Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd gives Donald Trump a zinger this morning by praising the way French President Emmanuel Macron has emerged as a world leader with grace and style while not giving into the Trump bullying.  Before getting into her theme, she puts down Trump and the characters around him. 

“We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to see the president of the United States step up to the lectern to confidently tell us how he will combat the existential threat to the planet — be it aliens, asteroids, tidal waves, volcanoes, killer sharks, killer robots or a 500-billion-ton comet the size of New York City.

So it was quite stunning to see the president of the United States step up to the lectern to declare himself the existential threat to the planet.

And with a calming band playing us to our doom, just like on the Titanic.

You know you’re in trouble when beclouded Beijing, where birds go to die, replaces you as a leader on climate change.

America is living through a fractured fairy tale, in the grip of a lonely and uninformed mad king, an arrogant and naïve princeling, a comely but complicit blond princess and a dyspeptic, dystopian troll under the bridge.

American carnage, indeed.

On climate change, the troll, Steve Bannon, got control and persuaded Donald Trump to give a raspberry to the world. Bannon had better watch out or rising waters will wash out his bridge to the past.

Even though Jared, Ivanka, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, Elon Musk, Bob Iger and Lloyd Blankfein pressed the president to stay in the Paris climate accord — which is merely aspirational about the inhalational — Bannon won the day…

… Then the president read an interview with Emmanuel Macron in a French newspaper, bragging about how he had prepared to give Trump an Iron Man grip because it was “a moment of truth” showing that he “won’t make small concessions, even symbolic ones.”

Comparing Trump to strongmen Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Macron made it clear that he was determined to face down the bully, pushing back hard on Trump, just as he would a few days later with Putin. He scolded the Russian president for his state-controlled media’s “lying propaganda” and warned that France would use military force if Putin’s ally Bashar al-Assad unleashed chemical weapons on civilians again.

As Ashley Parker, Phil Rucker and Michael Birnbaum reported in The Washington Post Thursday: “Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said. A few days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden, ‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.’”

Whether Macron is being coached by his wife, whom he met when she was his drama teacher in high school, is not clear. But he understands the signs and symbols of power.

Trump is the president with a background in entertainment, but the 39-year-old French president is the one who has mastered theatrics, from the splendor of “Ode to Joy” playing at the Louvre on election night as he made his slow victory walk, to his steely six seconds of arm wrestling with Trump, to his dramatic swerve to embrace Angela Merkel, leaving Trump nonplused and waiting to shake his hand, to his dressing down of Trump’s pal Putin at Versailles, to his televised exhortation aux barricades on Thursday in English: “Make our planet great again.”

As The Times’s Adam Nossiter wrote, Macron has a “deeply held belief that France in some sense has been missing its king since the execution of Louis XVI on Jan. 21, 1793.” And he has consciously cultivated a regal air as he champions “radical centrism,” globalization and protecting the environment. The Post dubs him “the prince regent of Paris and Pittsburgh alike.”

Trump, on the other hand, has rattled the world with his crude manner, cruel policies, chaotic management style, authoritarian love-ins and antediluvian attitudes, cementing his image as the highchair king.

For once, the French have a right to be condescending toward the United States.”

Vive la France!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The City University of New York (CUNY) represents many things to many people.  Those of us who have had the privilege of teaching at one of its twenty-four colleges and schools marvel at its diversity and the industriousness of its students.  However, I don’t remember anyone ever referring to CUNY as Poetry U.  The New York Times in a featured article this morning, does just that.  Here is an excerpt:

“The City University of New York is many things. It is vast. It is accessible to students without a lot of money. It is exceptionally diverse. It is not, however, particularly fancy, the kind of place that oozes exclusivity or prestige.

And yet CUNY is home to a surprising number of extremely accomplished, recognized — some might even say fancy — poets.

This year, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry went to “Olio,” a book by Tyehimba Jess, an associate professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

Mr. Jess joins an extensive list at CUNY. Ben Lerner, a MacArthur Fellow, teaches at Brooklyn College. Kimiko Hahn, winner of the prestigious PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, teaches in the Queens College M.F.A. program. Grace Schulman is at Baruch College, Patricia Smith is at the College of Staten Island, Meena Alexander and Tom Sleigh are at Hunter College. Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, retired last year after teaching at Lehman College for almost 50 years.

As it happens, poets at CUNY have won the Pulitzer in two out of the past three years — before Mr. Jess’s award, Gregory Pardlo, a CUNY graduate student at the time, took the prize in 2015. And, in a related category, Sarah DeLappe, a Brooklyn College M.F.A. student, was a finalist this year in the drama category for a play about a girls’ high school soccer team.

“I’m not sure that ‘fancy’ is the key to creativity,” James B. Milliken, the CUNY chancellor, said in an interview. “CUNY has to be one of the most diverse universities in America, and it seems self-evident to me that diversity of all kinds contributes to creativity. Add to that the fact that we’re in New York City.”

It is difficult to overstate the city’s draw for many poets. The expense can be daunting, but it is the center of their industry. It is where publishing happens, and where poets from all over the world come to read their work. And since the number of poets who can make an actual living just by their writing is tiny, many of them turn to teaching — though you wouldn’t necessarily know it to read their work…

… “New York is a city where poets really want to live,” said Cate Marvin, the founder of VIDA, an organization for women in the literary arts, a poet and an English professor at the College of Staten Island. “So at the College of Staten Island, for example, when we run searches and hire people, it’s often really competitive because people really want to move to New York.”

“Poets,” she added, “will kill to live in New York.”

Teaching at CUNY in particular appeals to those who like the idea of teaching students who don’t have access to exclusive, cloistered classrooms, Ms. Marvin said. Many poet-professors said they enjoyed working with students who were new to the country, people with jobs and children and full lives outside of the classroom. Mr. Collins described the system as an “academic version of the Statue of Liberty.”

