Dear Commons Community,

After getting their first long look at John Fetterman in Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, fellow Democrats are second-guessing his decision to appear on stage five months after a stroke — and some question whether he should have remained on the ballot at all.  As reported by NBC News.

“He should not have debated. Anyone on his team who agreed to a debate should be fired, or never work again, because that debate may have tanked his campaign,” said Chris Kofinis, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. “This race was trending toward victory. Now, it’s anyone’s guess what happens.”

Several Democrats who spoke to NBC News, some on the condition of anonymity, said they were shocked by the degree to which Fetterman struggled to communicate clearly, even though he has acknowledged ongoing difficulty in processing what he hears and speaking without dropping words.

Oz himself seemed to poke at Fetterman’s struggles on the debate stage, wondering aloud at one point if he “wasn’t clear enough” for his opponent to “understand” him. Fetterman’s allies have accused critics of boosting “ableist” rhetoric about the candidate, insisting that he is moving along in his recovery just fine and noting that two current Democratic senators have recovered from recent strokes with little concern about their ability to perform the job.

But by yesterday morning, many Democrats were in a panic over his performance. And there were fresh questions about how transparent Fetterman has been through a months-long recovery that continues to present communication challenges less than two weeks before Election Day.

“Folks are pretty much freaking out on the Dem side,” Khari Mosley, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant and grassroots activist, said via text message. “I think there was false hope he’d thread the needle last night so some wind was taken out of the sails. In many ways that’s the first time many [people] got to see the phenomenon known as John Fetterman, not the best timing for the biggest stage of his life.”

One Democrat who has been in touch with the Fetterman campaign said it erred in not having him do more events and interviews sooner, to better acclimate voters to the challenges he was facing and to make the incremental improvements in his recovery more visible in real time. Fetterman, after spending much of the summer off the campaign trail, began ramping up his activity in the weeks leading up to the debate.

“Their team has been ignoring what tons of strategists and insiders have been saying for months: We’ve expressed our concerns many, many times about being more transparent,” the source said, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly about the race. “It’s OK to have a medical issue — you just have to be transparent about it.”

The alarm is also acute in Democratic circles beyond Pennsylvania.

“It was startling,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide who has worked on political campaigns. “I really question the judgment that he continued with this race.”

But with partisan control of the 50-50 Senate hanging in the balance, Democrats have little choice but to hope that Fetterman’s platform matters more to voters than his performance. He has little room for error: The FiveThirtyEight‘s review of recent polls suggests he holds a 2.3 percentage point lead over Republican Mehmet Oz, a margin that has narrowed appreciably since Labor Day.

That puts Democrats in a bind: They don’t want to criticize him because they believe victory is within his grasp. And Fetterman’s campaign, eager to project strength, said yesterday that it had raised $2 million since the debate ended

“There’s always second-guessing,” Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said on MSNBC Wednesday. “And I know Democrats sometimes invent things to worry about at the end of a campaign. … I think it was the right decision to have both candidates appear together and answer questions.”

Fetterman on Wednesday night acknowledged his debate performance during a rally in Pittsburgh with the musician Dave Matthews.

“To be honest, doing that debate wasn’t exactly easy,” Fetterman told the audience. “Knew it wasn’t going to be easy after having a stroke after five months. In fact, I don’t think that’s ever been done before in American political history.”

A fan in the crowd shouted: “We still love you!”

 I hope there is enough love for him to win the election!

Tony

Paul Bellar, Joseph Morrison and Pete Musico. Associated Press

Dear Commons Community,

Three men accused of supporting a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer were convicted of all charges yesterday, a triumph for state prosecutors after months of mixed results in the main case in federal court.

Joe Morrison, his father-in-law Pete Musico, and Paul Bellar were found guilty of providing “material support” for a terrorist act as members of a paramilitary group, the Wolverine Watchmen.

They held gun drills in rural Jackson County with a leader of the scheme, Adam Fox, who was disgusted with Gov. Whitmer and other officials in 2020 and said he wanted to kidnap her.

Jurors read and heard violent, anti-government screeds as well as support for the “boogaloo,” a civil war that might be triggered by a shocking abduction. Prosecutors said COVID-19 restrictions ordered by Whitmer turned out to be fruit to recruit more people to the Watchmen.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The facts drip out slowly,” state Assistant Attorney General Bill Rollstin told jurors in Jackson, Michigan, “and you begin to see — wow — there were things that happened that people knew about. … When you see how close Adam Fox got to the governor, you can see how a very bad event was thwarted.”

Morrison, 28, Musico, 44, and Bellar, 24, were also convicted of a gun crime and membership in a gang. Prosecutors said the Wolverine Watchmen was a criminal enterprise.

