Dear Commons Community,

The owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, has decided that the team will not tolerate players who protest during the playing of the national anthem.  Speaking after the Cowboys game on Sunday, Jones said any players who disrespect the flag “will not play.”

“If there’s anything that is disrespectful to the flag, then we will not play,” Jones said (via ESPN). “We will not … if we are disrespecting the flag, then we will not play. Period.”

According to ESPN, the topic was raised after Vice President Mike Pence left the Indianapolis Colts-San Francisco 49ers game early on Sunday after players knelt during the national anthem. In a statement, Pence said he will not dignify an event that disrespects the military and the US.

The event comes after President Donald Trump said NFL owners should “fire” any player that kneels during the anthem. Trump on Sunday said that he told Pence to leave early if any players knelt.

On September 25, in the wake of Trump’s comments and widespread protest around the NFL, Jones and the Cowboys linked arms and knelt before the anthem, but stood during the anthem. Following the Cowboys’ gesture, Trump said he spoke to Jones — who donated to Trump’s campaign — and that the team will stand for the anthem going forward.

“We made our expression,” Jones said on Sunday. “I’m very supportive of the team, but under no circumstances will the Dallas Cowboys — I don’t care what happens — under no circumstances will we as an organization, coaches, players, not support and stand and recognize and honor the flag.”

Kneeling during the anthem was a protest started last season by Colin Kaepernick to raise awareness about police brutality and social injustice. Many other players who have since knelt have said the protest is not meant to disrespect the military but to raise awareness for social injustice.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a series of tweets, President Trump and Republican Senator Bob Corker (Tennessee) exchanged cutting barbs with each other yesterday.   As reported in the New York Times.

“Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”

“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Mr. Corker’s comments capped a remarkable day of sulfurous insults between the president and the Tennessee senator — a powerful, if lame-duck, lawmaker, whose support will be critical to the president on tax reform and the fate of the Iran nuclear deal.

It began on Sunday morning when Mr. Trump, posting on Twitter, accused Mr. Corker of deciding not to run for re-election because he “didn’t have the guts.” Mr. Corker shot back in his own tweet: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”

The senator, Mr. Trump said, had “begged” for his endorsement. “I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement),” the president wrote. He also said that Mr. Corker had asked to be secretary of state. “I said ‘NO THANKS,’” he wrote.

Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business.

Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview.”

More senior members of the Republican Party have got to fess up to the mess that Mr. Trump has brought to the presidency.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Rachel Botsman, the author of the forthcoming book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart, has an op-ed describing her 3-year old daughter’s interaction with Alexa, Amazon’s Echo companion.  If you do not know Alexa, it is a black cylinder about ten inches high that can respond to a number of voice commands and questions.  It has its own communication link to the Internet and can play music, tell the weather, buy merchandise, and perform a host of other services. 

Botsman op-ed describes her daughter’s interaction with Alexa as follows.

“You are going to have a chance to play with Alexa,” I told my daughter, Grace, who’s 3 years old. Pointing at the black cylindrical device, I explained that the speaker, also known as the Amazon Echo, was a bit like Siri but smarter. “You can ask it anything you want,” I said nonchalantly. 

Grace leaned forward toward the speaker. “Hello, Alexa, my name is Gracie,” she said. “Will it rain today?” The turquoise rim glowed into life. “Currently, it is 60 degrees,” a perky female voice answered, assuring her it wouldn’t rain.

Over the next hour, Grace figured out she could ask Alexa to play her favorite music from the film “Sing.” She realized Alexa could tell jokes, do math or provide interesting facts. “Hey, Alexa, what do brown horses eat?” And she soon discovered a whole new level of power. “Alexa, shut up,” she barked, then looked a little sheepish and asked me if it was O.K. to be rude to her. So she thought the speaker had feelings?

By the next morning, Alexa was the first “person” Grace said hello to as she bounded into the kitchen wearing her pink fluffy dressing gown. My preschooler who can’t yet ride a bike or read a book had also quickly mastered that she could buy things with the bot’s help, or at least try to.

“Alexa, buy me blueberries,” she commanded. Grace, of course, had no idea that Amazon, the world’s biggest retailer, was the corporate behemoth behind the helpful female assistant, and that smoothing the way when it came to impulse buys was right up Alexa’s algorithmic alley.

