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Garry Wills explains The Triumph of the Hard Right
By Larry Kummer, Editor / 8 Comments	/ 9 February 2016 7 January 2018
Summary: As America drifts into control by the Right through the "bottoms up" movement the Left has so longed dreamed of, many of our brightest minds describe with clarity and urgency what is happened. Such as in this review by Garry Wills of a powerful new book by E. J. Dionne. Whatever happens, we cannot say we were not warned.
"Every nation has the government it deserves."
— Joseph de Maistre (lawyer, diplomat, philosopher), Letter #76 dated 13 August 1811, published in Lettres et Opuscules.
"Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences."
— attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson.
The Triumph of the Hard Right
By Garry Wills
New York Review of Books, 11 February 2016
Posted with their generous permission.
Review of Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond
by E.J. Dionne Jr.
Everybody told everybody early in this year's presidential campaign (during what was called Trump Summer) that we had never seen anything so sinisterly or hilariously (take your choice) new. But Trump Summer was supposed to mellow into Sane Autumn, and it failed to — and early winter was no saner. People paid to worry in public tumbled over one another in asking what had gone wrong with our politics. Even the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, joined the worriers. After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, he set up what he called the Growth and Opportunity Project, to reach those who had not voted Republican — young people, women, Latinos, and African-Americans.
But its report, once filed, had no effect on the crowded Republican field of candidates in the 2016 race, who followed Donald Trump's early lead as he treated women and immigrants as equal-opportunity objects of scorn. Now the public worriers were yearning for the "good old days" when there were such things as moderate Republicans. What happened to them?
The current Republican extremism has been attributed to the rise of Tea Party members or sympathizers. Deadlock in Congress is blamed on Republicans' fear of being "primaryed" unless they move ever more rightward. Endless and feckless votes to repeal Obamacare were motivated less by any hope of ending the program than by a desire to be on record as opposing it, again and again, to avoid the dreaded label RINO (Republican in Name Only).
E.J. Dionne knows that Republican intransigence was not born yesterday, and he has the credentials for saying it because this dependably intelligent liberal tells us, in his new book, that he began as a young Goldwaterite — like Hillary Clinton (or like me). He knows that his abandoned faith sounded themes that have perdured right down to our day. In the 1950s there were many outlets for right-wing discontent — including H.L. Hunt's Lifeline, Human Events, The Dan Smoot Report, the Fulton Lewis radio show, Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, the Manion Forum. In 1955, William F. Buckley founded National Review to give some order and literary polish to this cacophonous jumble. But his magazine had a small audience at the outset. Its basic message would reach a far wider audience through a widely popular book, The Conscience of a Conservative
, ghostwritten for Barry Goldwater by Buckley's brother-in-law (and his coauthor for McCarthy and His Enemies), L. Brent Bozell.
The idea for the book came from Clarence Manion, the former dean of Notre Dame Law School. He persuaded Goldwater to have Bozell, who had been his speechwriter, put his thoughts together in book form. Then Manion organized his own and other right-wing media to promote and give away thousands of copies of the book.
Bozell did his part too — he went to a board meeting of the John Birch Society and persuaded Fred Koch (father of Charles and David Koch) to buy 2,500 copies of Conscience for distribution. The book put Goldwater on the cover of Time three years before he ran for president. A Draft Goldwater Committee was already in existence then (led by William Rusher of National Review, F. Clifton White, and John Ashbrook). Patrick Buchanan spoke for many conservatives when he called The Conscience of a Conservative
their "New Testament."
The Goldwater book, Dionne says, had all the basic elements of the Tea Party movement, fully articulated fifty years before the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party through their organizations Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. The book painted government as the enemy of liberty. Goldwater called for the elimination of Social Security, federal aid to schools, federal welfare and farm programs, and the union shop. He claimed that the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision was unconstitutional, so not the "law of the land." He said we must bypass and defund the UN and improve tactical nuclear weapons for frequent use.
It was widely thought, when the book appeared, that its extreme positions would disqualify Goldwater for the presidency, or even for nomination to that office. Yet in 1964 he became the Republican nominee, and though he lost badly, he wrenched from the Democrats their reliably Solid South, giving Nixon a basis for the Southern Strategy that he rode into the White House in the very next election. The Southern Strategy had been elaborated during Nixon's campaign by Kevin Phillips, a lawyer in John Mitchell's firm. The plan did not rely merely on Southern racism, but on a deep conviction that, as Phillips put it in a 1968 interview, all politics comes down to "who hates who." In that interview, Phillips laid out an elaborate taxonomy of hostilities to be orchestrated by Republicans — another predictor of the Tea Party. Dionne argues, with ample illustration decade by decade, that this right-wing populism would remain a Republican orthodoxy, latent or salient, throughout the time he covers. (See Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man
Joe Scarborough, in a recent book, The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics – and Can Again
, claims that moderate conservatism is the real Republican orthodoxy, interrupted at times by "extremists" like Goldwater or the Tea Party. (See NYRB, 9 Jan 2014.)
He suggests Dwight Eisenhower as the best model for Republicans to imitate. Yet Scarborough is also an admirer of Buckley, and his thesis does not explain — as Dionne's thesis does — why Buckley despised Eisenhower. Eisenhower, as the first Republican elected president after the New Deal era of Roosevelt and Truman, was obliged in Buckley's eyes to dismantle the New Deal programs, or at least to begin the dismantling. Buckley resembled the people today who think the first task of a Republican president succeeding Obama will be to repeal or take apart the Affordable Care Act.
Eisenhower, instead, adhered to the "Modern Republicanism" expounded by the law professor Arthur Larson, which accepted the New Deal as a part of American life. Eisenhower said, "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history." It was to oppose that form of Republicanism that Buckley founded National Review in 1955, with a program statement that declared: "Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle-of-the-Road is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant."
Buckley hated Eisenhower's foreign policy as much as his domestic one. He said, "Eisenhower was above all a man unguided and hence unhampered by principle. Eisenhower undermines the Western resolution to stand up and defend what is ours." When Russia put down the 1956 uprising in Hungary and Eisenhower did not intervene, National Review called for people to sign the Hungary Pledge — to have no dealings with iron curtain products or exchanges (Buckley's wife had to give up Russian caviar).
Admittedly, Buckley did not, like Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society), think Eisenhower was a secret Communist (as many Republicans now think Obama is a secret Muslim). Buckley thought that Eisenhower had no greater purpose than his own success: "It has been the dominating ambition of Eisenhower's Modern Republicanism to govern in such a fashion as to more or less please more or less everybody."
The sense of betrayal by one's own is a continuing theme in the Republican Party (a Fox News poll in September 2015 found that 62% of Republicans feel "betrayed" by their own party's officeholders). The charges against Eisenhower were repeated against Nixon, who brought Kissingerian "détente" into his dealing with Russia and renewed diplomatic ties to China. On the domestic front, he imposed wage and price controls and sponsored the welfare schemes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Buckley joined the effort to "primary" Nixon in 1972 by running John Ashbrook against him. Buckley campaigned for Ashbrook in New Hampshire, but he succumbed to pleas from Spiro Agnew (before his disgrace) and Henry Kissinger (a new friend of his) that he endorse Nixon for the general election.
The story keeps repeating itself. The right opposed Gerald Ford — not for pardoning Nixon (as the left did) but for continuing Kissinger's effort at détente (the Helsinki Accords), advancing the Panama Canal treaty, and making the hated Nelson Rockefeller his vice-president. (At the 1976 Republican convention, Ford had to humiliate Kissinger and Rockefeller in order to head off Reagan's challenge, and made Bob Dole his running mate — all to no avail).
Both Bush presidents were denounced by the Republican right, the first for raising taxes, the second for expanding Medicare's pharmaceutical support and expanding the government's role in education — and the two of them for increasing the size and cost of government. Even the sainted Reagan disappointed the hard right with his arms control efforts {details here}, his raising (after cutting) taxes, his failure to shrink the government, and his selling of arms to Iran (though that bitterness has been obscured by the clouds of myth and glory surrounding Reagan).
To be on the right is to feel perpetually betrayed. At a time when the right has commanding control of radio and television talk shows, it still feels persecuted by the "mainstream media." With all the power of the 1% in control of the nation's wealth, the right feels its influence is being undermined by the academy, where liberals lurk to brainwash conservative parents' children (the lament of Buckley's very first book, God and Man at Yale). Dionne shows how the right punishes its own for "selling out" to any moderate departures from its agenda once a person gets into office.
A good example of this was the rejection of one of its own "Young Guns," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in his 2014 bid for reelection. Dionne writes:
Cantor's district was changed [by gerrymander] to give him more Republican voters — and he lost especially badly in the primary among the new and very conservative voters who had been moved in to strengthen him in the general election.
Even Kevin Phillips proved that he was not only a connoisseur but a practitioner of resentment against leaders when he said that Bill Buckley was selling out when he palled around with liberals on his yacht — he called him the leader of la-di-dah conservatives (See William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives
). (Who hates who now?)
Joe Scarborough claims that the Republicans have continually oscillated between moderates and extremists. But he could find only two stellar moderates in the last half-century, Eisenhower and Reagan. Some oscillation! Dionne comes closer to the facts with his tale of a ground bass of growls against moderation, swelling at times or diminishing, but continuously present and becoming more embittered. It is appropriate that this feeling has been in alliance with the Confederate South, the loser of a war it still thinks it should have won. The rest of the Republicans may not be as racist as the South, but they cannot prevail at the federal level without it. All grievances gravitate toward one another.
Some conservatives rightly say that Bill Buckley was their best advocate — he elevated their vocabulary and taste, and he shuddered away from vulgarians like Robert Welch and Willis Carto. But he knew there could not be a conservative party if the South were not included in it. In 1957 he published an editorial titled "Why the South Must Prevail." It said:
The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
This feeling that superior people have license to circumvent democracy is still with us — when strategic gerrymandering and restrictive voting procedures freeze out minorities, the young, and the elderly, giving Republicans stronger representation in Congress than the popular vote warrants. Chief Justice John Roberts perpetuated this inequity when he voided Section Four of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — a decision followed immediately by a rush to impose new restrictions on who, where, and by what validation people can vote.
Grass Roots Conservationism
The idea that America has somehow outgrown or transcended racism is an ever-renewable delusion. Some hoped that the election of a black president would mark the end of racism. But in fact it blew on the embers of racism we have beneath us all the time. Otherwise how could Americans continue to think against all evidence that the incumbent president is not even a citizen of the country he leads? As a blanket statement, only Republicans think that. In a September 2015, Public Policy poll, only 29% of Republicans grant that Obama was born in the US (among Trump supporters, it is 21% ), and 54% think he is a Muslim (it is 66% among Trump supporters).
The surge of Trump for half a year at the top of Republican polls was mystifying to many people. They thought the lead would quickly evanesce, since it was based on the man's celebrity-cum-effrontery, not on any real political support. But the support was entirely political. Remember, Trump first became a political factor by claiming that Obama has no valid birth certificate — a charge he has never abandoned. He was mocked for that, but why should he abandon it? It turns out that a majority of Republicans have held that belief and never renounced it. Trump was giving voice to the growl of Republican orthodoxy that Dionne analyzes.
The truth is that conservatives are right to feel that their own moderates are sell-outs. To be (even moderately) a moderate is to leave the Republican Party — to be what Buckley called an immoral Middle-of-the-Roader. To accept Enlightenment values — reason, facts, science, open-mindedness, tolerance, secularity, modernity — is to lower one's guard against evils like evolution, concern about global warming, human equality across racial and sexual and religious lines — things Republicans have opposed for years and will not let their own members sell out to. They rightly intuit that there is only one Enlightenment party in America, and the Republicans are not it. That is why they have to oppose in every underhanded way they can the influence of younger people who are open to gays, to same-sex marriage, to feminism.
Clashing Conclusions
This is the conclusion I come to from a reading of Dionne's account of Republicans across the half-century story he tells. But I must admit that Dionne does not come to the same conclusion. He still has hopes that moderate forces can ride to the rescue of the party. He places those hopes in the men he calls Reformicons. He still entertains the dream of Russell Kirk that American Republicans will somehow become Yankee Edmund Burkes, as Thoreau hoped to form Yankee Buddhists. It is not surprising, then, that Dionne calls a Burke scholar, Yuval Levin, the leader of his Reformicons. Membership in this movement seems relatively easy. There is no entry test on Burkean knowledge.
Dionne comes up with a wide scatter of Reformicon members — it contains, besides Levin, Michael Needham, Mike Lee, Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, David Frum, Michael Strain, Josh Barro. Bruce Bartlett, Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Charles Murray, Ramesh Ponnuru, David Brooks, Arthur Brooks, and Henry Olsen. Dionne admits that these are rather "bookish types" — there is only one office holder among them (Senator Lee of Utah). Some of these "moderates" are at least part-time Tea Partiers. Needham and Lee, for instance, cooked up the 2013 government shutdown for which Senator Ted Cruz took most of the credit or blame. (See Stephen Moore, "Michael Needham: The Strategist Behind the Shutdown," The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2013; and Alex Rogers, "Utah Senator Mike Lee: The Man Behind the Shutdown Curtain," Time, October 22, 2013.) Loose as this aggregation is, Dionne even grants John McCain a kind of honorary membership in his maverick days — before he started palling around with Sarah Palin (she may have read something, but I doubt that it was Edmund Burke).