Morrison, who recently tested positive for COVID-19, and Musico watched the verdict by video away from the courtroom. Judge Thomas Wilson ordered all three to jail while they await sentencing scheduled for Dec. 15.

This trio deserves to have the judge throw the book at them!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night I saw the movie, “Tár” starring Cate Blanchette as a mistress of the universe figure in the world of classical music.  She plays the role of Lydia Tár who is the maestro at the Berlin Philharmonic, with a complex personality that is excessively domineering and troubled.  I have just read several reviews, I would recommend the one by A.O. Scott that appeared in The New York Times.  However, I would also recommend Michelle Goldberg’s column (see below) entitled,  “Finally, a Great Movie About Cancel Culture.”  Here is an excerpt:

“This question — how to weigh a genius’s private and personal failings against her work — is at the center of “Tár.” It’s a movie about a woman, played by Cate Blanchett, who has built herself in the image of the great, arrogant male cultural titans of the 20th century, only to be undone by the less indulgent mores of the 21st century. In other words, it’s a film about cancel culture, making it the rare piece of art that looks squarely at this social phenomenon that has roiled so many of America’s meaning-making institutions.”

Heavy lifting here about a movie that has to be listened to carefully to understand the complexity of the protagonist.

Goldberg’s entire column is below.

I found it disturbing yet mesmerizing.

Tony

————————————————

The New York Times

Michelle Goldberg

Finally, a Great Movie About Cancel Culture

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Midway through the enthralling new film “Tár,” the heroine, a brilliant and imperious classical music conductor named Lydia Tár, is talking about the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer with her elderly former mentor.

“Schopenhauer measured a man’s intelligence against his sensitivity to noise,” her mentor says.

“Didn’t he once also throw a woman down a flight of stairs?” asks Tár.

“Yes,” he responds. “It was unclear that this private and personal failing was at all relevant to his work.”

This question — how to weigh a genius’s private and personal failings against her work — is at the center of “Tár.” It’s a movie about a woman, played by Cate Blanchett, who has built herself in the image of the great, arrogant male cultural titans of the 20th century, only to be undone by the less indulgent mores of the 21st century. In other words, it’s a film about cancel culture, making it the rare piece of art that looks squarely at this social phenomenon that has roiled so many of America’s meaning-making institutions.

There’s something odd about this rarity, given how dramatically juicy struggles over sex, race and power can be. Sure, there are films like “She Said,” the Hollywood version of The New York Times’s investigation of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse, which recently debuted at the New York Film Festival and opens next month. But that movie, while a captivating procedural, is morally simple. What we’ve been lacking are narratives that draw human complexity out of our combustible political debates.

Perhaps that’s because it’s really hard to do well. Reports of absurdly overzealous sensitivity reads suggest that publishers and producers fear backlash. There have been a couple of comedies that have taken on the idea of cancellation, but they’ve stacked the deck by making the person who gets canceled either totally innocent, as in the 2021 TV series “The Chair,” or absurdly guilty, as in the satire “Not Okay.” Stand-up comedians, for whom attempted cancellation is monetizable, have been less cautious. But a dramatic work that asks you to empathize — if not sympathize — with a tragic figure who has done a lot of harm is more difficult to pull off. (Apparently there was a clunky attempt in “The Morning Show,” which I haven’t seen.)

“Tár” itself stacks the deck in one important way — by making its protagonist a woman. A swaggering, magnetic figure in bespoke suits who worships high culture and seems to delight in tweaking social justice assumptions, she’d be insufferable as a man. (She might be insufferable as anyone not played by the wildly charismatic Blanchett.)

Early on, a young conducting student tells her that “as a BIPOC pangender person,” they are not into Bach because of his misogyny. Tár, a self-described “U-Haul lesbian,” humiliates the student before making an impassioned case for artistic universalism. “You want to dance the masque, you must service the composer,” she says fiercely. “You’ve got to sublimate yourself, your ego. And yes, your identity.”

The New Yorker critic Richard Brody, who dissented from the largely rapturous reception “Tár” has received, mentioned this scene while arguing that the film is bitter and reactionary. I saw it differently. Though a misleadingly edited version of the exchange appears later in the film, it has little to do with Tár’s downfall; this is not a movie complaining that you can’t say anything anymore.

Rather — stop reading here if you’re avoiding spoilers — Tár is destroyed because of the lives and careers she has ruined. The film unfolds like a thriller, but what is pursuing the protagonist are her own sins.

These sins reveal themselves slowly and obliquely. We learn that a former protégée, Krista, with whom Tár had some sort of romantic relationship, killed herself, and see evidence, which Tár tries to hide, that Tár had blackballed her. Speaking to her current assistant — with whom there’s also a hint of sexual impropriety — Tár is coldly dismissive of Krista: “She wasn’t one of us.” Later, we see Tár trying to groom a young cellist; in the service of her attempted seduction, she denies another musician a solo that should have been hers.

