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Benjamin McKeown

Immigration Should Be About Culture and Assimilation (and the Joy of Becoming American)... - 0 views

ricochet.com/...d-the-joy-of-becoming-american

migration HL response anti-globalization culture

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Were we to allow America’s ideals to be radically changed over time by outsiders coming in, the case could then be made that America as founded no longer exists. At that point we may as well change the name to not denigrate what American once was.
  • History compels us not to let America die by the noose of multiculturalism.
Benjamin McKeown

Is Cultural Appropriation Always Wrong? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ppropriation-always-wrong.html

HL culture cultural imperialism

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Sermon on the Mount.
  • In June, young Asian-Americans protested when the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as an accompaniment to a lecture called ‘‘Claude Monet: Flirting With the Exotic,’’ invited visitors to pose next to Monet’s ‘‘La Japonaise’’ while wearing a matching kimono. And South Asian women, objecting to the fad for ‘‘ethnic’’ wear at music festivals like Coachella, continued a social-media campaign to ‘‘reclaim the bindi,’’ sharing photographs of themselves, their mothers and grandmothers wearing bindis, with captions like ‘‘My culture is not a costume.’’’
  • The line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is always going to be blurred,’’
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • ‘‘We as black people have to come to grips that hip-hop is a contagious culture,’’ Questlove, the drummer and co-founder of the Roots, said last year in an interview with Time magazine in which he defended Iggy Azalea, the white Australian rapper derided for (among other things) affecting a ‘‘Southern’’ accent. ‘‘If you love something, you gotta set it free.’’
  • But it has never been easier to proceed with good faith and Google, to seek out and respect context.
  • Social media, these critics suggest, allow us too much access to other people’s lives and other people’s opinions to plead ignorance when it comes to causing offense.
  • Seen in this light, ‘‘appropriation’’ seems less provocative than pitiably uninformed and stale.
  • ‘The moment you say a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don’t tell those stories. Worse, you’re saying: As an American male you can’t understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, unknowable. She’s other. Leave her and her nation to its Otherness. Write them out of your history.’’
  • ‘‘there would be fewer wars’’ if more novelists allowed themselves to imagine themselves into other cultures.
  • t’s a seductive if utterly unverifiable claim.
  • Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19
     
    "Sermon on the Mount."
Benjamin McKeown

american immigration debate - Google Search - 0 views

www.google.co.jp/webhp

HL magration response anti-globalization

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Benjamin McKeown on 17 Mar 15
     
    "The U.S. Immigration Debate - Council on Foreign Relations"
Benjamin McKeown

The U.S. Immigration Debate - Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views

www.cfr.org/...p11149

HL magration response anti-globalization

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • President Barack Obama's immigration policies have drawn ire from immigration advocates and opponents alike. Though he pledged to tackle comprehensive immigration reform in his first year in office, Obama did not make the issue a priority until his second term. His administration has deported more than two million undocumented immigrants, more than former President George W. Bush did in his two terms, though some of this reflects the rise in border arrests of migrants from countries other than Mexico,
  • Obama has tried to grant a reprieve to as many as five million undocumented immigrants in the United States
  • the majority of Americans support various elements that would comprise comprehensive immigration reform, including creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (88 percent), requiring employers to check immigration status of workers (84 percent), tightening border security (83 percent), and expanding short-term visas for skilled workers (76 percent).
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Many tech-industry leaders have become prominent supporters of immigration reform,
  • They argue that if skilled workers—many of whom are educated in U.S. universities—are not permitted to work in the United States, some tech companies may be forced to move their operations offshore.
  • early one third of undocumented immigrants in the United States are the parents of U.S.-born children, according to the Pew Research Center.
  • "[The United States' undocumented immigrant] population is not growing—it's more settled,"
  • Increasingly, people who are coming are Central Americans fleeing violence and seeking asylum—not Mexicans seeking work—and that's a very different policy problem. But I don’t think Congress has caught up with that. The debate and the approaches still reflect the world of a decade ago."
  • Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential elections and many Republican strategists said that their party would need to strike a more conciliatory tone on migration following the party's loss that year.
  • Comprehensive immigration reform refers to proposed legislation that would change U.S. immigration laws to address demand for high-skilled and low-skilled labor, legalize most undocumented immigrants already in the country, and toughen border and interior enforcement.
  • Immigration Innovation Act: A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate in January 2015 that would nearly double the number of visas for temporary high-skilled workers, from 65,000 to 115,000, and eliminate annual per-country limits for employment-based green cards. Start-Up Act: A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate in January 2015 (three prior versions had been introduced) that proposed creating an entrepreneurs’ visa for immigrants and a STEM visa for U.S.-educated workers with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, and eliminating per-country caps on employment-based immigration visas. Secure Our Borders First Act: A Republican bill that threatens penalties against senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials whose departments fail to intercept a targeted number of crossings. The proposal would allow the Border Patrol to operate on all federal lands, provide funding for the National Guard to participate in securing the border, and authorize expanded use of surveillance drones along the border.
  • Obama's immigration announcement emphasized his administration's efforts to secure the U.S. border, and in FY 2014, nearly twenty thousand U.S. Border Patrol agents (PDF) operated along the southwestern border—the largest deployment in U.S. history.
Benjamin McKeown

