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Javier E

Opinion | I'm What's Wrong With the Humanities - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...umanities-internet-novels.html

humanities university culture crisis history connection separation

shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the English department. She was one of several academics who described, in Heller’s phrase, an “orientation toward the present” among contemporary college students so powerful that they “lost their bearings in the past.”
  • “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” she told him, “I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.”
  • I flatter myself that I can mostly follow the sentence structure in these books, but in every other way I am the reader described by Claybaugh, too attached to the distracting present to enter fully the complex language of the past.
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  • let’s shift from self-flagellation to prescription
  • The essence of the humanities’ failure, over the last generation but especially in the internet era, 0c 0cis a refusal to accept that a similar kind of separation is necessary for what the guardians of the liberal arts are trying to preserve.
  • The quest, understandably enough, has always been to sustain relevance and connection — to politics, to professional life, to whatever trends appear at the cutting edge of fashion, to the idea of progress
  • But that quest can end only in self-destruction when the thing to which you’re trying so desperately to bind yourself (the culture and spirit of the smartphone-era internet, especially) is actually devouring all the habits of mind that are required for your own discipline’s survival. You simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture; you have to separate
  • “The humanities sealed their own fate,” the Temple University professor Jacob Shell tweeted in response to the Heller article, “when they refused to adjust to playing the needed role of intellectual ‘rightist’ critique of soc science, technocracy.”
  • a more modest version of Shell’s argument would be just that the humanities need to be proudly reactionary in some way, to push consciously against the digital order in some fashion, to self-consciously separate and make a virtue of that separation.
  • at the very least it would involve embracing an identity as the modern multiversity’s internal exiles — refusing any resentment of lavishly funded STEM buildings because that funding is corruption and your own calling is more esoteric and monastic, declining any claim to political relevance because what you’re offering is above and before the practical business of the world
  • It would mean banishing every token of the digital age from classrooms and libraries, shutting out the internet, offering your work much more as an initiation into mysteries, a plunge into the very depths. It would mean cultivating a set of skills even less immediately useful to technocratic professional life than reading a dense 19th-century text — memorization and recitation, to your classmates if possible
cartergramiak

Opinion | Let's Cut Our Ridiculous Defense Budget - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-defense-budget.html

politics Culture history biden

shared by cartergramiak on 07 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden loves spending money. Last month, he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to stimulate the economy. Now he’s pushing the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He vows to follow that with the American Families Plan to improve health care, child care and education, which could cost billions or trillions more.
  • The more money Mr. Biden tries to spend, the more loudly critics ask where he’s getting it. He borrowed the funds for the stimulus. He wants corporations to pay for the infrastructure plan. With every legislative battle, finding the money grows harder. All of which raises a question: Will Mr. Biden try to cut defense?
  • It’s not as if there aren’t places to cut. In 2016, Bob Woodward and Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post disclosed that, according to an internal study, the Defense Department could save $125 billion over five years simply by trimming its distended bureaucracy. The department, the study found, employed close to 200,000 people in property management alone. After a summary of the report became public, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Whitlock noted, the Pentagon “imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings.” It remains the only federal agency that has never passed an audit.
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  • China, however, spends less than one-third as much on defense as the United States does and has fewer than one-tenth as many nuclear weapons. China’s military could indeed be a match for the United States in conflicts near China’s shores, but globally, China poses a far greater economic challenge. To meet it, the United States must invest enormously in education and emerging technologies — the very investments that military spending will sooner or later crowd out. The two superpowers also compete ideologically, and the United States gravely undermines the appeal of its democratic system when, amid a pandemic, the dictatorship in China proves better able to keep its citizens alive.
  • None of this means that Mr. Biden and his advisers aren’t doing what they believe is best for the country. But their beliefs about what’s best for the country have evolved in a Beltway ecosystem in which the military-industrial complex wields enormous power.
Javier E