This is not a very disciplined or cohesive cadre. Some would no doubt have trouble identifying themselves with others in the "moderate" movement for which Dionne is recruiting them. They have different institutional loyalties and no shared base for concerted "reformiconning."
Besides, Dionne shows that it is risky for Republicans even to toy with talk of moderation. That is why even "mainstream" Republican candidates steer away from support for evolution, or measures against global warming, or taxes on the rich, or same-sex marriage. None wants to be guilty of compromise or looking soft. The right hated George H.W. Bush's plea for a "kinder and gentler" party kindling "a thousand points of light." They had no more kind or gentle feeling about George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" and his promise to "leave no child behind." They think that is Democrat talk. And they are right.
The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. … This … was the real American Revolution.
— John Adams in a letter to H. Niles, 13 February 1818.
Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. See his Wikipedia entry for details. He is the author of almost two score books; the most recent is The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis
. Here are a few of his articles from the New York Review of Books…
Obamacare: The Hate Can't Be Cured
Back Door Secession (the Right's infection from the Confederacy lives on).
The Buckley Myth.
This is interesting but not illuminating: Gallup poll on American's political ideology: 37% conservative, 35% moderate, 24% liberal. But self-identification does not well measure shifts over time of the entire spectrum — or the relative energy and power of each segment. More useful is "Who Turned My Blue State Red?" by Alec MacGillis at ProPublica — "Why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net." It explores the dynamics discoverd by Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about the rise of the Right, about ways to reform America, and especially these…
We have the leaders we deserve. Visit McDonald's to learn why.
The secret to Conservatives' success, and why they deserve to win — Remember, Mother Nature does not care.
America swings to the Right. The Left loses. How has the Left dug itself into this hole?
Look to the Left to see the force powering Trump and Carson.
The numbers about immigration that fuel Trump's campaign.
8 thoughts on "Garry Wills explains The Triumph of the Hard Right"
ch1kpee
Can he really call Reagan a "moderate" Republican?
I suppose you could claim that because he actually backed down on *some* of the idiocy of supply-side economics after it jacked up the national debt, and actually expanded some government programs that *weren't* in DoD, like Medicaid.
In every other way, he was Kylo Ren to Goldwater's Darth Vader, haha.
Editor of the Fabius Maximus website
All political labels are relative to their context in time and space; there is no useful absolute scale of extreme-moderate Left-Right politics. Reagan is moderate in the context Joe Scarborough uses, which is modern conservatism.
I suppose so. As much as Reagan was the triumphant Second Coming of Goldwater, even Goldwater was left of today's GOP leaders on many issues (as I see you noted in a past "Name That Liberal" article).
Seems to me our Overton window went about as far left as it ever did with the New Deal (which I appreciate now as a brilliant populist move to stave off any homegrown communist or fascist uprising after the Depression), then has just slowly crept further and further right. The only exception has been on social issues (feminism, gay rights, etc.), which as you often note, the elite 1% have little interest in.
ellifeld
Terrific article, best explanation I've read regarding the Republican party.
BTW, have you ever seen this TED Talk by Nick Hanauer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8
I heard last year on NPR's curated TED Talk Radio Hour, thought more about since I started following your blog. Though I would argue that the West's 1% has gotten considerably smarter and more subtle in their methods since the French Revolution or the Gilded Age.
That's a fascinating observation, and well worth thought. It makes sense, since almost all social processes have evolved during the past century-plus. I wonder if we — the US citizenry has grown more sophisticated in its methods of self-government? I doubt it.
But imo the greatest factor is our lack of will. I no longer believe we are willing to bear the burden of self-government. So the contest is over who shall rule us, and how.
kensmiles
A very provocative article! The kind that makes a light bulb glow in your head as you say "ah yes" to yourself.
There is, though, something missing when most "thought leaders" discuss topics like this. There's a silent assumption that they manipulate/program voters to see the world their way. Buckley did not drink Welch's Kool-Aid about Ike being a communist. Birchers were always a fringe among voters. (The '64 election confirmed this.) But Trump and others convince all but 29% of Republicans to believe Obama was not born in the US. What's wrong with the 71%? Their "flat-earth" brains seem defective.
Media personalities don't touch the issue of what's wrong with voters. They talk for months about how Trump is going to crash and burn but are incapable of explaining why that does not happen. They are flummoxed. And afraid to criticize voters lest they take offense and change the channel.
But the simple explanation is that people like Trump. And those people vote for him. Trump isn't scary. His flat-earth supporters are.
"There's a silent assumption that they manipulate/program voters to see the world their way"
Yes, there is a massive body of evidence showing that this can be done (that does not mean every such effort is successful). For an example see Why the 1% is winning, and we are not.
"But the simple explanation is that people like Trump"
That's not an explanation, unless you believe people's support is just a matter of personalities (evidence shows that is not correct). There are larger forces that have propelled Trump to the top of the GOP contest. For details see Trump and the new Populism. Tomorrow's post shows a different perspective on this.
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Expected Bristol City side to take on Huddersfield Town: Lee Johnson set to abandon 3-5-2
The Robins are looking to bounce back from Wednesday's West Brom woes
James PiercySports Editor
Niclas Eliasson gets on the ball for Bristol City
Lee Johnson was lambasted for his formation and choice of team against West Brom on Wednesday but such was the defeat his side sustained at The Hawthorns, he'll surely be pressed into making changes again.
Too many individuals under-performed in midweek and when you couple that with the fact City are still searching for the winning formula at home, Saturday's game against Huddersfield Town is likely to witness a very different starting XI and formation.
Based on form, tactical considerations, injuries, what's been said by the head coach and his staff and our own gut feeling on the situation, here's how we think will line up at Ashton Gate …
Dan Bentley punches clear against West Brom
The only City player this season to have played every single available Championship minute, Dan Bentley will once again don the gloves for the Robins.
Bentley ranks fourth in the league for saves (58) and third for the amount of times he's left his line and successfully claimed the ball (46), which only further emphasises his importance to the team.
Ashley Williams of Bristol City celebrates beating Cardiff City (Image: Robbie Stephenson/JMP)
At the risk of jumping ahead of ourselves in selecting a line-up, we're almost certain Niclas Eliasson is going to play which means Johnson is likely to abandon a 3-5-2 and move to a more traditional back four.
There logic is simple; there isn't a position for the Swede in Johnson's go-to formation as he's not as effective centrally and can't really play wing-back, unless in the event of emergency, so therefore assuming he will start – and he has to based on recent cameos – the defence must change in composition.
With Tomas Kalas likely to miss out due to tendonitis in his knee and Taylor Moore not quite ready, that means Johnson will select two from Bailey Wright, Ashley Williams and Nathan Baker – his starting three at The Hawthorns.
Bristol City coach defends team tinkering and outlines how Eliasson can become a regular starter
Based on performances since the international break, it's probably Wright who looks the one to miss out plus starting the Australian three times inside a week after precious first-team football between August and mid-November is something of a risk.
There could be a place for him as a right-back, however, should Pedro Pereira make way – which is also likely given the frequency of games and Johnson's desire to freshen his XI up – and Jack Hunt not be declared fit.
Jamie McAllister seemed bullish about Hunt's chances when speaking on Friday, with the 28-year-old having training for the last two weeks after suffering a hamstring injury in mid-October. However, when City have played a back four this season, it's tended to be Pereira selected not Hunt, so it'll be an interesting call.
Over on the left-hand side, having been dropped in midweek – although Callum O'Dowda's selection ahead of him against West Brom was as much of a tactical ploy as it was a representation of his own form, which has been solid – Tommy Rowe should return at full-back.
Adam Nagy is challenged by Grady Diangana of West Brom
Based on the theory that Johnson will changes things at home and start a 4-4-2/4-2-3-1 to accommodate Eliasson on the right flank and two central forwards, Josh Brownhill's midfield partner is an interesting debate.
It should be Adam Nagy but the Hungarian looked off the pace against the Baggies and perhaps is still feeling the after-effects of his foot problem, which is understandable considering he was out for three months.
Brownhill-Nagy is a brilliant and dynamic combination but the latter starting three games inside a week after such a long lay-off means he could sit this one out plus in a two, Johnson may require some greater defensive security.
Korey Smith put in an impressive 95-minute shift in the Midlands on Wednesday but, even more so than Nagy, it's surely too much to ask for him to start four days later in such a physically-demanding role.
He can obviously do it but, as McAllister hinted on Friday, City have to be mindful of his injury absence and have a duty of care not just to Smith but also themselves and the fact he will be a vital player beyond just Huddersfield at home.
Kasey Palmer and Brownhill together would be adventurous but a likely defensive nightmare so Han-Noah Massengo could well return to the side and effectively anchor the midfield having been given a reasonable amount of time to recharge his batteries.
O'Dowda is the obvious candidate on the left-hand side of midfield but sustained a dead leg against West Brom and is a doubt. And if the Republic of Ireland international isn't fit, unless they move Eliasson to the left and start, say Pereira or even Andi Weimann on the right, there isn't an abundance of wide midfield options.
Famara Diedhiou leaps to connect with a header
If it a 4-4-2, then Andi Weimann will surely be joined by Famara Diedhiou in attack to make the most of Eliasson's delivery and get amongst quite a strong-looking Huddersfield backline.
There is a school of thought that says maybe Weimann needs a rest as his performances have tailed off and the synergy between midfield and attack isn't quite there like it was at the start of the campaign when the Austrian was, at times, City's best individual.
If Weimann does move to the bench – which despite plenty of evidence supporting such a move will be a huge surprise – then either Rodri, Marley Watkins, Antoine Semenyo or Sammie Szmodics will replace him.
Neither of that quartet have presented a compelling case to do so in a match situation, although the word from Failand is that Szmodics continues to be one of the outstanding individuals in training, so maybe he could be in a withdrawn role behind Diedhiou.
Kalas, Moore, O'Dowda: Bristol City injury latest ahead of Huddersfield Town
It's where the 23-year-old operated best for Colchester and he could buzz around the Senegalese, feeding off knock-downs, linking the midfield and making late runs into the penalty area. If Weimann needs a rest, it certainly makes a lot of sense.
However, such is the importance of the Austrian to City's overall play in how he works on the ball and off it, in terms of making runs and pressing, leaving him out is a temptation Johnson probably doesn't want to take.
Bristol City (4-4-2): Dan Bentley; Jack Hunt, Ashley Williams, Nathan Baker, Tommy Rowe; Niclas Eliasson, Josh Brownhill, Han-Noah Massengo, Callum O'Dowda; Famara Diedhiou, Andi Weimann
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Mary G. McDonald has received the Service Excellence Award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS). McDonald is the Homer C. Rice Chair in the Sports and Society in the School of History and Sociology, and leads the Sports, Society, and Technology program in the Georgia Institute of Technology Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
The award recognizes McDonald for service throughout her career to the association, as well the field of the sociology of sport. It was presented in November, during the association's annual conference in Vancouver.
"It is humbling that some of the people I most admire in the field were those who nominated me," McDonald said of the honor.
In nominating McDonald for the award, colleagues from numerous universities noted that she is a leading scholar in her field, with numerous articles "widely recognized as leading texts in sports studies," including her work on Michael Jordan, Michelle Obama, the Rutgers' women's basketball team, and the WNBA.
The nominators also cited her work in improving diversity, organizational efficiency, and the intellectual climate within the association, as well as her international stature in the field, and commitment to serving as a mentor to undergraduates, graduate, and post-doctoral students.
"I continue to learn from her in various ways: through her scholarship which always expands my understanding of sports studies, through her mentorship — she is always there when I need help or professional advice, and through her leadership — she was an invaluable resource during my term as president of NASSS," wrote Cheryl Cooky, associate professor at Purdue University.
In addition to receiving the Service Excellence Award, McDonald also was invited to deliver the Alan Ingham Memorial Lecture at the NASSS conference. This prominent annual keynote address typically focuses on expanding theoretical ideas within the sociology of sport.
McDonald's address, Once More, With Feeling: Sport, National Anthems and the Collective Power of Affect, traced the history of national anthems at sporting events and the implications of those displays citing two recent examples.
The first involved the singing of a multi-lingual version of the Canadian national anthem before a hockey game staged to close Truth and Reconciliation Commission events in 2014. The second involved NFL player Colin Kapernick's decision to kneel during the U.S. national anthem before a football game.
McDonald is a former president of the NASSS. She is an executive board member of the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA), where she currently serves as vice president for communications.
She decided to study the sociology of sport following her years as a basketball player at the University of Dayton and nine years as a college women's basketball coach.
Her research focuses on American culture and sport including issues of inequality as related to gender, race, class and sexuality.
McDonald said that her position as the Homer C. Rice Chair has provided resources to support interesting programing and workshops. Those have led to anthologies featuring international scholars that are helping shape the field of sociology of sport, including issues such as concussions and the social study of science and technology in sports.
"This is a really great position to have an influence on the some of the intellectual trends in the field," she said of her Georgia Tech post.