Grace’s easy embrace of Alexa was slightly amusing but also alarming. My small experiment, with my daughter as the guinea pig, drove home to me the profound shift in our relationship with technology. For generations, our trust in it has gone no further than feeling confident the machine or mechanism will do what it’s supposed or expected to do, nothing more, nothing less. We trust a washing machine to clean our clothes or an A.T.M. to dispense money, but we don’t expect to form a relationship with them or call them by name.

Today, we’re no longer trusting machines just to do something, but to decide what to do and when to do it. The next generation will grow up in an age where it’s normal to be surrounded by autonomous agents, with or without cute names.”

Botsman’s point is that our children and grandchildren are and will see Alexa-type devices as natural companions in their lives.  They will grow to trust them and to make them a vital part of their daily activities.  Alexa right now is a cylinder without any distinct physical features.  A whole new aspect of man-machine interface will evolve when Alexas are manufactured that have humanoid features.

Tony 

Dear Commons Community,

Last night Elaine and I went to see 91-year old singer, Tony Bennett, at Radio City Music Hall. The tickets were a birthday gift from my children.  Mr. Bennett can still put on quite a show.  Backed-up by a four-piece band, he sang many of the tunes such as Rags to Riches that made him a star in the 1950s and 1960s.  The audience waited for his signature song, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, which he delivered towards the end of the evening. The packed house kept asking for more and he continued to sing.  His voice is still there.

Thank you for an enjoyble evening, Mr. Bennett!

Bravo!

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

At an apparent knock at President Trump, Senator Bob Corker (R. Tennessee) said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly “help separate our country from chaos.”  As reported by CNN:

“I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis, and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos, and I support them very much,” the Republican chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill.

When asked about the relationship between President Donald Trump and Tillerson, which is reportedly on thin ice, Corker suggested that the secretary of state doesn’t have the support he needs from the President.

“I mean, look, I see what’s happening here,” Corker said. “I deal with people throughout the administration and (Tillerson), from my perspective, is in an incredibly frustrating place, where, as I watch, OK, and I can watch very closely on many occasions, I mean you know, he ends up being not being supported in the way I would hope a secretary of state would be supported, that’s just from my vantage point.”

Corker has nothing to lose and has announced that he will not seek reelection after 2018.

On Wednesday, NBC News reported Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” in a Pentagon meeting. But at an afternoon news conference, the secretary of state denied that he had ever considered resigning.

Tillerson also denied that Vice President Mike Pence had to persuade him to continue in his role.

“The vice president has never had to persuade me to remain as secretary of state because I have never considered leaving this post,” Tillerson said Wednesday.

However, Tillerson did not directly deny that he had referred to Trump as a “moron.”

Corker’s praise of Trump’s team was also a dig at the commander in chief, who the senator has previously criticized publicly for not having yet shown the “stability” and competence” to succeed in the office.

On Wednesday, Corker added that he hoped that Mattis, Tillerson and Kelly would stay in their positions because “they’re valuable to the national security of our nation, they’re valuable to us putting forth good policies, they’re very valuable as it relates to our citizens feeling safe and secure.”

When asked if by chaos, he meant chaos caused by Trump, Corker said: “It’s just, they … act in a very, they work very well together to make sure the policies we put forth around the world are you know, sound and coherent. There are other people within the administration, in my belief, that don’t,” he said, in an apparent nod to Trump.

“I think Tillerson is in a very trying situation, trying to solve many of the world’s problems a lot of the times without the support and help that I’d like to see him have,” Corker said.

As I posted yesterday, I don’t think Tillerson is long for his position as Secretary of State.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is coming under scrutiny for comments he made earlier this year about President Trump being a “moron”.  Tillerson supposedly made the comment after Trump made a speech to the Boy Scouts of America.  Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article reporting on Tillerson’s comment.

“Long-simmering tension within President Trump’s national security team spilled into public view on Wednesday as Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson took the extraordinary step of calling a news conference to affirm his support for Mr. Trump, despite what associates describe as his deep frustration with the president and talk of resignation.

Mr. Tillerson praised Mr. Trump but did not deny a report that he once referred to the president as a “moron.” Mr. Trump welcomed Mr. Tillerson’s statement of support and declared “total confidence” in his secretary of state.

If Mr. Tillerson had hoped to douse questions about how long he would stay, he instead further fueled a debate about his future. Although he insisted he had never considered resigning, several people close to Mr. Tillerson said he has had to be talked out of drafting a letter of resignation on more than one occasion by his closest allies, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. And they said he has regularly expressed astonishment at how little Mr. Trump understands the basics of foreign policy.