Ms. Schulman, a much lauded poet and a former Guggenheim fellow who has taught at Baruch College for 45 years, said a few years ago an undergraduate in one of her classes won a prestigious award for a poem she wrote about walking through Chinatown.

“I said, ‘Look, Susan, don’t you think we ought to talk about graduate school?’” Ms. Schulman recounted. “And she said, ‘Oh, no, I want to be an accountant.’”

Even accountants can be poets!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has agreed to help fund and coordinate a group of governors, mayors, corporate CEOs, and university presidents willing to participate in the Paris Accord on climate control regardless of President Trump’s decision to withdraw.  As reported by the New York Times:

“Representatives of American cities, states and companies are preparing to submit a plan to the United Nations pledging to meet the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions targets under the Paris climate accord, despite President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement.

The unnamed group — which, so far, includes mayors, governors, more than 80 university presidents and more than 100 businesses — is negotiating with the United Nations to have its submission accepted alongside contributions to the Paris climate deal by other nations.

“We’re going to do everything America would have done if it had stayed committed,” Michael Bloomberg, said in an interview.

By redoubling their climate efforts, he said, cities, states and corporations could achieve, or even surpass, the pledge of the administration of former President Barack Obama to reduce America’s planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent by 2025, from their levels in 2005.

It was unclear how, exactly, that submission to the United Nations would take place. Christiana Figueres, a former top United Nations climate official, said there was currently no formal mechanism for entities that were not countries to be full parties to the Paris accord.

Ms. Figueres, who described the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw as a “vacuous political melodrama,” said the American government was required to continue reporting its emissions to the United Nations because a formal withdrawal would not take place for several years.

But Ms. Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change until last year, said the Bloomberg group’s submission could be included in future reports the United Nations compiled on the progress made by the signatories of the Paris deal…

But Bloomberg Philanthropies, Mr. Bloomberg’s charitable organization, is offering to donate $15 million over the next two years to help fund the budget should it be needed, a spokeswoman said. That figure represents the United States’ share, she said.”

The fight for a cleaner planet goes on.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Donald Trump formally pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions that had been approved by 190 nations. 

Trump said Thursday he would exit the accord ― which he insists “punishes the United States” ― but left open the idea the U.S. could “negotiate our way back in to Paris” or potentially work to reach some other deal entirely.

“We will all sit down and we’ll get back into the deal and we’ll make it good,” said Trump.

World leaders, who have been negotiating a global agreement for 25 years, of course may differ on that point.

 “The real problem today and the real sadness is the death blow to the international credibility of U.S. leadership,” said Christina Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “The blow to the international credibility of the United States cannot be underestimated.”

A New York Times editorial commented:

“Only future generations will be able to calculate the full consequences of President Trump’s incredibly shortsighted approach to climate change, since it is they who will suffer the rising seas and crippling droughts that scientists say are inevitable unless the world brings fossil fuel emissions to heel.

But this much is clear now: Mr. Trump’s policies — the latest of which was his decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change — have dismayed America’s allies, defied the wishes of much of the American business community he pretends to help, threatened America’s competitiveness as well as job growth in crucial industries and squandered what was left of America’s claim to leadership on an issue of global importance.

The only clear winners, and we’ve looked hard to find them, are hard-core climate deniers like Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency and the presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, and various fossil fuel interests that have found in Mr. Trump a president  credulous enough to swallow the bogus argument that an agreement to fight climate change will destroy or at least inhibit the economy.

Mr. Trump justified his decision by saying that the Paris agreement was a bad deal for the United States, buttressing his argument with a cornucopia of dystopian, dishonest and discredited data based on numbers from industry-friendly sources. Those numbers are nonsense, as is his argument that the agreement would force the country to make enormous economic sacrifices and cause a huge redistribution of jobs and economic resources to the rest of the world.”

God save our planet!

Tony

P.S.  I wonder what would have happened in the 2016 election if Jill Stein did not run as a Green Party presidential candidate and if some, if not most of her votes went to Hillary Clinton instead especially in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Dear Commons Community,

For those interested in the battles of the minds among the likes of Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Pauley, and others over quantum mechanics, I have just finished reading and would recommend Quantum by the science writer, Manjit Kumar. It is a book loaded with the stories of what some consider the greatest intellectual debate of the 20th century. In addition to the back and forth among the titans of science, Kumar also provides good explanations of the complex theories associated with the quantum. Neils Bohr was quoted as saying that: “When it comes to the quantum, we must realize that words don’t fit.” Here is an excerpt from the New York Times book review:

“Quantum mechanics is the most revolutionary scientific theory to appear in the past 150 years. In the atomic domain, it superseded laws first set out by Isaac Newton a quarter of a millennium earlier and has since had an unbroken string of successes. Today, it continues to give an utterly reliable account of the behavior of the subatomic world, yet there are nagging doubts that there is something rotten at its core.

In his lively new book, “Quantum,” the science writer Manjit Kumar cites a poll about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, taken among physicists at a conference in 1999. Of the 90 respondents, only four said they accepted the standard interpretation taught in every undergraduate physics course in the world. Thirty favored a modern interpretation, laid out in 1957 by the Princeton theoretician Hugh Everett III, while 50 ticked the box labeled “none of the above or undecided.” Almost a century after a few physicists first set out the basic theory, quantum mechanics is still a work in progress.”

The review concludes with the following:

“In the late 1970s, I had the pleasure of talking with John Bell about the Bohr-Einstein debates during a train journey from Oxford to London. Every seat was taken, so we had to stand. Pressed against me by sullen commuters, Bell summarized his apparently reluctant conclusion as we pulled into Paddington station: “Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.”

Great read!

Tony