Characterised in that the method further comprises the step of interpolating selected output signals of the switch and to provide an instance of a time shifted multipath signal to said fingers.
The present invention is related to a receiver for IMT-2000 spread-spectrum signals, more particularly to a novel structure for a rake for such a receiver.
When a signal is transmitted over a wireless channel, reflections of this transmitted signal on different objects will lead to identical signals with various and variable strength and phase. The receiver can and will receive these different reflections. Not all reflections will arrive at the same time (i.e. the path TX-reflection-RX is almost always different for different reflections, leading to phase difference). In the same way, as the path travelled by every signal can be different, the signal strength will vary. The receiver will thus receive time shifted versions of the same transmitted signal. A multipath is the sum of separate reflection with about the same Tx/Rx delay. As those multipaths are the sum of all signals arriving at the receiver at about the same moment, a very small shift of receiver position can change the phase and amplitude of each multipath considerably, because the separate signals the multipath signal is consisted of will change phase, leading to more or less signal extinction due to phase difference of the individual paths. This can result in a dramatic change in phase and amplitude of the combined multipath when the receiver is moved.
Since the phase and amplitude and delay of every multipath are changing in time, high quality signal reception is cumbersome, especially for the mobile user.
When CDMA is used for transmission/reception, the multipaths that have a phase difference of more than about the length of 1 chip are typically detectable separately (assuming good auto correlation properties of the CDMA code).
The purpose of a rake receiver, usually comprised in a CDMA receiver apparatus, is to combine coherently the multipaths to increase the receiver performance. To do a coherent combining a channel estimation and correction is needed per multipath. Traditional rakes thus comprise searchers (to search new multipaths), multipath trackers (used for following a shifting multipath signal) and combiner fingers (combining comprises to perform channel estimation, channel correction and to make the estimated and corrected signal available for adding to the final, combined signal so that the different channel corrected streams can be combined in a coherent way with the appropriate gain). The signals captured by the combiner fingers are combined to a combined strong signal in a coherent way.
When a CDMA signal is transmitted, every symbol is transmitted as a sequence of chips at a much higher rate than the symbol rate. This sequence of chips is called a PN code. The receiver will regenerate this PN code to detect the symbols. This regenerated PN code must be aligned with the incoming PN code, i.e. the receiver must know the phase of the incoming PN codes, which is not the case when the CDMA receiver is just turned on.
The goal of the chip time acquisition is to for example by trying all possible phases and observing which possibility returns the best result (= most energy).
The current rakes as used in receivers have a delay line to align multipaths with each other and with the rake fingers. The input from the fingers can come from some specific point in the delay line, depending on the time shift of the multipath. As the delays between the multipaths are random and not merely e.g. multiples of the chiplength, the best performance can be obtained when alignment of the multipaths with the fingers and with each other is optimal. This can be case if the resolution of the delay line is very high. Further, the delay line needs to have a certain length (a multitude of the chip length) in order to capture the maximal useful delay between the multipaths.
Evidently, a rake receiver has to be implemented at least partly in hardware, therefore it is a factor that influences the overall production cost and it also has implications for battery life in mobile receivers. For a fixed length (in time or in chips), the resolution of the delay line is directly correlated with the number of elements that have to be in the delay line. Further, a higher resolution also means a higher clock rate for the delay line. Typically, a minimum of 4 times over sampling (4 times the chip speed) needs to be used for the delay line to obtain acceptable results. A prior art delay line is thus an important hardware cost factor and uses a lot of battery power, both of which are negative factors when designing mobile telecommunication devices.
The present invention aims to provide a novel more efficient way of multipath signal combining to produce an enhanced signal. In particular, the present invention wishes to provide a cheaper spread spectrum receiver design while at least maintaining signal reception quality.
Combining said selected output signals to an instance of a time shifted multipath signal with an increased resolution compared to the predetermined resolution.
The method of the present invention can be further characterised in that the selected output signals are adjacent signals. The step of interpolation can be a linear, quadratic, or exponential interpolation of the selected output signals, or any other known interpolation method.
Another embodiment of the present invention is an integrated circuit comprising means for implementing the method of the present invention.
A further embodiment of the present invention is a computer program product arranged for execution on a computer device of all the steps of the method of the present invention.
The present invention further comprises a rake receiver comprising means for executing all steps of the method of the present invention.
Another embodiment of the present invention is a spread spectrum receiver comprising means for executing all steps of the method of the present invention.
Fig. 1 represents a rake receiver design as known from the prior art.
Fig. 2 shows a rake receiver design comprising interpolation as in the present invention.
The present invention is related to a novel way of using delay lines in rake receivers.
As explained higher, a prior art rake receiver comprises a delay line 1 as shown in figure 1. The delay line 1 takes the incoming signal (a superposition of time shifted multipaths). The fingers will take as input some point in the delay line in order to align the finger with the multipath. The delay line's clock frequency is a multitude n of the chip rate (fchip), usually n being 4 or 8. This way, acceptable resolution of the delay line is obtained. The switch allows each finger to choose where it will take its input from the delay line and the clock frequency is decimated to the original chip rate (5).
The rake receiver according to the invention can be seen schematically in figure 2. The delay line 2 is e.g. only clocked at half the speed of the prior art delay line (n/2. fchip). Two adjacent outputs of the delay line 2 can be interpolated (8) after switch 6 to obtain a combined signal, which in this example has to be decimated by n/2 (6) to obtain a signal at the chip rate fchip.
In this setup a simple linear interpolation bis used. Interpolated samples are calculated as follows: Interpolated sample = (xi + xi+1) / 2 where xi and xi+1 are 2 consecutive samples.
Any other interpolation method can be used, i.e. other formula, or higher order.
In a CDMA system it is important to sample the chipstream at the correct moment in time. In this way the locally generated code is best aligned with the incoming code and the best BER is obtained.
The following table illustrates the effect of missampling and the usage of an interpolator. The simple linear interpolator is used in this setup. For the sampling and the difference was translated in an equivalent implementation loss using the BASK Eb/No vs BER curve.
A typical PN code and Eb/No were used.
So it would mean that if one keeps the resolution of the delay line half chips and do nothing else (i.e. maximum error = 0.25 chip), one could have a loss of 0.93 dB (worst case).
Now by not doubling the delay line, but only introducing the interpolation, one can reduce this 0.93 dB loss to 0.06 dB.
Characterised in that the method further comprises the step of interpolation of selected output signals of the switch and to provide an instance of a time shifted multipath signal to said fingers.
Method as in claim 1 or 2, characterised in that the selected output signals are adjacent signals.
Method as in any of the claims 1 to 3, characterised in that the step of interpolation is a linear, quadratic, or exponential interpolation of the selected output signals.
An integrated circuit comprising means for implementing the method of any of the claims 1 to 4.
A computer program product arranged for execution on a computer device of all the steps of any of the claims 1 to 4.
A rake receiver comprising means for executing all steps of the method as in any of the claims 1 to 4.
A spread spectrum receiver comprising means for executing all steps of the method as in any of the claims 1 to 4.


