Opinion | The World-Shaking News That You’re Missing – By Thomas L. Friedman – The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• Nov. 26, 2019
• • 478

The site of a meeting in June between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

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“SINGAPORE — One of the most negative byproducts of the Trump presidency is that all we talk about now is Donald Trump. Don’t get me wrong: How can we not be fixated on a president who daily undermines the twin pillars of our democracy: truth and trust?

But there are some tectonic changes underway behind the Trump noise machine that demand a serious national discussion, like the future of U.S.-China relations. Yet it’s not happening — because all we talk about is Donald Trump.

Consider this: On Nov. 9, European leaders gathered in Berlin to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an anniversary worth celebrating. But no one seemed to notice that almost exactly 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, a new wall — a digital Berlin Wall — had begun to be erected between China and America. And the only thing left to be determined, a Chinese business executive remarked to me, “is how high this wall will be,” and which countries will choose to be on which side.

This new wall, separating a U.S.-led technology and trade zone from a Chinese-led one, will have implications as vast as the wall bisecting Berlin did. Because the peace, prosperity and accelerations in technology and globalization that have so benefited the world over the past 40 years were due, in part, to the interweaving of the U.S. and Chinese economies.”

Opinion | The Double-Barreled Dream World of Trump and His Enablers – By Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch – The New York Times

By Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch

Mr. Simpson and Mr. Fritsch are the founders of Fusion GPS.

 

“As the founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that commissioned the reports by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that raised some of the earliest warnings of Russia’s actions, we’re willing to clear up some of the nonsense now so abundant on the right.

House Republicans like Representatives Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan seem eager to portray Fusion as co-conspirators with the Ukrainians in some devilish plot to undermine Mr. Trump’s 2016 candidacy. That could not be farther from the truth. None of the information in the so-called Steele dossier came from Ukrainian sources. Zero. And we’ve never met Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian former legislator and journalist whom Republicans want to blame for the downfall of Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

That said, our investigation of Donald Trump did get a great boost because of Ukraine, just not in the way Republicans imagine. We began looking into Mr. Trump’s business dealings and ties to Russia in the fall of 2015 with funding from Republicans who wanted to stop his political ascent. The Ukraine alarms went off six months later, when candidate Trump brought into his campaign none other than Mr. Manafort, a man with his own tangled history with Russian oligarchs trying to get their way in Ukraine.

It turns out we already knew a great deal about Mr. Manafort’s activities in Ukraine because we worked on several stories about his work for Russian-backed politicians eight years earlier, when we were both still writing for The Wall Street Journal. That reporting threw a spotlight on how Mr. Manafort, while representing clients involved in fierce geopolitical struggles over Ukraine, had neglected to comply with a lobbying law requiring that he register as a foreign agent — the very law, among others, to which he pleaded guilty of violating.”

Opinion | The Life and Death of the Local Hardware Store – by Tim Wu – The New York Times

“On Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, not far from where I live, there’s a small neighborhood hardware store called Chelsea Convenience Hardware, which is distinguished by its unlikely display of dozens of Russian nesting dolls in the storefront window. Inside, tools and supplies are piled to the ceiling, and when you enter, the owner, Naum Feygin, an immigrant from Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, looks up to ask you what you need.

The “convenience” in the store’s name is no misnomer, for the place is extraordinarily efficient. It is cheaper and faster than ordering from Amazon and offers expert advice that reduces the risk of buying the wrong thing. It is all too easy on Amazon, for example, to buy halogen bulbs that don’t fit your lamp base; Mr. Feygin has spared me many such headaches. And the store’s small size is a virtue: Unlike at Home Depot, you can be in and out in 10 minutes.

Nonetheless, Chelsea Convenience is set to close at the end of November, another casualty of rising commercial rents and competition from e-commerce. The closing is of no great economic significance, other than to Mr. Feygin. But it is a microcosm of the forces reshaping the United States economy, often paradoxically and for the worse. Why is a less efficient, less personalized and more wasteful way of buying screws and plungers — ordering online — displacing the local hardware store?”

Opinion | I Invented the World Wide Web. Here’s How We Can Fix It. – The New York Times

By Tim Berners-Lee

Mr. Berners-Lee is a co-founder of the World Wide Web Foundation.