The Quinoa Quarrel - Food and Environment Reporting Network - 0 views

thefern.org/...quinoa-quarrel

quinoa food food security

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • But at same time, what’s happening to Bolivian potato farmers? They have cheap industrial potatoes dumped into their market, so they can’t compete. They can’t make a living. They have to work in mines or migrate to cities. ”
  • to import useful qualities from the wild varieties, such as heat tolerance and pest resistance.
  • Of course, seeds from Bolivia and other Andean nations would offer a more easily accessible source of genetic diversity—but they’re not available.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Must the whole world “start paying the Iranians a premium for every bushel of wheat,” he asks, “because their Iranian ancestors were the ones that domesticated it?”
  • “If you ask for one crop that can save the world and address climate change, nutrition, all these things—the answer is quinoa. There’s no doubt about it.”
  • “When we’re talking about people who die every day because they don’t have enough to eat, then I think that sharing is a must.”
  • While the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a handful of governments around the world hold small, freely shared collections, most varities of quinoa are off-limits. Who is to blame? It’s not the usual suspect— some multinational corporation with a full portfolio of patents and evil intentions. This time, the germplasm is being withheld by the Andean nations themselves.
  • Jellen pictured quinoa granola bars “in every Walmart in America.” But there was no way to meet this demand as long as the Andean nations refused to facilitate production outside their borders while lacking the infrastructure to supply additional demand themselves.
  • she has finally adapted the plant well enough to be able to provide farmers with seed later this year.
  • “Quinoa has been in a nursery kind of environment,” he explains. “Now it’s about to go out into the urban jungle, so to speak. It’s about to land in Times Square, and it’s going to have to fend for itself.”
  • “To think we can take a couple of Chilean quinoa strains and grow them in Iowa—it just doesn’t work that way,” Jellen tells me. “There’s always a disease right around the corner, and the big game in plant breeding is to be one step ahead of that.”
  • which is why Jellen favors the “free and fair” exchange of germplasm. He will gladly share his genetic material with any interested parties—Americans, Moroccans, Bolivians. “I’d give that seed to Monsanto if they wanted to use it.”
  • For decades, Bolivia did share its quinoa germplasm.
  • To make a hybrid, one plant is used to fertilize another. In the case of corn, which naturally cross-pollinates with its neighbors, this is easy. But where corn is promiscuous, quinoa is practically abstinent, what plant breeders call a “selfer”: the female part of the plant is fertilized almost exclusively by the male part of the same plant. In order for the two plants to be mated, then, the “female” must first be emasculated by the removal of its male reproductive organs. Because quinoa flowers are tiny and numerous, this is extremely difficult work.
  • hybrid quinoa,
  • Farmers in Bolivia were furious. The researchers had found the cytoplasm in plants they were growing in Colorado, but their seed had originated on the Altiplano.
  • “all the countries of the world not to recognize this patent because the male sterile plant, the knowledge and maintenance of its genetic diversity, is the property of the indigenous peoples of the Andes.” Read: quinoa belongs to us.