There is nothing at all really as welcome as these gorgeous spring flowers that appear to emerge from nowhere to welcome the arrival of spring. Bulb sort flowers are seriously special plants, simply because they devote most of their days resting quietly beneath the surface of the soil. Then suitable on schedule, up they come, complete of bloom and vigor, and then virtually as quickly as they came, they go. Except for the green leafy aspect of the plant that tends to linger longer than we would like them to.
In spite of their brief bloom time and unattractive foliage soon after the blooms are gone, they are nonetheless a amazing addition to any landscape. But how must you care for them? Very first let's speak about how to use them in your landscape. Flowers of all types are very best when planted in groupings. Numerous folks purchase 25 or 50 bulbs and just go about the yard planting helter skelter. That is fine if that is what you want, but when planted that way they have a tendency to blend in with the landscape and seriously never show up nicely at all. When you plant them in substantial groups they are a breathtaking showpiece.
In the early spring start out pondering about exactly where you would like to generate a bed for flower bulbs. Prepare the bed by raising it with fantastic wealthy topsoil, and if at all doable add some nicely composted cow manure. Do this in the spring although you are in the gardening mood you could not be in the fall. More than the summer time fill the bed with annual flowers to hold the weeds down, and to fairly up your yard for the summer time. Come fall all you have to do is pull out the annuals and plant your bulbs to the depth suggested on the package.
If you consider you could have a dilemma with squirrels digging up the bulbs and consuming them, you can also wrap the bulbs in steel wool, leaving just the tip of the bulb exposed so it can develop out of the small wire cage you have produced. Or you can just plant the bulbs and then cover the bed with chicken wire or plastic fencing till the bulbs start out to develop in the spring.
When the bulbs come up in the spring and start out blooming, you must clip off the blooms as they start out to wither. This keeps the bulb from generating seeds, which demands a lot of power, and you want the bulb to use all of its offered power to shop meals in preparation for the bulb's resting period. As soon as the bulbs are fully completed blooming you never want to reduce off the tops till they are withered and die back. The million dollar query is how to treat the tops till that occurs.
Numerous folks bend them more than and slip a rubber band more than them, or in the case of bulbs like Daffodils tie them with one particular of the lengthy leaves. This appears to function simply because it is a really typical practice amongst quite a few skilled gardeners. Even so, Mike is about to rain on the parade.
I strongly disagree with this theory simply because back about 6th grade we discovered about photosynthesis in science class. To recap what we discovered, and with out going into the boring particulars, photosynthesis is the course of action of the plant applying the sun's rays to make meals for itself. The rays from the sun are absorbed by the foliage and the meals creating course of action starts. In the case of a flower bulb this meals is transported to the bulb beneath the ground and stored for later use.
So fundamentally the leaves of the plant are like small solar panels. Their job is to absorb the rays from the sun to start the course of action recognized as photosynthesis. If we fold them more than and handcuff them with their hands behind their back, they are not going to be in a position to do their job. It really is like throwing a tarpaulin more than 80% of a solar panel.
In order for the leaves to absorb the rays from the sun, the surface of the foliage has to be exposed to the sun. On leading of that, when you bend the foliage more than, you are restricting the flow of nutrients to the bulb. The veins in the leaves and the stem are a lot like our blood vessels. If you restrict them the flow stops.
You choose. I've presented my case. Bending them more than appears to function, but I've spent a lot of income on my bulbs. I want them operating at complete speed. What I do is clip the blooms off after they are spent, and just leave the tops alone till they are yellow and wilted. If they are nonetheless not wilted when it really is time to plant my annual flowers, I just plant the annuals in amongst the bulbs. As the bulbs die back the annuals have a tendency to develop and conceal them. If one particular shows via I clip it off. It appears to function nicely for me.