• Nov. 24, 2019
• • 242

Credit…Wren McDonald

“My parents were mathematicians. My mother helped code one of the first stored-program computers — the Manchester Mark 1. They taught me that when you program a computer, what you can do is limited only by your imagination. That excitement for experimentation and change helped me build the World Wide Web.

I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the world of open source software are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the web.

However, the reality is much more complex. Communities are being ripped apart as prejudice, hate and disinformation are peddled online. Scammers use the web to steal identities, stalkers use it to harass and intimidate their victims, and bad actors subvert democracy using clever digital tactics. The use of targeted political ads in the United States’ 2020 presidential campaign and in elections elsewhere threatens once again to undermine voters’ understanding and choices.

We’re at a tipping point. How we respond to this abuse will determine whether the web lives up to its potential as a global force for good or leads us into a digital dystopia.”

“, , ,I’m introducing a new approach to overcome that stalemate — the Contract for the Web.

The Contract for the Web is a global plan of action created over the past year by activists, academics, companies, governments and citizens from across the world to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone.

The contract outlines steps to prevent the deliberate misuse of the web and our information. For example, it calls on governments to publish public data registries, so that they are no longer able to conceal from their own citizens how their data is being used. If governments are sharing our data with private companies — or buying data broker lists from them — we have a right to know and take action.”

Opinion | Why I Wear Five Wedding Rings – by Margaret Renkle – The New York Times

Margret Renkle is not like any other journalist I follow. She writes today mostly about gratitude to her mother and her female ancestors It might be iimpossible to read this and not insert yourself into the story she weaves, with your own losses and loves, and family heros.
She writes,: “I’m the keeper of other family rings: my great-grandmother’s, my grandmother’s, my mother-in-law’s. From time to time I would take them out to ponder for a moment, but I never thought to wear them. Along with my mother, these women are at the very heart of the essay collection that was about to send me out on a book tour, and one day it finally dawned on me that their wedding rings would make the perfect talismans against fear. They would remind me that worry is pointless, that fretting about my own shortcomings as a public speaker would not in any way make me a better public speaker. I took out the wedding rings of all my treasured forebears and put them on.

In what might be another minor miracle, for we are clearly in the realm of magical thinking here, it worked. I stood in front of microphone after microphone, spinning the thin bands around my fingers, and I looked out upon all those strangers, and, lo, I was not afraid.”

Opinion | Why the Searing Politics of the Trump Era Give Me Hope – by Lee Drutman – The New York Times

“But here’s why I’m ultimately optimistic: I see how much the election of Mr. Trump acted as an impetus for people who care about democracy to get involved. The 2018 election registered the highest turnout midterm election in 104 years, and the smart money is on a similarly high turnout election in 2020. It may sound strange to say, but Mr. Trump’s election may yet turn out to be the shock and near-death experience that American political system needed to right itself.

I’m also optimistic because the one reform with the most potential to break our zero-sum partisanship, ranked-choice voting, is gaining tremendous momentum at the state and local level. In 2018, Maine became the first state to use ranked-choice voting for federal elections (after Mainers approved it in two statewide referendums). This month, New York City voters adopted it. Also in 2020, expect voters in Alaska and Massachusetts to decide whether they want in on ranked-choice voting.

By removing the spoiler effect of third parties, ranked-choice voting can break the us-versus-them force driving our partisan warfare, and create space for a political realignment that creates new coalitions to shape economic reforms and negotiate social change.”

Opinion | The Four Lessons of Impeachment – by Susan Rice – The New York Times

Susan Rice has just written what I wanted to say about these brave and articulate Foreign Service officers etc..   She wrote:

“Second, these hearings have amply demonstrated the extraordinary caliber and character of our nonpartisan career Foreign Service officers, civil servants and uniformed military personnel. The intellect, integrity, selflessness and sense of duty displayed by each of the officials who testified — even in the face of harsh personal attacks and efforts at witness intimidation orchestrated by the president — are extraordinary. They reflect the commitment to country that I witnessed every day for 16 years when I was privileged to serve alongside these kinds of apolitical officers.

Yet Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress have denigrated and demeaned these public servants, placing them in physical danger — just because they prioritized their duty to the law and the Constitution above slavish devotion to any president. Beyond this disgrace, the president and his acolytes are assassinating the collective character of all career public servants — disparaging them as the “Deep State,” “Never-Trumpers” and un-American.