In a Volatile Climate on Campus, Professors Teach on Tenterhooks - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...hing-amid-partisan-divide.html

campus discussion censorship free speech Culture

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Today’s students bring a multiplicity of personal identities to campus — their sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, religion, political leanings — and they want to see that reflected in course content. The values in readings, lectures and even conversations are open to questioning. All good — that’s what college is supposed to be about — except that now the safety screen around the examination of ideas has been pulled away. Higher education is increasingly partisan, and professors must manage these disconnected ideologies, which are sometimes between themselves and their students.
  • With so many professors identifying as liberal or far left (60 percent, according to a U.C.L.A. poll last year), it’s not surprising that the right distrusts the profession. In a Pew Research Center survey released in September, respondents indicated on a thermometer scale how they felt about professors. Democrats rated them a warm 71 degrees, Republicans a chilly 46 degrees.
  • It’s a charged climate and professors know it. The culture wars playing out in the classroom have made them fearful of being targeted.
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  • An English professor at Northern Arizona, Anne Scott, did end up on Fox News. After she deducted one point from a first-year student’s paper last spring for using “mankind” instead of “humankind” — she said she had told the class that “inclusive” vocabulary is required — the student contacted the website Campus Reform. She received more than 400 emails, rude voice mail messages and dropped calls. This semester, when the student’s name appeared on the wait-list for a course she was teaching, Dr. Scott said, “I was terrified.”
  • These clashes are affecting curriculum. After meeting with a professor to plan a spring course on fascism and anti-fascism, “we decided it was probably not worth it,” said Lori Poloni-Staudinger, head of the department of politics and international affairs, who has also received threats. The class won’t be offered. “People are more guarded,” she said. “They are watching what they say.”
  • Tools she shares are new to professors focused on conveying content. On the first day, she urges instructors to work with students to create ground rules for class discussions, including what to do when talk gets heated. She shares tricks like asking students, before peers pounce, to rephrase or repeat a provocative utterance (often it’s less harsh). If someone suggests that people who ride busses are poor, instead of calling him “classist,” she said, a teacher could reframe: “Let’s talk about the labels that come up when we talk about social class.”
  • It’s also important to openly discuss cultural identity with students, rather than make assumptions. “You can be from the same background and be very different,” she said. “Or you can be from very different backgrounds and think very similarly.” Digging below the surface is critical because students “are asking for more opportunity to be complicated individuals.”
  • Professors who once skipped pre-semester faculty workshops now want to know “how to model productive disagreement,”
  • In “Conflict in the Classroom,” a sketch recently staged at Skidmore College, a statistics “class” discusses correlation and causation. The “professor” posits an example: the link between infant mortality and maternal income. The “students” raise questions that have nothing to do with math. “It becomes a debate about the variables,” said Sara Armstrong, the artistic director: One student wonders why the example doesn’t consider household income, and defines a household as man and woman. Another objects. The first accuses the other of attacking. The instructor interjects, “I don’t think this is appropriate for this class. We really can’t talk about this.” The upset student insists, “This is a problem! We have to talk about this!” A student records on his phone.
  • In the post-performance discussion, the faculty members backtrack: What could the instructor have done ahead of time to prevent problems? What could the instructor do in the moment? And afterward? Approaches involve addressing not just what is taught, but how and why. The professor might explain why he chose the case study, pause the discussion, or email the class, acknowledging the disruption and, perhaps, apologizing.
yehbru

On International Women's Day, Biden Signs Gender Equity Measures : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...council-within-the-white-house

US Politics Biden Gender Equity Council

shared by yehbru on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden marked International Women's Day on Monday by signing two executive orders geared toward promoting gender equity, both in the United States and around the world.
  • "In our nation, as in all nations, women have fought for justice, shattered barriers, built and sustained economies, carried communities through times of crisis, and served with dignity and resolve. Too often, they have done so while being denied the freedom, full participation, and equal opportunity all women are due."
  • "We intend to address all sorts of discrimination and fight for equal rights for people, whether that's LGBTQ+ people, women, girls, men."
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  • The Council's staff will include a special assistant to the president to focus specifically on "policies to advance equity for Black, indigenous and Latina women and girls of color," Klein said
  • Areas of long-term focus for the Council, Reynoso said, will include "increasing economic security and opportunity by addressing the structural barriers to women's participation in the labor force; decreasing wage and wealth gaps; and addressing the caregiving needs of American families and supporting care workers."
  • The second executive order the president signed Monday is directed at the Department of Education, and seems expressly aimed at reversing a controversial rule on campus sexual assault and harassment that was issued last year by then-President Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
  • "[guarantee] an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex, including discrimination in the form of sexual harassment, which encompasses sexual violence, and including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity."
Javier E