These days, a lot of your data gets encrypted when you save it to disk or send it over the internet.
The data gets decrypted again when you read it back in or after it's received at the other end.
For that, you need some sort of cryptographic algorithm – what's known in the jargon as a symmetric cipher or secret-key encryption.
Symmetric ciphers use the digital equivalent of a key, typically a string of characters, to lock and unlock the data.
In this article, we'll take a journey through the history of symmetric ciphers during the pen-and-paper era, before mechanical and electronic encryption devices came onto the scene.
How each generation of algorithms worked.
Why they fell by the wayside.
What was better – or not! – about what came next.
..and even though we'll end our journey just over 100 years ago, during World War One, there's still plenty we can learn from it.
We'll start where many cryptographic histories kick off, with the Caesar cipher, named after military commander and political supremo Julius Caesar, who lived, fought and ruled in the first century BC.
As you can imagine, given the writing technology available at the time, Caesar needed a system that was simple both to use and to explain.
If you want to send an encrypted message to someone else, they have to be able to learn the system easily and to unscramble messages reliably.
The most obvious weakness of the Caesar cipher is that there are only 25 different possible keys, assuming the 26-letter alphabet used for English.
In other words, the easiest attack on a Caesar cipher is what's now known as brute force – try every possible key until you hit the jackpot, assuming that the original message makes sense and can be recognised easily.
Encryption algorithms need enough keyspace to make a brute force attack unfeasible, or else the crooks can always win.
Remember that when you are encrypting data that might fall into an attacker's hands, you are protecting against what's called an offline attack That's where you have no control over how much time, energy, computing power or trickery the Bad Guys might invest in cracking the puzzle.
A five-digit PIN code is just about good enough to keep your bank card secure because the PIN isn't stored on the card and can't be recovered from it. The only way to figure out the PIN, given the card, is an online attack, where you present the card at an ATM, enter a PIN and ask the system to see if it's correct. After three mistakes, the card gets invalidated, and the attack has failed.
But when the crooks are trying to decrypt already-stolen data, you have no way of limiting how hard they can try, so you need to assume they may try for months, or even years. Offline attacks can draft in thousands of powerful servers, or even build special-purpose cryptographic cracking machines.
One way to increase the keyspace of a Caesar cipher is to shuffle the alphabet rather than just to shift it.
You have 26 letters to choose from when you pick the replacement character for A, then 25 replacements for B, and so on, for a total of 26 × 25 × 24 … 3 × 2 × 1 different keys.
That's a whopping number: 403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000, in fact.
That number is bigger than 287, meaning that when written out in binary, it needs 88 bits.
The US security standards body NIST currently recommends at least 128-bit keys for new cryptographic software, but 80 bits is still considered acceptable for legacy applications, more than 2000 years after Caesar.
Unfortunately, just having lots of possible keys is not enough on its own.
Whether you shift or shuffle the alphabet, a Casear cipher always replaces the letters in the same way.
If the first E in your document encrypts to X, for instance, then every other E will come out as X as well.
If the attackers know the likely topic of the message they want to crack, they can use the statistical properties of other material on the subject to help them recover the key.
..T . .E.T... ......T.. .. HE .....E.E. ...E .HE.E HE ... ... .HE. HE ... H.. HE H..
.ET H.. .. H.. ... .E..T ... .....HT H.. T. .. ... ... T... ...E .. H..
The Ts, Hs and Es are combining neatly so far, so we'll accept these substitutions for now, and look at the rest of our top six list, the letters A, N and O.
The letters A and N are common partly because the words AN and AND are common, and KJV verses frequently begin with AND.
The first verse starts ..T, which could indeed stand for BUT, so let's guess that the second verse starts with AND, which comes out as YLB in the ciphertext.
Given that AND is a common word, our guess is supported by the presence of several other instances of YLB in the encrypted data.
.ET H.. .N H.. ..N .EA.T AND .....HT H.. T. AN .NN AND T... .A.E .. H..
At this point, .HEN can't be THEN, so it's probably WHEN.
We've also got SAMARITAN as a likely match for .A.A..TAN, given what we know about Middle Eastern history, and DEPARTED jumps out as a probable fit for DE.A.TED.
The rest follows easily, based on letter frequencies alone.
Encryption algorithms need to mix their data up sufficiently to disguise any patterns that might leak from the plaintext to the ciphertext. Simply put, the output of a decent encryption algorithm should be indistinguishable by statistical analysis from a string of random numbers.
Note, however, that an algorithm with no obvious biases in its output is not secure on that basis alone. If you encrypt data that's already been compressed, for example, you are starting with random-looking input and so even cryptographically inadequate mixing may make the output pass most or all well-known tests for randomness.
But any encryption algorithm that does have biases in its output is almost certain to be no good.
By the 1500s, cryptography expert Giovan Battista Bellaso had come up with a way of improving the Caesar cipher without greatly increasing the complexity of the encryption process.
His cipher is now known as the Vigenere, named (or mis-named, if you prefer) after the diplomat and cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère, who came up with a different but related idea later in the 16th century.
This system uses multiple Caesar ciphers in sequence to disguise patterns in the input, and to skew the frequency distribution of the ciphertext.
Our first input word is BUT, and the first three letters of the key are CRY, so we use the third row, labelled C, to shift B forward two places to D; we shift U using row R, giving L; and T is "Caesared" with row Y to produce R.
Last time, every letter in BUT was shifted the same amount to give ZSR; this time we end up with DLR.
When we reach the end of the key, we wrap round and repeat the sequence of different Caesar shifts again.
But there's still not enough mixing going on – with only five different Caesar shifts, there's a 1-in-5 chance that any repeated text will remain the same in the encrypted output.
For example, in the second verse, THE comes out first as VYC and then as IAG, but in the word THEE at the end, the letters THE are re-aligned with the key in a way that once again produces VYC.
Also, at heart, a Vigenere cipher with a key of N characters is really just N separate Caesar ciphers, each of which can be solved separately using letter frequencies, as we did above.
When we guess the keylength correctly, we suddenly see a frequency distribution that lines up with the input data much better than any of the others.
Encryption algorithms don't necessarily get better just because you add a bit more complexity.
The Vigenere cipher is harder to crack than a pure Caesar cipher, but at heart it isn't sufficiently different, and can be cracked using exactly the same techniques applied slightly differently.
The problem with both the Caesar and Vigenere ciphers is the one-letter-at-a-time approach.
Even if you don't have digital computers at your disposal, frequency analysis based on individual characters is just too easy.
Encrypting more letters at one go – essentially using an much bigger alphabet than just A to Z – was the approach taken by nineteenth century scientist and prolific inventor Charles Wheatstone.
His cipher became known as Playfair, after Lyon Playfair, a scientist and politician who promoted its use.
Playfair encrypts two characters at a time, so that an attacker needs a frequency table for all two-letter pairs, or digraphs, from AA to ZZ.
One letter of the alphabet, such as Q, is dropped, or two letters, such as I and J, are combined, so the 25 remaining letters will fit into a 5×5 alphabetic grid.
After entering a permutation of the alphabet into the grid, you use the mixed-up grid to encrypt two letters at a time.
The two-letters-at-a-time substitution makes statistical analysis harder, because there are 26 × 26 = 676 letter pairs to keep track of.
Unfortunately, using a 676-entry "alphabet" still isn't enough to put Playfair beyond the reach of an attacker working manually with pen and paper.
There are also various anomalies in the Playfair algorithm that reduce its randomness in a way that helps crackers.
One problem is that there's no easy way to encrypt paired letters, such as the OO in BOOK or the NN in FUNNY, because you need two different letters in the grid to make a substitution rectangle.
The algorithm therefore requires you to add dummy characters, such as X or Z, between paired letters in order to force them to be encrypted as two different letters.
But the absence of letter pairs in the input means that you'll never see letter pairs in the ciphertext.
In other words, the ciphertext can never end up truly random-looking – you should get the same letter twice in a row 1/26th of the time (3.8%) if you're relying on chance – and so the Playfair cipher can never satisfy the mix-up rule we laid out above in Lesson 2.
Also, because of the way the character substitution process works, reversing any letter pair will produce a reversed ciphertext pair.
If RS encrypts as EK, as shown above, then SR will come out as KE, being the diagonal corners of the same substitution rectangle in the opposite order.
So, if you were to see the ciphertext AM RV VR, and the letter pair AM occurred elsewhere fairly regularly, you might immediately guess that the plaintext word was INDEED.
Playfair was subsequently extended to a version that used two squares of alphabetic patterns, and even to a four-squared variant that produced better randomness by allowing you to encrypt letter pairs such as OO and EE directly.
But the 2-square and 4-square variants were much more cumbersome to use, and still didn't address the problem that the underlying cipher always produced the same output for the same input.
The words THE and AND, for instance, can only form the letter pairs TH Ex, xT HE, AN Dx and xA ND, which is why the digraphs TH, HE, AN and ND stand out at the top of the frequency chart above.
Extra algorithmic complexity can help, but isn't enough on its own.
Playfair ciphers feel quadratically more complex than Caesar ciphers at first, because you're dealing with 262 encryption units at a time instead of just 26.
But the same frequency-counting techniques that help you crack Caesar and Vignere work with Playfair too, because the output simply isn't random enough.
We generally don't rely on pen-and-paper encryption any more, because we simply can't match by hand the amount of mixing-mincing-shredding-and-liquidising that computers can perform when scrambling data.
AES can encrypt the input 15CHARSATATIME-x all in one go, as if it were a single letter in a truly enormous alphabet, using a beefy key such as AESKEYCANBE256BITSWHICHIS32BYTES.
Despite the enormous key and alphabet sizes, however, even AES doesn't offer perfect security.
With the right combination of wits, time, computing power and luck, AES-encrypted data can sometimes be cracked.
Interestingly, however, a perfectly secure cipher – perfect in both the mathematical and the practical senses – does exist, and it was invented more than 100 years ago during the First World War by US Army officer Joseph Mauborgne.
The reason it's perfectly secure in a mathematical sense is that every possible key is equally likely, and because the key is as long as the input, every possible decryption is equally likely.
Of course, for all that the one-time pad can be made perfectly secure in practice, it's not very practical.
In particular, the keys really do have to be random; every byte of every key must be used at most twice (once for encryption and once for decryption); and the sender and recipient need to keep their keystreams synchronised and secret at all times.
Generating and distributing that much key material securely is both costly and complicated, which is why one-time pads have traditionally been used only by intelligence agents in the field or for top-level diplomatic communications.
In fact, the strength of the one-time pad can also serve as its enemy: if you run out of key material, you might be tempted to use the same key for more than one message.
Doing so, however, ruins the "perfect unpredictability" that comes from truly random keystream data.
By all accounts, in a project known in the trade as Venona, the US successfully decrypted small amounts of top-secret Soviet diplomatic traffic sent between about 1942 and 1948.
Apparently, the organisation that produced Soviet one-time pads struggled to keep up with wartime demand, and sometimes reused old printing plates to speed up the creation of key pages.
This resulted in occasional messages that were encrypted with the same keystream, and those messages could, in theory at least, be cracked.
The pen-and-paper history of cryptography and cryptanalysis is fascinating, not least because you don't need to wade through advanced mathematics to get a feel for the hack-and-counter-hack nature of the field.
Key size matters. A cryptosystem in which a crook can feasibly try every possible key just isn't good enough, so you need to be sure that the underlying algorithms put what's known as a brute-force search out of reach.
Key size alone is not enough. A cryptosystem in which a crook can take shortcuts to sidestep a brute force attack is no good either.
Randomness matters. A cryptosystem that shows any sort of bias in its output shouldn't be trusted, because there may be systematic weaknesses in how well it mixes up its input.
Randomness alone isn't enough. A cryptosystem must produce output that seems random, but data isn't secure simply because it passes all known tests for randomness.
A correct algorithm alone isn't enough. A cryptosystem can't meet its security promises if it isn't used correctly, for example by turning a one-time pad into a two-time pad.
The good news about cryptography in 2019 is that there are few technical reasons for cutting corners and not "doing it right".
Modern computers – even if you add low-cost Internet of Things devices to your list – generally have sufficient computing power to support the latest, fit-for-purpose algorithms.
Modern encryption algorithms are generally free to use, and high-quality implementations are freely available if you search wisely.
Our biggest problem these days seems to be avoiding the interference of well-meaning governments who want to regulate the use of encryption in ways that deliberately weaken it.
At Sophos, we've long been against forcing vendors to use cryptographic algorithms in a way that purposely prevents them meeting their security promises – such as mandating the inclusion of so-called backdoors.
The One Time Pad's development is usually credited to collaborative work of Gilbert S. Vernam and Joseph O. Mauborgne. Their work may have been inspired by a book written 35 years earlier by Sacramento banker Frank Miller. The OTP is perfectly secure provided the key space is "exactly" same size as message space and key is never used or repeated in other encryption. Also, OTP is malleable as bits (0,1's) can be changed – flipped – which change the message.
I am ascribing the creation of the one-time pad specifically to Mauborgne because, as far as I know, it was he who realised that the *perfect* security came from making the keystream truly random. Vernam's cipher device was what we now call a stream cipher (like RC4 or ChaCha20) – essentially a pseudo-one-time pad based on a pseudo-random sequence derived from a starting key.
The prerequisites for perfect security in the one-time pad – key length, key secrecy and key uniqueness (the "one-time" aspect) – that you mention are spelled out in the article.
As you suggest, proving the authenticity of any decrypted message can be a tricky problem – if it was tampered with and decrypts nearly but not quite correctly, how can you even tell?
Another great article Paul. I really love these deep dives. I learn so much from them. Looking forward to the next one.
What a great introduction to some of the key concepts on crypto. I'm retired now, but that would have been most useful in the past when training people new to Info Sec. I'm sure others will find it useful now.
Amazing article. Just added it my bookmarks and definitely will read it again. Thank you for the effort of writing it!!!
Many thanks for this useful article.
Fantastic article, really interesting seeing all the ancient encryption systems compared to each other like this.
Thanks for your kind words – and for reporting the broken link, which I've fixed.