In rhetoric that recalls the darkest days of McCarthyism, Republican leaders will seemingly stop at nothing to destroy public faith in our public servants. This is the very “deconstruction of the administrative state” that Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, heralded as the administration’s goal. And who wins when the State Department, intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the Pentagon struggle to attract and retain top talent? Not Americans. It serves only our adversaries who want to hollow out our bureaucracy, weaken our national institutions and discredit our democratic model.”

Opinion | The Day That Decided the 2020 Election – by Timothy Egan – The New York Times

“The impeachment hearings had been bumping along, the main story clear: a parade of impeccable public servants trying to uphold the values of their country against a gangster White House. A candidate who had gloated over chants of “lock her up” for an opponent who had used unsecured emails had, once elected, conducted foreign policy by extortion, on open cellphone lines penetrated by the Russians.

Most Americans felt that Trump had committed an impeachable offense, but barely half favored removing him by the constitutional equivalent of the death penalty.

Then came the bullet-headed Republican, Gordon Sondland, an oddball hotelier whose ambassadorship to the European Union was a million-dollar quid pro quo. Some predicted he would take the Fifth.

Instead, he said that the unusual diplomatic dance in Ukraine was not part of a rogue operation holding up American tax dollars as part of a scheme to take down a political opponent. It was White House policy, the government of the people in service of one person.

“We followed the president’s orders,” he said. “Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.” “

Moliere’s 1665 comedy “Don Juan,” has great resonance in today’s world, at Westport Country Playhouse through Nov. 23.

We saw Moliere’s Don Juan last night at the Westport Playhouse, and were deeply impressed by the script and the acting. Don Juan explains to his servant how his new piety will be the perfect con, is so appropriate to understanding the giant hypocrisy of the GOP today.

The review below ends, ” One question that’s highlighted by having Don Juan be so dastardly and Sganarelle so dutiful: Why does the servant stick around? The theme of blind obedience is one that Kennedy and Pelsue are happy to explore, right up to the closing of the curtain.

Brendan Pelsue’s adaptation is full of respect for Moliere’s original. He cuts a few scenes down to their essence, but since the show runs two and a half hours (including intermission) even with those cuts, he’s doing us a favor there. When a joke won’t work without explaining it, Pelsue explains, usually by adding more jokes. He turns monologues into snappy dialogues just by adding a few reaction lines or back-and-forth expressions. The debates about love and honor don’t get tedious. Religious dogma is downplayed. This new version, coupled with Kennedy’s clear direction, is about accenting what we find objectionable about Don Juan today, and that’s plenty.

“Don Juan” is not a morality play. Its anti-hero stays immoral to the end. His story is crazed and complicated, and very much a comedy. This underappreciated 350-year-old play by one of theater’s all-time master satirists is scarily appropriate for our times. It can be hard to take, but so worthwhile. “A cruel nobleman is a horrible thing,” the play tells us. But he can also be terribly entertaining.

DON JUAN by Moliere, translated and adapted by Brendan Pelsue, directed by David Kennedy, runs through Nov. 23 at Westport Country Playhouse, 25 Powers Court, Westport. Performances are Tuesday at 7 p.m., Wednesday at 2 and 8 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $40-$70. 888-927-7529, westportplayhouse.org.”

COURANT.COM

Review: ’Don Juan’ a cool, cruel comedy at Westport Playhouse

Moliere’s 1665 comedy “Don Juan,” a cautionary tale of unrepressed lust and selfishness, has great resonance in today’s world, as proven by David Kennedy’s sharp production at Westport Country Playhouse through Nov. 23.

Billy Elliot at the Goodspeed Opera house last night – by David Lindsay

David Lindsay

We saw Billy Elliot at the Goodspeed Opera house last night, and it is good news and bad news. The good news, is it a great production with amazing music and dance. An 8 out of 10, with a complicated dark story full of huge laughs. I laughed harder than at The Book of Mormon. The bad news, it closes after this Sunday, and there are limited seats left. I learned today at the Trinity Christmas Market that there is a movie version I was unaware of! The music is by Elton John, and story, is about a young boy’s courage to pursue ballet, wich is seen as totally gay, in a coal mining town of northern England as the town goes through the hell of the only mine closing.

YOUTUBE.COM

Goodspeed’s BILLY ELLIOT THE MUSICAL Montage

Sept 12 – Nov 24, 2019 at The Goodspeed, East Haddam, CT Young Billy Elliot is pulled between his family’s coal-mining roots and his newly discovered passion…