken[.] … This may make the president more relatable to the average American, who scarfs down some $1,200 worth of fast food each year, but it’s an unusual habit for someone holding down one of the world’s most demanding jobs. … By any measure, America’s president is overweight, and medical experts say it could be affecting his health and his job.”

— New York Magazine, “There Aren’t Very Many Democratic Governors. That Could Change in 2018,” by Ed Kilgore: “The most underappreciated (in Washington, anyway) aspect of the 2018 midterm elections is the fact that 36 governorships will be up for grabs. And the partisan landscape for these contests will be nearly as skewed toward Democrats as the Senate landscape is skewed toward Republicans, with the GOP defending 26 seats and Democrats just 9 (one, in Alaska, is held by an independent). What really makes the gubernatorial races different from others, however, are term limits: Fully 13 Republican governors and 4 Democrats are either term-limited or have already announced their retirements.”

— The Atlantic, “South Korea’s President May Be Just the Man to Solve the North Korea Crisis,” by S. Nathan Park: “Just as only the conservative Richard Nixon could thaw U.S.-China relations, the supposedly dovish Moon Jae In could defuse tensions with the Kim regime.”

HOT ON THE LEFT

“Arizona Senate candidate under attack for being Muslim,” from the Arizona Republic:“She’s the other challenger to Sen. Jeff Flake. A native of Little Rock, Ark. A Phoenix attorney and civil rights activist. An independent-turned-Democrat. A 19-year resident of Arizona who wants to represent ‘the state where I found my home, family and dreams.’ And, as it turns out, a few nightmares. Deedra Abboud is also Muslim. … The response over the last 24 hours to … some of her other posts and videos have ranged from disturbing to just plain scary.”

HOT ON THE RIGHT:

“An article called for John McCain to ‘just … die already.’ A GOP official responded: ‘Amen,’” from Kristine Phillips: “A member of the Republican National Committee in Nevada apologized after retweeting an article that begged for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to die. Diana Orrock, a national committeewoman for the Nevada GOP, shared a story headlined ‘Please Just [expletive] Die Already.’ In retweeting the piece, which was published on Medium, Orrock wrote ‘Amen.’ Several hours after posting the now-deleted tweet, Orrock apologized to McCain and to the Nevada and national GOP, calling the ailing senator ‘an American hero’ — and her own post ‘disrespectful.’”

In a true show of bipartisanship, Sen. Jeff Flake offered reassurance to his Democratic challenger Abboud:

DAYBOOK:

Trump will have an NSC briefing and a meeting with Terry Branstad, the U.S. ambassador to China, in the morning before his lunch with Republican lawmakers to discuss health-care in the afternoon. He will then lead a Made in America roundtable.

Pence will participate in the first meeting of the voter fraud commission and then join the health-care lunch and Made in America roundtable. He also has a meeting with the governor of Indiana, Eric Holcomb.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Former Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) on his tenure, three months after resigning amid a sex scandal and pleading guilty to criminal charges: “I’m the best governor Alabama’s ever had by far.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:

— It’s hot today in D.C., but it’ll be even worse over the weekend. The Capital Weather Gang forecasts: “But with partly to mostly sunny skies, highs reaching the mid-90s aren’t exactly refreshing either. Add in the high humidity, and we’ll see the afternoon heat index near 100, with the possibility of an isolated afternoon storm.”

— The Nationals beat the Angels 4-3. (Chelsea Janes)

— Even before Mitch McConnell’s bill to repeal Obamacare failed due to three senators’ opposition, the governors of Maryland and Virginia voiced their own opposition. Josh Hicks reports: “Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) on Tuesday joined nine other governors to urge Congress to ‘immediately reject’ efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and focus instead on stabilizing insurance markets.”

— Maya Rockeymoore, a policy consultant and the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), is weighing a bid for Maryland governor in 2018. The 46-year-old would be the first woman to join what is shaping up to be a crowded Democratic primary field, with five contenders already battling for a chance to challenge incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan in the general election. (Josh Hicks and Ovetta Wiggins)

— “Democrat Danica Roem, the transgender ex-journalist who is challenging Del. Robert G. Marshall in Prince William County, far outpaced the conservative Republican in fundraising last month, an early indication that her campaign is drawing significant interest from inside and outside Virginia.” (Antonio Olivo)

VIDEOS OF THE DAY:

Keegan-Michael Key reprised his role as Barack Obama’s anger translator:

Keegan-Michael Key Brings Luther, Obama’s Anger Translator, Out Of Retirement

Seth Meyers checked in on the EPA:

The Check In: The Environmental Protection Agency

A Saudi woman has been arrested for a viral video showing her wearing a miniskirt in a conservative province in the kingdom:

Young woman arrested in Saudi Arabia for wearing ‘suggestive clothing’

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) lamented the pain that comes with being a Cleveland Indians fan:

Rooting for the Cleveland Indians is a lifetime of pain, even for senators

Parisians swam in three new swimming areas in a canal, part of the city’s push to clean its waterways for its Olympics bid:

Swimmers go for a dip in a Paris canal

And scientists at the University of Manchester discovered that the T. rex could not run:

Simulation of T. rex reveals the dinosaur couldn’t run

Daily Dose of FAKE NEWS -> Teflon Trump gets blamed less by base for Obamacare fail than Senate GOP Daily Dose of FAKE NEWS -> Teflon Trump gets blamed less by base for Obamacare fail than Senate GOP…

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