Twelvepieces Cairo cap has been hand cut and sewn from a premium cotton twill in a six panel construction. The cap features a large embroidered camel to the front, 'Cairo' in arabic to the side and the signature '12' logo to the rear. Multiple eyelet vents to the crown are complimented by a tonal cotton strap fastening and tonal stitching finishes.


text:
First Ride: Trek Top Fuel 9.8 SL
The reincarnated version of this World Cup-winning XC racer gets modern updates and a hella-fast ride
by Gloria Liu Published: Sep 2, 2015
For years, the Trek Top Fuel was the company's World Cup-winning, 26-inch-wheeled cross-country race bike. But then the big wheel craze hit, and the Top Fuel was replaced by the 29er Superfly FS. For 2016, the Top Fuel came back to reclaim its place at the top of the line as the company's superlight race bike, with some notable improvements over both of its predecessors.
The most obvious update is wheel sizing. Trek employed what it calls Smart Wheel: The 15.5-inch Top Fuel gets 27.5-inch wheels, while 17.5-inch sizes and up are 29ers. As Trek explains it, the ideal XC racing position is anywhere from a 42- to 45-degree bend at the torso, though World Cup racers get even lower with 41- to 43-degree angles—a position that enables the rider to recruit the most power from the glutes. Ross Rushin, assistant mountain bike brand manager at Trek, says, "No matter what we did, we could always get the hand position about 30mm lower with a 27.5-inch wheel on the 15.5-inch frames. We found that the ability to better achieve that target fit makes up for the slight loss of rolling speed from going to smaller wheels. The other advantage with smaller wheels for that smaller rider is that they can lift that front wheel more, to better maneuver and control the bike, and that makes up for speed, too."
Trek went with Boost spacing front and rear on the 29er versions, which also allowed engineers to shorten the chainstays from those on the Superfly FS, for more agile handling.
Like the last rendition of the original Top Fuel, the 2016 version sports 100mm of front and rear travel, the latter of which is delivered by the company's Full Floater Evo link design, which attaches the shock to two moving points on the down tube. Trek says this design enables the suspension to stay more active and plush-feeling than the swing link system attached via the top tube of the Superfly FS. Trek also says that, because the rocker link provides a more solid connection between the front and rear ends of the bike, it improves overall frame stiffness from the Superfly, even if it does mean the Top Fuel is 30 grams heavier. Based on numbers provided by Trek, the Top Fuel is 9 percent stiffer in the head tube area and 16.1 percent stiffer in the bottom bracket area than the Superfly FS. "We were okay with not losing weight because the Superfly FS was already lighter than anything out there," says Rushin. (And indeed, our 15.5-inch Top Fuel tester weighed a scant 22.9 pounds on our scale—impressive for a $5,000 bike.)
RELATED: Editors' Choice: Scott Spark 910
Other notable changes that primarily affect the 29er versions: Chainstays were shortened for more agile handling, going from 452mm on the Superfly FS to 435mm on a 29er Top Fuel—only 9mm longer than the chainstays on the 15.5-inch, 27.5-inch version. This was enabled by the wider hub spacing that came from using Boost hubs on the 29-inch versions of the Top Fuel. Boost also stiffens the wheels, says Trek, addressing a common criticism of 29ers that the wheels were too flexy. The bike comes with Trek's Mino Link switch that gives you up to a degree of adjustability in head and seat tube angles, and half an inch in bottom bracket height. And Trek's Control Freak cable routing system allows you to cleanly internally (or externally, if you wish) route up to 54 combinations of cable setups for droppers, braking, and shifting systems.
How It Rides
I rode the 15.5-inch, 27.5-inch version of the Top Fuel over two weeks, on some fast group rides over techy East Coast singletrack, as well as in an XC race that featured a variety of terrain: flow trails, grassy fire roads, lots of logovers, and rock gardens.
I still hear some people say that hardtails are faster on climbs, but I'd pick a light, efficient-climbing, full-suspension model like the Top Fuel over a superlight hardtail any day. About a month prior to racing on the Top Fuel, I did an XC race on a 21.5-pound, carbon 29er hardtail on a very similar, if less technical, course. I felt much faster on the Top Fuel (and my pace confirmed it) despite the extra pound and a half of bulk, and the smaller wheels. I'll chalk it up to the additional traction on the uphills, improved descending capability, and the generally more forgiving ride on the Top Fuel.
Fitted with DT Swiss XMC1200 carbon wheels and weighing just under 23 pounds, the Top Fuel 9.8 SL was a joy to climb on. The bike punched it up climbs when I laid down the power, and during fast pedaling on flats, it felt like it was transferring all my power immediately and efficiently. I raced on tired and sore legs, and the Top Fuel made easy work of the uphills, going fast enough for a win in my category that day. Another tester rode the bike on her home trails and got several Strava PRs on it. I did notice the slightest bit of pedal bob on the road when the shock was fully open, but it didn't seem to affect the quick feeling of the bike on the trail.
Small-bump performance was excellent, resulting in surprisingly great traction despite the Top Fuel's low-profile, 2.2-inch Bontrager XR2 Team Issue tires—almost on par with the excellent Yeti SB5c Beti I rode recently, which has the best traction of any trail bike I've tested, and rolls on bigger tires. On one ride, the rocks were snotty and slippery from rain that had fallen earlier that day, yet the Top Fuel crawled resolutely uphill over slick boulders and rock gardens, helping me to keep up with faster riders primarily riding trail bikes.
The new Top Fuel is stiffer in the bottom bracket and head tube areas than the Superfly FS.
After getting off a more traditional trail bike, the narrower, 680mm handlebar paired with the 70mm stem—though appropriate for an XC race bike—took a little getting used to. The bike handled a bit quicker than I was ready for at first, but within half a ride, I was accustomed to it. Once I got used to how responsive the Top Fuel is, I found it steers very precisely, deftly shooting through skinny gaps between pedal-menacing rocks, and sticking the right line during techy sections that required lots of concentration.
In designing the bike, Rushin says Trek considered the fact that World Cup XC courses are getting more technical and challenging, and so the Top Fuel needed to be more capable than it had been in the past. I found the Top Fuel to be surprisingly good—for a 100mm-travel bike—at descending rocky, East Coast singletrack at speed, including a few very steep, rutted, and bumped-out sections. I felt like the suspension did firm up a bit when I sped up over very rough terrain, leading to a sense of being a little jostled on the bike, but the Top Fuel was stable enough to stay on its line; this descending personality seemed appropriate for an XC race machine. And the suspension sported some nice pop, making it super fun to catch a little air over rocks and small rollers.
As for wheel size: With its speed and XC-oriented feel, this bike's personality seems suited to 29-inch wheels. However, while you lose that extra rollover capability with the smaller bike, another tester and I agreed that this 27.5-inch bike was particularly easy to pick up and loft over logs and big rocks anyway. While I am curious to try a 17.5-inch 29er, there was nothing slow-feeling about the 27.5-inch version of this bike—and it was good enough to help me win a race.
The bike ships in its slacker, low setting, in which I performed all my test rides. The stock setting gives the Top Fuel a 69.9-degree head angle, a BB height of 13 inches, and a seat tube angle of 69.5 degrees. Flipping the Mino Chip to its higher, steeper geometry brings the head tube angle to 70.9 degrees and the seat angle to 70.5 degrees, and raises the BB height to 13.4 inches. In the low setting, I did find myself just barely grazing my pedals in a couple of surprising places, like fast, off-camber corners. Getting an extra 0.4 inches of BB clearance could reduce that, though I really didn't find it to be a significant issue either way.
The Mino Link allows you to adjust the head and seat tube angles by up to one degree, and raise the bottom bracket by almost half an inch.
Parts are solid: The SRAM X1/X01 1x11 drivetrain gets a 32T chainring up front and a 10-42 cassette in the rear, and I enjoyed smooth shifting and the ability to quickly dump multiple gears when I hit a sudden steep climb. The Shimano XT brakes worked great, too. I did miss two things: One, even on an XC race bike, I wanted a dropper post. And two, while the remote lockout on the handlebar for the fork and shock makes it convenient to open and lock the suspension during a fast-paced riding situation, both myself and our other tester wished there were some middle "trail" mode in addition to fully locked and fully open options. The only time I lock both front and rear suspension is when I'm climbing on the road; but if I'm on the road (or hopping onto the trail from the road), it's not as hard for me to reach down and flip the settings on my fork and shock anyway.
But these two points are overshadowed by the big picture: For $5,000, you can have a carbon XC race bike that weighs just a shade under 23 pounds for the smallest size, and is fast because it's capable, not just because it's superlight. Who should consider buying the Trek Top Fuel? XC racers, of course, but also anyone who most prizes lightweight climbing prowess in a short-travel, full-suspension package. Whether you're pinning on a number or just trying to rack up some bragging rights on Strava, you'll ride fast on the Top Fuel—and really, who's not a fan of that?
Weight: 22.9 lb. (15.5 in.)
Gloria Liu
Contributing Writer, Bicycling & Runner's World
Gloria Liu is a writer-at-large, and formerly the features and gear editor at Bicycling. Gloria's love for cycling spans disciplines from road to gravel to 'cross to mountain. She's written popular features for Bicycling about a wide range of subjects, from the (at times hilarious) self-discovery gained by going #FullEnduro, to the intersection of #MeToo and cycling.