A former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, Mr. Tillerson has never found his place as a subordinate to the hard-charging, unpredictable president. He has bristled at being undercut, as he was over the weekend when Mr. Trump publicly said Mr. Tillerson was “wasting his time” by trying to open talks with North Korea. At the same time, Mr. Tillerson has alienated lawmakers, foreign policy veterans and the news media while demoralizing the State Department, and critics inside and outside the White House consider his troubles self-inflicted…

…Mr. Tillerson has been frustrated for months, not just by Mr. Trump’s unpredictable policy positions but by his provocative leadership style. He publicly distanced himself when Mr. Trump blamed “both sides” for violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and bristled when the president gave a political speech to the Boy Scouts of America, an organization Mr. Tillerson once headed. NBC reported that he was so offended by the Boy Scouts speech that he threatened not to return to Washington from a visit to Texas.

The episode that Mr. Tillerson called a real breaking point, according to associates, came when he was trying to mediate a dispute between the Persian Gulf state of Qatar and its Arab neighbors. The secretary had long told colleagues that relationships he built over decades in business made him uniquely qualified to broker a deal.

But he complained bitterly that he was undermined by Mr. Trump and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom he accused of siding with the United Arab Emirates. When Mr. Tillerson publicly called for a “calm and thoughtful dialogue,” the president less than an hour later lashed out at Qatar as a financier of terrorism.”

It does not sound like Tillerson is long for his position as Secretary of State.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman today focuses on accused Las Vegas killer, Stephen Paddock, and speculates what our politicians, government officials, and pundits would be saying if he had been a Muslim or a member of ISIS.  Here is an excerpt:

“If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted “Allahu akbar” before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he had been a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another …

If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and “politicize” Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies.

No, no, no. Then we know what we’d be doing. We’d be scheduling immediate hearings in Congress about the worst domestic terrorism event since 9/11. Then Donald Trump would be tweeting every hour “I told you so,” as he does minutes after every terror attack in Europe, precisely to immediately politicize them. Then there would be immediate calls for a commission of inquiry to see what new laws we need to put in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Then we’d be “weighing all options” against the country of origin.

But what happens when the country of origin is us?

What happens when the killer was only a disturbed American armed to the teeth with military-style weapons that he bought legally or acquired easily because of us and our crazy lax gun laws?

Then we know what happens: The president and the Republican Party go into overdrive to ensure that nothing happens. Then they insist — unlike with every ISIS-related terror attack — that the event must not be “politicized” by asking anyone, particularly themselves, to look in the mirror and rethink their opposition to common-sense gun laws.

So let’s review: We will turn the world upside down to track down the last Islamic State fighter in Syria — deploying B-52s, cruise missiles, F-15s, F-22s, F-35s and U-2s. We will ask our best young men and women to make the ultimate sacrifice to kill or capture every last terrorist. And how many Americans has the Islamic State killed in the Middle East? I forget. Is it 15 or 20? And our president never stops telling us that when it comes to ISIS, defeat is not an option, mercy is not on the menu, and he is so tough he even has a defense secretary nicknamed “Mad Dog.”

But when fighting the N.R.A. — the National Rifle Association, which more than any other group has prevented the imposition of common-sense gun-control laws — victory is not an option, moderation is not on the menu and the president and the G.O.P. have no mad dogs, only pussycats.

And they will not ask themselves to make even the smallest sacrifice — one that might risk their seats in Congress — to stand up for legislation that might make it just a little harder for an American to stockpile an arsenal like Paddock did, including 42 guns, some of them assault rifles — 23 in his hotel room and 19 at his home — as well as thousands of rounds of ammunition and some “electronic devices.” Just another deer hunter, I guess.”

I would add that we have pundits such as Laura Ingraham claiming on Fox News that the reason for the Las Vegas massacre was that we don’t have enough religion in our country and especially in our schools. And TV religious huckster Pat Robertson saying that the massacre in Las Vegas was caused by lack of respect for President Donald Trump, protests during the national anthem and the country having no “vision of God.” 

The country of origin is us indeed.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning commenting on the rise of research by undergraduates at a number of colleges and universities.  While hard data is lacking, the article comments that undergraduate research has expanded in the last couple of decades to hundreds of colleges of all sizes and types.  Here is an excerpt:

“In just a few months, Rachael G. Nutt’s undergraduate thesis at the University of Vermont — on menstruation and fertility in Italian Renaissance art — has already been downloaded more than 400 times.