Tár, then, isn’t a victim, except perhaps of the once-common assumption that profound talent licenses rapacious appetites. It’s true that the movie seems to ask if something is lost when a culture no longer makes room for its sacred monsters. The man who replaces Tár on the conductor’s podium is a mediocrity, and the final scene is an indelible image of artistic abasement. But while the film forces the viewer to identify with Tár, it doesn’t exonerate her. Her unraveling is gutting to witness, not because it’s undeserved but because she’s human.

In my experience, most people, especially those who are middle-aged and older, have complicated and contradictory feelings about the rapid changes in values, manners and allowances that fall under the rubric of cancel culture. They’re glad to see challenges to elite impunity, and uncomfortable about what can seem like mob justice. The notion of separating the art from the artist has gone out of fashion, but a progressive version of old-fashioned morality clauses isn’t a satisfying replacement.

“Tár” demonstrates that all this flux and uncertainty is very fertile territory for art. Hopefully its success — many are predicting it will win a best picture Oscar — will encourage others to take on similarly thorny and unsettled issues. Hysteria about cancel culture can encourage artistic timidity by overstating the cost of probing taboos. In truth, there’s a hunger out there for work that takes the strangeness of this time and turns it into something that transcends polemic.

Dear Commons Community,

Last June, I gave a talk based on two of my publications and specifically on a book, Joel Spring and I published in 2013, on The Great American  Education-Industrial Complex.  The venue  was a conference entitled Education and Digital Capitalism held in Remscheid, Germany in June, 2022 .  Our book was the focus of a panel discussion on Education Industry and Learning Technologies: Critical Perspectives  (see below for a fuller description).  I gave the opening remarks for this panel.  These remarks (in English) can be seen here.  I could not attend in person because of ankle surgery so I made a video of my remarks.

The full proceedings (mostly in German) of the conference were recently made available on the Web at: https://bildung-und-digitaler-kapitalismus.de/tagungsdokumentation/

Tony

————————————–

Panel Description

Globally active companies have gradually become more important in the education sector – also in Germany. Anthony G. Picciano referred to this phenomenon back in the 1990s as the “education-industrial complex”. Based on this concept and current economic and educational policy interdependencies, this working group discusses the following questions:

How do companies in the field of learning technologies affect education systems? What changes have there been in the last 30 years?

What are the differences and similarities between the USA and German-speaking countries? How do regional, national and global contexts,          actors relate to one another?

How do education policy and administration react to these developments?

What pedagogical, technological and political options are there to counteract dependency structures?

Which alternatives (BYOD, FOSS etc.) are desirable and why?

Panelists:

Anthony G. Picciano: Great American Education-Industrial Complex

Richard Münch: DFG project and educational industrial complex

Annina Förschler: Educational Policy Transformations|

Theo Hug and Reinhold Madritsch: Austrian Educational-Industrial Complex

Discussants: Ralf Lankau & Nele Hirsch

Moderators: Valentin Dander and Theo Hug

Rishi Sunak

Dear Commons Community

Rishi Sunak, a former member of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet, is set to become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom after rival Penny Mordaunt dropped out of the race just minutes before the deadline.

Just six weeks ago, Sunak had lost out against Liz Truss in the running for prime minister. But after several economic disasters that caused the pound to collapse and an intervention from the Central Bank, Truss resigned. She had taken over from Johnson, who himself resigned amid ethics scandals. All are members of the Conservative Party.

Sunak, 42, is set to be Britain’s first nonwhite prime minister; his parents, of Indian descent, were both born in East Africa. He served as Johnson’s chancellor of the Exchequer, or treasury chief.

Sunak’s was a short campaign for the job. He declared on Sunday that he would be entering the contest, stating that he wanted to “fix our economy.” By Monday morning, he had gained the support of 194 Conservatives.

A source from Mordaunt’s team told Sky News two hours before the deadline that she had received 90 votes. “For the sake of the party, it’s important our members have their say,” the source said. However, only 25 politicians publicly backed Mordaunt.

Sunak’s win comes hours after Johnson withdrew from his attempt to regain the prime minister position, saying that although he had the support needed to advance to the vote, it wasn’t “the right thing to do.”

Sunak, whose resignation from Johnson’s Cabinet delivered a major blow at the time, responded to his former boss’s withdrawal from the race by thanking him on Twitter. “Although he has decided not to run for PM again, I truly hope he continues to contribute to public life at home and abroad,” he said.

Mordaunt said that Johnson had put “country before party, and party before self.”

Since Thursday, Conservative members of Parliament have been nominating candidates to be the next leader of the party and therefore the prime minister. While Sunak won the necessary 100 nominations in less than three days, Mordaunt had been trailing behind with 25 votes by Monday afternoon. Sunak is expected to be sworn in as prime minister by Friday.