  • If the cytoplasm identified by Ward and Johnson allowed the efficient creation of hybrids, wouldn’t that serve as an incentive for seed companies to invest in improving quinoa? And wouldn’t the primary beneficiaries of that investment be the quinoa farmers themselves?
  • This thinking reflects the modern mind-set of American plant breeding. Until the 1980s, improving crops was a mostly public endeavor; in the United States, it was underwritten by tax-payers. But as public involvement with agriculture waned and intellectual-property rights began to generate much greater profits for seed companies, plant breeding became largely privatized. Today it is ownership, in the form of patents and licensing agreements, that makes the wheels of progress turn.
  • hey see intellectual-property rights as reasonable arrangements that allow those in the plant-breeding industry to recoup the often enormous sums they invest in research and development.
  • General Mills has declined to support the crop’s development until there’s sufficient supply for a cereal line.
  • Maughan has approached his former employers at Monsanto, making personal appeals for research support, but they are not interested. Even with its star on the rise, quinoa is still too small to be a good investment.
  • For instance, they have identified crucial genes that make possible quinoa’s extraordinary tolerance of salt. If that mechanism could be engineered into corn, it could revolutionize food production around the world. The same goes for quinoa’s ability to withstand drought. These innovations could be invaluable to global food security. They could also be stupendously profitable— and almost certainly patentable.
  • cytoplasm had proved of no commercial value.
  • No one I spoke with in Bolivia denied that poor communities around the world could benefit from quinoa. But once the germplasm is shared, there’s no way to ensure that it won’t be made into something that’s patented.
  • he Bolivians needed to own quinoa so that somebody else couldn’t.
  • Even state ownership, meant to protect a crop like quinoa from corporate predation, tends to work against the larger goal of promoting genetic diversity. Take Bolivia’s genetic-conservation program. In a shift mandated by the 2009 constitution, the government nationalized the quinoa gene bank, which had been overseen by PROINPA for more than ten years. Government supporters argue that a public entity is more likely to be a democratic custodian of those resources than is a private organization—especially one that accepts foreign funding. But researchers in Bolivia and around the world question the government’s ability to safe-guard the seeds.
  • “Quinoa doesn’t belong to the Bolivian government or to corporations,” he told me. “Any food, any seeds, they are very sacred—they are for serving humanity. And if you don’t have their diversity stored in other places, you are in trouble. Be
Benjamin McKeown

Are eco-friendly initiatives pointless unless we tackle overpopulation? | Life and styl... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nment-eco-friendly-initiatives

population malthus resources

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 26 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • carrying capacity
  • His answer? “If you want to live like North Americans, 200 million.”
  • Determining some sort of final number that the human race can comfortably survive at is virtually impossible without considering the differing way we consume resources. Each American single-handedly produces the same amount of carbon emissions as 20 people from India, 30 from Pakistan or 250 from Ethiopia.
  • Benjamin McKeown on 26 Jan 16
     
    "ca"
Benjamin McKeown

Last of the Amazon - National Geographic Magazine - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...wallace-text