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Dyson shows off its canceled electric car for the first time
Having pulled the plug on his company's electric car project back in October last year, Sir James Dyson has finally lifted the veil on what could have been a major Tesla competitor in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times.
The article, which celebrates the famous inventor and entrepreneur's first time topping The Sunday Times Rich List, offers a world-first look at a working version of Dyson's development car, referred to as N526 within the company.
"I drove it secretly in a screened-off compound we have here," said Dyson, speaking of the model pictured above.
Design-wise, Dyson's electric car concept looks unsurprisingly sporty and futuristic. Measured at five meters long, two meters wide and 1.7 meters tall, Dyson's electric car can reportedly be compared to high-end SUVs from the likes of Jaguar's Land Rover and Range Rover, while its wheels are said to be larger than just about any other car on the road.
Leaning into its sporty aesthetic, Dyson's concept car has a windscreen that's tilted "more steeply than on a Ferrari" according to the man himself. Inside the car, there are a total of seven "thin and firmly upholstered" seats with rounded headrests which the article's author John Arlidge describes as having "the look of a lollipop."
Additionally, the author mentions storage drawers that "look like pull-out filing cabinets" with driver instrumentation delivered exclusively via a heads-up display.
(Image credit: The Sunday Times)
According to Dyson, the company's EV would've boasted a longer range than any other electric car had it made it to production, reportedly able to drive for 600 miles (965 kilometers) on a single charge. By comparison, the Tesla Model S has a range of 379 miles (609 kilometers).
The article states that the car's range would've been possible "even on a freezing February night, on the naughty side of 70mph on the motorway, with the heater on and the radio at full blast".
In terms of horsepower, it's said that Dyson's electric car was set to offer twin electric motors capable of producing 536bhp and 480 lb ft of torque, which would allow the vehicle to go from zero to 62mp/h in 4.8 seconds and deliver a top speed of 125mp/h (201km/h).
As for why the car was canceled, Dyson laments that "though we have tried very hard throughout the development process we simply can no longer see a way to make it commercially viable," adding that the car would need to sell for £150,000 (approximately $181,440) just to break even.
The article reports that Dyson spent £500 million of his own money (as the company is private and not shareholder-owned) on the project before deciding to scrap it. It's not all a loss, though – Dyson plans to use what it has learned and funnel it into the production of solid-state batteries which other car makers could use.
Google Pixel 5 could skip Motion Sense tech
Realme TV and smartwatch to be unveiled on May 25


I didn't have a 19th Birthday party.
You can take a look at my 1st-18th Birthdays by following the links on this page.
Posted on September 19, 2010, in Birthdays, Parties and tagged Birthday Traditions, Parties, photos. Bookmark the permalink.	Leave a comment.


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S.E. Willis Turtle Dove Bounce/Live at the Poor House
S.E. Willis
Turtle Dove Bounce/Live at the Poor House
Mr. Suchensuch Records
S.E. Willis aka Steve is the veteran piano player in The Elvin Bishop Band. During a two year period when Willis was ill he worked in his home studio recording his versions of some classic piano blues. He also contributes four original compositions. Willis decided to combine his completed solo piano recording with a live set he recorded in January 2011, at The Poor House Bistro in San Jose, Ca. when he was backed by Bishop and the other members of the band. This two cd set is the result.
On the first cd Willis' opens with the "Cow Cow Blues", which was written and recorded by Charles Davenport in 1928. Besides being a boogie-woogie piano player Davenport was also a vaudeville entertainer.
"Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" also called "The Original Boogie Woogie" is from Clarence "Pinetop" Smith who also first recorded it in 1928.
Included also is Eurreal Wilford "Little Brother" Montgomery's "The Vicksburg Blues" recorded in 1930. Willis states he got to meet Montgomery who was from the greater New Orleans area. Montgomery passed away in 1985.
Chicagoan Jimmy Yancey wrote and recorded "The Fives" in 1939. This piano instrumental is a terrific show piece for Willis. It is just fabulous.
"Good To Go Boogie" is an original in the traditional boogie-woogie style embraced by Willis and it is another fabulous instrumental.
Willis is also a gifted vocalist and he sings on two songs written by Leroy Carr, "How Long" and "Baby Don't You Leave Me No More". Robert Lockwood Jr. once told Willis that the later was the model for "Sweet Home Chicago".
"Worried Life Blues" was written by Big Maceo Merriweather in 1941. It has been recorded by both Ray Charles and Eric Clapton among many others.
Willis has also written three more songs on which he sings. "Hard Times Coming", the "Drinking Blues" and the terrific title track "Turtle Dove Bounce" which starts off as an instrumental. Willis has also overdubbed himself on harp on these three tunes.
As a bonus we have this equally wonderful live set. Elvin Bishop is a great bandleader and he attracts some great musicians. The band consists of Wills, vocals, piano and harmonica; Bob Welsh, guitar; Bobby Cochran, drums and vocals; Ruth Davies, bass; Ed Earley, trombone and vocal; Nancy Wright, sax and background vocals; and Takezo Takeda, second guitar. Bishops sits in on guitar on four tracks and sings on Fat Domino's "Don't Lie to Me". Among the fourteen tracks are two more Willis originals, two New Orleans classics, and vocals by Cochran and Earley. As always this band "cooks".
This is a great new double album well deserving of your attention.
Richard Ludmerer
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Botanical Names
Acca sellowiana - Some Magnetic Island Plants
fruit detail
Acca sellowiana
(O.Berg) Burret 1941
pronounced: AK-uh sell-low-ee-AH-nuh
(Myrtaceae — the gum family)
synonym — Feijoa sellowiana
(O.Berg) O.Berg 1859
pronounced: fay-JOE-uh sell-low-ee-AH-nuh
common names: pineapple guava, feijoa
Acca is said to be derived from an ancient Hebrew word meaning 'hot sand', but I have not been able to verify this, or to find the actual word; sellowiana was named for Friedrich Sellow or Sello (1789 - 1831), a German botanist and naturalist who was one of the earliest scientific explorers of Brazil. Feijoa is for João da Silva Feijó (1760 - 1824), a Brazilian-born naturalist.
This is a perennial shrub or small tree that can grow 5 – 7 m in height, widely cultivated as a garden plant, and for its fruit where the climate is suitable. It is really a warm-temperate to subtropical plant; it will grow in the tropics, but requires some winter chill before it will fruit.
The bark is a pale grey; the spreading branches are swollen at the nodes. The thick leathery leaves are opposite, short-petioled, bluntly elliptic, 3 – 6 cm in length, smooth and glossy on the upper surface, and silver-hairy underneath
The conspicuous flowers are bisexual, about 4 cm wide, borne singly or in clusters. They have 4 fleshy oval concave petals, white on the outside and purplish red inside, with a cluster of erect purple stamens with round yellow anthers.
The fruit is oblong or ovoid or rather pear-shaped, up to 5 or 6 cm in length, with persistent calyx segments still adhering to the apex. The skin is thin, and has a bloom of fine whitish hairs while immature. When ripe, it remains a dull green in colour, sometimes with a red or orange blush. It emits a strong perfume, even before it is ripe. The thick flesh is white, watery and granular; the seeds are enclosed in a translucent pulp in the centre of the fruit. There are usually at least 20 seeds, but there may be up to 100; they are tiny, and hardly noticeable when the fruit is eaten.
Although the tree is grown in many places, nowhere is it more popular than in New Zealand. It was introduced there in about 1908, but remained little-known until the 1930s, when it became widely used as an ornamental. After improvement by selection of types with superior fruit, commercial plantings began to be set up in the citrus-growing areas of the country. A considerable amount of fruit is now being exported. New Zealanders often plant the trees as a windbreak around wind-sensitive crops.
In South Africa, it is planted both as an ornamental and for its fruit. After World War II, plantations were established in North Africa, parts of southern Russia, and in Sicily, Portugal and Italy. The tree espaliers well, and is often grown as a wall plant in English gardens. The wood is dense, hard, and brittle.
The planting of this tree is now officially discouraged in both Victoria and NSW, as its fruit is a prime host of the fruit fly.
Photographs taken in a Nelly Bay garden 2012, 2013
Page last updated 25th September 2018
[gallery ID=1]