Having been part of Johnson’s Cabinet while he was in office, Sunak has seen his political career marred by scandals. He was most notably involved in “Partygate,” in which he and Johnson were fined by police for attending a party in June 2020 during the COVID lockdown.

Before that, Sunak’s popularity took a hit when the Independent newspaper revealed that his wife had claimed nondomicile status on her tax forms. This meant she saved millions of pounds on tax dividends she had collected from her family’s multimillion-pound IT business in India.

Congratulations and cheerio, Mr. Sunak!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This cartoon has it right!

Tony

Bob Woodward on revelations from “The Trump Tapes”

Dear Commons Community,

Ahead of the release of his never-before-heard audio interviews with former President Donald Trump, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward wrote that after listening to the unreleased tapes again, he concluded that Trump was an “unparalleled danger” rather than just the “wrong man” to be president. 

“The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Trump,” set to be released today, is an audiobook (see sample above)  of previously unreleased conversations between the veteran journalist and the businessman-turned-politician. 

In an op-ed for the Washington Post released Sunday, which includes previously unreleased snippets of “The Trump Tapes,” Woodward wrote that he had concluded his 2020 book on Trump by calling him “the wrong man for the job.” 

Woodward now says his assessment of Trump did not accurately describe the former president.

“Two years later, I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger,” Woodward wrote.

He continued: “When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the virus to racial injustice, it’s clear he did not know what to do. Trump was overwhelmed by the job. He was largely disconnected from the needs and leadership expectations of the public and his absolute self-focus became the presidency.”

Woodward explains in his piece for the Post that he decided to release the tapes to capture Trump’s personality in a way that the written word couldn’t. “Trump’s voice magnifies his presence,” Woodward said. 

The tapes allow listeners to hear Trump repeatedly interrupting and at times mocking Woodward as they speak about the most pressing policy issues of his presidency, including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Woodward described as Trump’s “greatest failure.”

In clips of the Trump Tapes previously released by CNN, Trump can be heard talking about his admiration for strongmen leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean President Kim Jong Un. In another clip, Trump also bragged to Woodward that no other president was “tougher” than him when faced with impeachment.

“Unparalleled danger” indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) goaded Donald Trump into testifying before the House Jan. 6 committee with a challenging insult yesterday that he’s “not man enough” to do so.

“I don’t think he’s man enough to show up,” Pelosi said on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show.” And if he fails to turn up, the public should judge him harshly for it, she said.

“No one is above the law,” Pelosi noted. “If we believe that, then they [Americans] should make a judgment about how he responds to that request.”

If Trump blows off the testimony, he clearly “thinks that he is above the law,” she added.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

Trump was subpoenaed to testify by the committee last Friday and requires Trump to submit required evidence by Nov. 4 and sit for a deposition on Nov. 14.

As of yesterday, Trump hadn’t publicly responded to the subpoena. His legal team said it would analyze and respond appropriately shortly to this “unprecedented action.”

But Trump has told aides he might comply if he can testify on live TV, The New York Times reported earlier this month.

His son Eric Trump happily envisioned such a scenario in a speech Friday at a right-wing rally in Pennsylvania.

“My father finally got a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee,” Eric Trump told a cheering crowd. “I told him … you have to go testify …. it will be the greatest entertainment. Who wants to pop a beer, make some popcorn and watch Donald Trump talk about election fraud in the United States of America?”

That’s not going to happen, Jan. 6 committee chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) vowed in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The committee treats this matter with great seriousness. We are going to proceed in terms of the questioning of the former president under oath,” Cheney explained. “It may take multiple days, and it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves.”

Trump won’t be allowed to “turn this into a circus,” Cheney added. “This isn’t going to be his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and food fight that became. This is a far too serious set of issues. We’ve made clear exactly what his obligations are.”

If Trump refuses to comply with the subpoena, Cheney said there are “many, many alternatives that we will consider.” A subpoena, she noted, is a “legal obligation every American citizen has to comply with.”

Pelosi knows how to get under Trump’s skin!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk said in a tweet yesterday that he has pushed back by a month the date for Neuralink’s “show & tell” event to November 30th.

Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain computer chips (also referred to as neural implants) to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.

Musk said in a 2019 presentation that Neuralink was aiming to receive regulatory approval for trials to implant chips into humans by the end of 2020, but the company has yet to receive such an approval or bring a product to market.

Musk approached brain chip implant developer Synchron Inc about a potential investment after he expressed frustration to Neuralink employees over their slow progress to win regulatory clearance for its devices.

A lot of attention is being paid to Musk’s venture to develop neural implants.  It can be groundbreaking or a bust!

Tony