16 NEWS Talking points
Getty (2)QThe agency that over-
sees military communica-
tions for the White House
has been the victim of a
cyberattack. The Defense
Information Systems
Agency (DISA), which is
responsible for military
cybersecurity, had its com-
puters hacked, exposing
200,000 people’s personal
data. Pentagon officials
would not say whether
the cyberattack had been
traced to its source.
BBC.com
QBased on the total cost
of President Trump’s golf
outings to taxpayers, he is
the country’s 10th-highest-
paid athlete. Taxpayers
have paid about $152 mil-
lion for Trump’s golf trips,
or roughly $50.6 million a
year, records show. The
No. 1 player in the world,
Rory McIlroy, has been
paid $12 million to play
over the past two years.
TheRoot.comQOver 90 percent of
plastic waste in the U.S.
is not recycled, and winds
up in an incinerator or a
landfill. Eight of the 10
most commonly polluted
plastic items are currently
unrecyclable, according to
sponsors of a bill intro-
duced in Congress that
would make companies
responsible for the waste
they generate.
Los Angeles Times
QPresident Trump’s
proposed budget includes
$587,000 to “establish a
permanent diplomatic
presence in Greenland.”
The request comes six
months after Trump or-
dered aides to explore the
possibility of buying the
autonomous territory that
belongs to Denmark.
TheHill.comNuclear families: The problem, not the solution?
For the first two centuries
of America’s existence,
we were a nation of big,
sprawling, extended fami-
lies, said David Brooks in
TheAtlantic.com. People
were embedded in a “sup-
porting web” of aunts,
uncles, cousins, siblings,
and grandparents who
shared burdens and could
step in and care for a child when a mom or
dad was not available. Such multigenerational,
extended families helped parents, socialized
young men, and grounded seniors, giving people’s
lives meaning. But over the 20th century, as
farming waned and people chased the American
dream to cities, they began living far from kin in
nuclear families—a married mom and dad and
their children. That worked for a time, but as our
society has embraced self-fulfillment, autonomy,
and privacy as ideals, the nuclear family has
turned into “a catastrophe.” Kids are growing
up in fragile family units that often crumble into
single-parent homes. Working parents must pay
people to perform child-rearing tasks that once
were handled by kin. Seniors, meanwhile, often
spend their final years alone. “It’s time to find
better ways to live together.”Easier said than done, said W. Bradford Wilcox
and Hal Boyd, also in TheAtlantic.com. While thealternatives that Brooks
offers up— communal
living arrangements and
so-called forged families of
nonbiological kin—have
their merits, research
has repeatedly proved
that “a nuclear family
headed by two loving
married parents remains
the most stable and safe
environment for raising children.” The social ills
that Brooks blames on the nuclear family—drug
epidemics, rising rates of suicide, depression, and
income inequality—are actually “the awful con-
sequences of its collapse,” said Mona Charen in
TheBulwark.com. In 1960, 77.5 percent of chil-
dren lived in nuclear families. Today, that figure
has fallen to 48 percent. We need to revive, not
give up on, nuclear families.Society has changed too much for that to be pos-
sible, said Robert Samuelson in The Washington
Post. Social conservatives can’t “magically”
erase geographic mobility, the need and desire of
women to work, or high divorce rates. As Brooks
points out, progressives also have no answers.
They’re so fixated on freedom and individuality
that they can’t concede the high cost of family
breakdown and leaving so many kids and adults
on their own. This is a prosperous age, but it is
filled with “bitterness and contradictions.”Noted
Baseball’s spring training should be a happy time
of “rhapsodizing about the crack of the bat and
the smell of freshly cut grass,” said Will Leitch
in NYMag.com. Instead, as teams have reported
to Florida and Arizona to prepare for the new
season, both players and fans are still “raging”
about the Houston Astros cheating scandal. No
Astros players were punished when the league
recently exposed the scheme they used in 2017
and 2018 to decode opposing catchers’ signs with
a camera and a computer, then tip batters off to
upcoming pitches by banging on a trash can in
the dugout. Now “everyone hates the Astros,”
with some opposing pitchers openly talking about
throwing at their batters to get revenge. A former
opposition player is even suing the team for alleg-
edly ruining his career. Cody Bellinger, whose Los
Angeles Dodgers lost to Houston in the 2017
World Series, said, “Everyone knows they stole
the ring from us.”This scandal makes the Astros “America’s team,”
said Lance Gould in CNN.com. In the Trump era,
“our national pastime couldn’t be more appropri-
ately represented” than by a team that “conned
its way” to victory and refuses to accept blame
after getting busted. Sure, the field manager andgeneral manager were fired, but the team’s “apol-
ogy tour has been a disaster.” Owner Jim Crane
claimed the cheating “didn’t impact the game”—
despite the elaborate efforts players made to steal
the signs—then 55 seconds later Crane said, “I
didn’t say it didn’t impact the game.” Sounds very
“Trumpian,” said Max Boot in The Washing-
ton Post. The Astros scandal reinforces the chief
lesson of the Trump presidency, which is that
“cheating is rewarded at the highest levels and
vice pays better than virtue.”Sports, at its best and its worst, provides “a win-
dow onto human nature,” said Brian Phillips in
TheRinger.com. The Astros’ hilariously cheesy
plot to use a software program and a garbage can
to get an edge on opposing pitchers is what inevi-
tably happens when you take “driven and obses-
sive human beings,” praise those impulses as
“heroic,” then put them in a competition offering
“immense rewards—money, fame, status—for
defeating each other.” That’s basically a “corrup-
tion algorithm.” Yet we still think professional
sports is a fine stage on which “to make role
models.” And perhaps it is: “Disillusionment can
be liberating.” Our heroes, we’ve been reminded,
are flawed, too.The Astros: Winning the American way
An extended family in New Jersey in 1890