HL uncontacted amazon

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Mar 16 - Cached
  • Brazil’s dilemma: Allow widespread—and profitable—destruction of the rain forest to continue, or intensify conservation efforts.
  • The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards.
  • n the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land. In this Wild West frontier of guns, chain saws, and bulldozers, government agents are often corrupt and ineffective—or ill-equipped and outmatched. Now, industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • All of it starts with a road. Except
  • nearly every road in the Amazon is unauthorized. There are more than 105,000 miles of these roads, most made illegally by loggers to reach mahogany and other hardwoods for the lucrative export market.
  • In Brazil, the events set in motion by logging are almost always more destructive than the logging itself.
  • squatters, speculators, ranchers, farmers, and, invariably, hired gunmen.
  • . Land thievery is committed through corruption, strong-arm tactics, and fraudulent titles and is so widespread that Brazilians have a name for it: grilagem,
  • landless squatters moved in from adjacent lots, working plots whose ownership the government failed to resolve. That has fueled a bloody showdown pitting the powerful absentee elites who raze forest for agribusiness against family farmers who clear small patches for crops but still depend on intact forest around them for survival.
  • The first model was implanted during the military dictatorship, based on timber extraction and cattle. It’s predatory because it causes death, it’s not renewable, and it devastates the forest.” The alternative model, preached by Stang, is what Pontes calls social environmentalism. The first concentrates wealth, the second calls for its dispersion in small-scale agroforestry collectives.
  • Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined
  • To Maggi, deforestation is an overblown issue, a “phobia” that plagues people who can’t grasp the enormity of the Amazon. “All of Europe could fit inside the Amazon,” he says, “and we’d still have room for two Englands.”
  • “Look around,” he said, “you won’t find a single scrap of plastic here.” Motioning to a barnlike structure that stored herbicides and pesticides, he said, “We keep all our agrotoxins properly ventilated until use.” In a steady rain, our vehicle fishtailing in the mud, we approached a denuded gully straddling a narrow stream; a closer look revealed hundreds of saplings. “When we bought this property,” Maggi said, “this riverbank was totally stripped. Now we’re regenerating the area.”
  • The land here is very poor. If you don’t take the right corrective measures, you couldn’t produce anything. It’s not true that soy degrades the soil. On the contrary, it puts into the soil what naturally isn’t there. Afterward, you can grow anything you want.” R
  • searchers agree that proper management of soy fields can increase soil productivity. But in reality, no one knows for sure how long the thin, highly acidic Amazon soils can be propped up, raising the possibility of an eventual two-headed catastrophe:
  • shiny new silos belonging to ADM, Bunge, and Cargill—all American multinationals.
  • azilians are not the only people profiting from soybeans. Along the 500-mile paved stretch of BR-16
  • between Cuiabá and Guarantã do Norte, there are no fewer than five John Deere dealerships. And at harvest time, fleets of the trademark green-and-yellow combines rumble across the fields flanking the highway, pouring rivers of golden soy into open-bed trucks bound f
  • The new district adds to an expanded mosaic of parks, reserves, and conservation units that, together with indigenous territories, forms the bulwark of defense against the expansion of the frontier in the central Amazon. These measures may be paying off. Deforestation rates fell more than 30 percent in 2005, and preliminary numbers for 2006 are also down. Indian lands in the Xingu watershed are proving an especially effective barrier. There, militant Kayapó and Panará warriors armed with clubs and shotguns patrol their borders using satellite images furnished by international NGOs to pinpoint illegal clearing. As Stephan Schwartzman puts it: “Where Indian land begins is where deforestation ends.” But Brazil’s measures to protect the Amazon must be weighed ag
  • These include plans to build seven dams on the environmentally sensitive Xingu and Madeira Rivers,
  • he dams will power aluminum smelters, and shipping channels will facilitate river transport of exports to Chinese markets.
  • s well as roads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and large-scale mining and industrial projects.
  • The dams will also flood millions of acres of forest, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases, destroying biodiversity, and forcing indigenous communities to flee ancestral lands.
  • Water cycling
  • carbon sequestering
  • maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life.
  • It’s far more profitable to cut it down for grazing and farming than to leave it standing. “Tropical deforestation is a classic example of market failure,”
  • “It’s urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide.”
  • Last summer, Cargill and Brazil’s other big soy traders agreed to a two-year moratorium on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon. The agreement is sending a signal to soy producers that the environmental impact of their operations is increasingly important in the world marketplace.
Benjamin McKeown