Her 70-page paper helps explain such mysteries as why the artists painted urinating boys on wedding gifts. (It’s one of many symbols, Ms. Nutt concluded, thought to have encouraged fertility.)

The thesis — and its unexpectedly strong public reception — is also part of a new era of undergraduate research that’s helping colleges and universities understand exactly what such early-stage scholars should be taught, and be expected to accomplish.

At the undergraduate level, “it’s pretty extraordinary to have this experience,” said Ms. Nutt’s faculty adviser, Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, a professor of art history.

Initially a phenomenon found mostly at small, elite private institutions, undergraduate research has expanded in the last couple of decades to hundreds of colleges of all sizes and types.

Still elusive, however, is good information on how best to shape those programs, assess their benefits, and repeat their successes. Just the number of undergraduate research programs is tough to estimate.

“This evolution is happening so quickly,” said Elizabeth L. Ambos, executive officer of the Council on Undergraduate Research, “it’s hard to measure.”

One of the clearest shifts has been the expansion of undergraduate research from its origins in the hard sciences to a variety of social sciences, Ms. Ambos said. In just a decade, the council has formed an arts-and-humanities division that now amounts to more than 1,000 people, or about 10 percent of its overall membership, she said.

Across the fields, there are some relatively basic ideas on how best to proceed. For students working in a professor’s lab, the benefit appears greater when the students participate in decisions and strategies rather than just perform technical functions.

Similarly, in classroom-based labs, students benefit when they design and carry out a relatively open-ended inquiry, rather than just repeat lab experiments that have been done thousands of times before.”

This is a highly desirable development and one that should be encouraged in undergraduate programs throughout the country.  If guided properly, conducting small-scale research projects can be a most valuable experience for students in any discipline.

Tony

Video Courtesy of ABC News.

Dear Commons Community,

This is a breaking story from Reuters.

A gunman killed at least 50 people and wounded more than 200 at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday, raining down rapid fire from the 32nd floor of a hotel for several minutes before he was shot dead by police.

Authorities identified Las Vegas resident Stephen Paddock as the man, now deceased, suspected of opening fire on concert.

The death toll, which police emphasized was preliminary and tentative, would make the attack the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, eclipsing last year’s massacre of 49 people at an Orlando night club.

Thousands of panicked people fled the scene, in some cases trampling one another as law enforcement officers scrambled to locate and kill the gunman. Shocked concertgoers, some with blood on their clothes, wandered the streets after the attack.

Police identified the gunman as area resident Stephen Paddock, 64, and said they had no information yet about his motive.

He was not believed to be connected to any militant group, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters.

“We have no idea what his belief system was,” Lombardo said. “We’ve located numerous firearms within the room that he occupied.”

Authorities believed they had located Paddock’s roommate, who they identified as Marilou Danley. He gave no details of whether she was suspected of involvement in the attack but described her as an “associate.”

Our prayers go out to the victims and their families!

Tony

Note:  Since I made this posting, the number of victims killed  in Las Vegas has risen to 58 and the number injured to over 500.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GnIutPfCyY

Dear Commons Community,

As reported by Reuters, the Associated Press, and other media.

Spanish riot police descended on polling stations in Catalonia yesterday, as the region held a referendum on its independence from Spain.

The referendum saw police use rubber bullets and batons in their operation to seize ballot boxes and shutter voting sites. At least 800 people were injured in the crackdown, according to the Catalan regional government.

The shocking scenes of unrest and violent tactics of the police brought international attention to Catalonia, with the subsequent chaos from the actions to stop the referendum giving additional weight to the symbolic independence vote. 

The violence threatens to deepen the longstanding divisions between Catalan separatists and the Spanish government, putting pressure on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and ensuring that the issue of independence will only become more prominent in the days to come. 

When I visited Barcelona in 2015, it was evident that there was deep resentment among Catalonians to the national government.  I wrote then: 

“Catalans will be going to the polls for local elections for the Parliament of Catalonia.  Which parties win will have an important effect on Barcelona’s future.  There is a strong push for separation from the rest of Spain and one does not spend a day in Barcelona and its countryside without seeing the separatist flag and hearing the Catalan language which sounds more Italian or Portuguese than Spanish. “

Tony