The Playful Pittsburgh Collaborative is a group of committed organizations dedicated to advancing the importance of play in the lives of children, families, and communities in the Pittsburgh region. We work to educate decision-makers (from parents to legislators) in our region so that their choices support access to play for people of all ages; raise awareness that play is a critical element in the lives of people of all ages; and model (and inspire) through various activities the actions we hope our broader community will take in their daily lives.
The Playful Pittsburgh Collaborative embeds play-based ideologies throughout the Pittsburgh region through community conversations (informal lectures surrounding play topics), hosting the annual Ultimate Play Day, partnering in the development of the Hazelwood Play Trail, representing Pittsburgh in the KaBOOM! Playful City USA Play Leaders Summit, and translating the multi-dimensional "case for play"; among other projects and initiatives.


For the past 10 years, E-Man have been an incubator and investor to start ups in London and more recently, the USA.
We have a rich history of co-founding disruptive products of our own and in partnership with great founders and supportive investors, from the earliest stage of the products lifecycle. We are proud supporters and participants in the creation and growth of the London Tech City community of East London.


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Q: Determining if a ring satisfies Serre's condition S_{n} Given a specific ring $R$ (eg, $R=k[x_{1}, \cdots, x_{n}]/I)$ is there a (simple) way to determine whether or not $R$ satisfies Serre's condition $S_{n}$?  In particular, is there a way to do this in Macaulay2?
($R$ satisfies $S_{n}$ if $depth R_{p} \geq \min(height(p), n)$ for all $p \in Spec R$.)

A: I think there is a neat answer to this question.

Lemma: Let $S$ be regular local of dimension $d$, $M$ a f.g $S$-module. Then:
  $$\text{depth}(M)\geq n \Longleftrightarrow \text{Ext}^i(M,S)=0\  \text{for} \ i>d-n$$

Proof: LHS is equivalent to $e= \text{pd}_SM \leq d-n$. By using a minimal free resolution of $M$ to compute Ext, one sees that $\text{Ext}^i(M,S)$ is not $0$ for $i=e$ (Nakayama's lemma) and $0$ for $i>e$.
Now let $A=k[x_1,\cdots,x_d]$, $R=A/I$. Here is the main:

Claim: $R\ \text{is}\ (S_n) \Longleftrightarrow \text{dim}(\text{Ext}_A^i(R,A))\leq d-n-i \ \forall i>d- \text{dim}(R)$

(of course, we only need to check for values of $i$ up to $d$, as $A$ has finite global  dimension $d$).
Proof: By Lemma one needs to check that for all $p\in \text{Spec} \ A$:
$$\text{Ext}_{A_p}^i(M_p,A_p)=0\  \text{for} \ i>\text{dim}(A_p) -\min\{n,\text{\dim}(R_p)\}=\max\{\text{dim}(A_p)-n,\text{dim}(A_p)-\text{dim}(R_p)\}$$
This condition is equivalent to the fact that for all $i>0$ and each $p$ in the support of $\text{Ext}_A^i(R,A)$ we must have $i\leq \max\{\text{dim}(A_p)-n,d-\text{dim}(R)\}$. Note if $i < d-\text{dim}(R)$, $\text{Ext}^i(R,A)=0$, so the claim follows.
You can compute both Ext and dimension with Macaulay 2.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


It's the day after April Fool's Day, but thanks to news readers, inboxes, and social networks, we're not consuming information in chronological order. Be sure to mark as read every news and information gathering system you use to prevent you from mistakenly sharing April Fool's pranks as real news.
At the very least inspects to make sure that when you publish your, your weekly wrap up or summary of the content that you're going to share this week that either you market this was an April Fool's Day thing, or you just clean it out and maybe do a shorter edition this week just so that you don't share something that you or someone in your audience misinterpreted as being legitimate news, when in fact, of course, it's not.
The other thing is that there were a couple of brands that released actual news yesterday. I don't know why you would do that. Because no one knows whether to believe you or not. So maybe try re releasing that news today.


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Home News 2014 10 Workers Hold Future Inequality Their Hands
Workers Hold The Future Of Inequality In Their Hands
Stop the War on Workers
Editor's note: This is the final of five Teamster In Depth blog postings leading up to the Nov. 4 election that examine issues of importance not only to Teamsters, but all workers. It is because of these matters that it is imperative for hardworking Americans to educate themselves and vote for pro-worker candidates this fall. Learn more about voter suppression, the gender wage gap, corporate welfare and unfair trade policies in previous election-related blogs.
Our nation's economic recovery may seem real to those who compile government statistics or for the elites on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. But ask the average rank-and-file worker in cities and towns across America, and you'll likely get a much different answer.
Despite a reduction in the U.S. unemployment rate, workers are still struggling. The reason is simple – jobs that paid a fair salary and supported families before the Great Recession have been replaced by those that pay the minimum wage or not much higher. In many cases, people need to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Otherwise, they make do with less or with government assistance.
As a result, the U.S. is experiencing a significant income inequality problem. A new report released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that wealth inequality has soared in the last three decades, with the top 0.1 percent share of wealth growing from seven percent in 1978 to 22 percent in 2013.
"Wealth inequality is making a comeback, with the top 0.1% wealth share almost as high in 2012 as in the 1916 and 1929 peaks and three times higher than in the late 1970s," authors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman wrote. "The key driver of the rapid increase in wealth at the top is a surge in the share of income, in particular labor income, earned by top wealth holders."
Of course, one way to counteract the growing wage disparity would be to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for more than five years. Democrats have largely led the charge to do so, but the idea is not without Republican support. In fact, four former House GOP members called for a hike in the nation's hourly salary floor earlier this month.
"It's wrong that someone in the United States of America who works hard for long hours to support their family can still be stuck in poverty today," the ex-lawmakers wrote in a USA Today column. "It is time for Congress to give the working poor a raise and take the politics out of this issue by linking future increases in the minimum wage to the cost of living."
Unfortunately, not enough Republicans in Congress are listening to that message. And the same is true in many states across the nation. The administration of Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) rebuffed calls to raise the minimum wage above the federal standard earlier this month. But perhaps more insulting was its suggestion that $7.25 an hour is a living wage in the state, despite studies the cost of living is actually almost three times higher.
It is nothing short of an abomination that hardworking Americans find themselves in these straits. Low-wage workers have repeatedly taken to the streets to raise public awareness about income inequality, but have little to show for it at the national level.
But that could change if workers take advantage of the system the U.S. does have in place. In many states, they can vote right now for pro-worker candidates who understand the problem and are willing to put people before the powerful. Or they can head to the voting booth next week and do the same.
Either way, this is the opportunity before us. By voting, we can effect change. Not showing up is not an option – at least if working people really want policies to change. Don't miss out on helping to shape a better future for yourself and your family. Vote on Nov. 4.
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