The Brussels attack is giving way to a terrible isolationist sentiment. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...le_isolationist_sentiment.html

anti-globalization HL nationalism

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • nstead of calling for solidarity against a common threat, a spokesman for the anti-European U.K. Independence Party declared that the open borders of Europe “are a threat to our security,” even though the U.K. is not part of Europe’s Schengen border treaty.  A columnist for the Daily Telegraph declared Brussels the “jihadist capital of Europe,” and mocked those who call for staying in the EU on the grounds of safety. Meanwhile, American news organizations fell over themselves to get instant reactions from Donald Trump, who had just told the Washington Post that he didn’t see the point of NATO, which “is costing us a fortune.” He didn’t disappoint: “[W]e have to be very careful and very vigilant as to who we allow in this country.”
  • “my country will be safer” if it pulls out of its international alliances is growing.
  • the illogical idea
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Every terrorist attack on U.K. soil in recent memory was carried out by British (or Irish) citizens and not foreigners; nuclear deterrence requires allies and coordinated responses; barbed wire cannot stop a cyberattack. The small-minded, short-sighted isolationists ignore reason and logic, instead substituting panic and fear.
  • Of course there are reasons for this change: German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to apparently “invite” Syrian immigrants into Europe last summer has left many Europeans feeling queasy and out of control.
  • The only way to fight jihadism is through our existing military, economic, and political alliances
  • And the only way to ensure that we have international support in the future, when a tragedy takes place on our soil—and it will—is to offer our support for a tragedy unfolding on allied soil right now. 
Benjamin McKeown

The effects of subsidies | Global Subsidies Initiative - 0 views

www.iisd.org/...effects-subsidies

subsidies resources

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • the benefits to society of that money, if it had been spent otherwise, or left in the pockets of taxpayers, might have been even greater.
  • heory shows that these depend on a number of factors, among which are the responsiveness of producers and consumers to changes in prices (what economists call the own-price elasticities of supply and demand), the form of the subsidy, the conditions attached to it, and how the subsidy interacts with other policies.
  • such subsidies tend to divert resources from more productive to less productive uses, thus reducing economic efficiency.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Those who take a more benign view argue that subsidies can serve redistributive goals, or can help to correct market failures. But, as the public-finance economist Ronald Gerritse once warned, subsides defended on such grounds "may have externalities that we did not bargain for." Indeed it is such second-order effects that have come under attack by environmental economists in recent years.
  • any subsidies are defended as benefiting disadvantaged groups, or groups the politicians like to make us believe are disadvantaged.
  • tend to favour larger producing units. Recently, for example, the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit organization, counted up all the direct payments made by the U.S. Government to farmers between 1994 and 2005 and found that ten percent of subsidy recipients collected 73 percent of all subsidies, amounting to $120.5 billion Analyses of agricultural support programmes in other countries appear to lend credence to the 80:20 rule - the impression that 80% of support goes to 20% of the beneficiaries.
  • environmentally harmful subsidies" they generally mean subsidies that support production, transport or consumption that ends up damaging the environment. The environmental consequences of subsidies to extractive industries are closely linked to the activity being subsidized, like fishing or logging.
  • Subsidies to promote offshore fishing are a commonly cited example of environmentally harmful subsidies, with support that increases fishing capacity (i.e., subsidies toward constructing new boats) linked to the depletion of important fishery stocks. In other industries, subsidies that promote consumption or production have led to higher volumes of waste or emissions. For example, irrigation subsidies often encourage crops that are farmed intensively, which in turn leads to higher levels of fertilizer use than would occur otherwise. Moreover, irrigation subsidies can lead to the under pricing of irrigated water, which in turn fosters the overuse and inefficient use of water. While many subsidies have unintended negative consequences on the environment, well designed subsidies can be beneficial when they work to mitigate an environmental problem. In the context of fisheries, for instance, these would include subsidies to management programs that help ensure that fisheries resources are appropriately managed and that regulations are enforced, or to research and development (R&D) designed to promote less environmentally destructive forms of fish catching and processing.    
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