Opinion | We've Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders's Socialism - Th... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bernie-sanders-socialism.html

socialism us idealism politics history culture progressive

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Sanders fits into a strain of American socialism that has largely eschewed ideology, made few references to Karl Marx, and been more likely to talk about fairness and values than about economic theory.
  • He does not sound like the doctrinaire immigrant socialists of the 19th century, for example. He is somewhat closer to Norman Thomas and the socialists of the 1930s or Eugene Debs and the socialism of the early 20th century. But both men headed a socialist party, which Mr. Sanders does not
  • The socialists Mr. Sanders most resembles were Gilded Age intellectuals, reformers, union members and ordinary citizens who self-labeled as socialist.
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  • the leading voices were, like Mr. Sanders, native-born and middle-class advocates of reform within the Democratic and Republican parties, whose bosses they often criticized.
  • Mr. Sanders sounds like these Gilded Age socialists in part because the issues of their time were similar to ours — immigration, environmental deterioration, declining well-being and growing inequality in a period of rapid technological and economic change
  • The Gilded Age socialists admitted what their opponents often did not: Americans did not all share common values.
  • Mr. Sanders’s actual similarity to 19th-century socialists makes him seem unthreatening, even avuncular. He is infinitely closer to William Dean Howells, the 19th-to 20th-century novelist who for a while proclaimed himself a socialist, than to Joseph Stalin.
  • Howells’s political evolution makes socialism’s American roots clear. Howells wrote campaign biographies for Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes, and remained close friends with John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Even when Howells called himself a socialist in the late 1880s, he continued to vote Republican, although he thought the party was corrupted.
  • Howells regarded socialism as “not a positive but a comparative thing … Every citizen of a civilized State is a socialist.”
  • If anyone believed “that the postal department, the public schools, the mental hospitals, the almshouse are good things; and that when a railroad management has muddled away in hopeless ruin the money of all who trusted it, a Railroad Receiver is a good thing,” then that person embraced socialism.
  • Like Howells, Bernie Sanders embraces a series of modest changes. Mr. Sanders often rightly seems bewildered that free public college education — once the norm in California — and the universal health care of Canada and Europe can seem to be radical solutions to American problems.
  • Radicals — anarchists, Communists and other Marxists — have at critical moments influenced America’s development, often for the better, and most of them have despised American socialists as insufficiently revolutionary, ideologically incoherent, hopelessly sentimental and utterly enmeshed in existing society.
  • They were right — which was why American socialists have been far more influential than their radical critics. Socialists appealed to sensibility, values and justice, not ideologies. They put their hope in the benevolence and fairness of the mass of Americans —­ what Howells called the sufficiency of the common — rather than in elites.
ethanshilling

White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-vaccine-evangelicals.html

US vaccination religion

shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.
  • Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”
  • Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”
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  • No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white churches.
  • “If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.
  • There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.
  • Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination.
  • Dr. Simone Gold, a prominent Covid-19 skeptic who was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, told an evangelical congregation in Florida that they were in danger of being “coerced into taking an experimental biological agent.”
  • “Go ahead and throw us in the lions’ den, go ahead and throw us in the furnace,” she said, referring to two biblical stories in which God’s people miraculously survive persecution after refusing to submit to temporal powers.
  • “Fear is the motivating power behind all of this, and fear is the opposite of who God is,” said Teresa Beukers, who travels throughout California in a motor home. “I violently oppose fear.”
  • Some evangelicals believe that any Covid restrictions — including mask mandates and restrictions on in-person church worship — constitute oppression.
  • The vaccines do not include fetal tissue, and no additional abortions are required to manufacture them. Still, the kernel of a connection has metastasized online into false rumors about human remains or fetal DNA being an ingredient in the vaccines.
  • White evangelicals who do not plan to get vaccinated sometimes say they see no need, because they do not feel at risk. Rates of Covid-19 death have been about twice as high for Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans as for white Americans.
  • There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci are not going to be able to persuade evangelicals, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School who is leading an outreach project to educate evangelicals about the vaccine.
  • Mr. Rainey helped his own Southern Baptist congregation get ahead of false information by publicly interviewing medical experts — a retired colonel specializing in infectious disease, a church member who is a Walter Reed logistics management analyst, and a church elder who is a nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
  • “It is necessary for pastors to instruct their people that we don’t always have to be adversaries with the culture around us,” he said. “We believe Jesus died for those people, so why in the world would we see them as adversaries?”
clairemann

Columbia Settles a Complicated Sexual Assault Case - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...columbia-sexual-assault.html

Culture policy economics Politics US trump

shared by clairemann on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It turned into a federal lawsuit with unusually detailed documentation.
  • And now it has ended in a settlement that underscores the contentiousness of the national debate over campus sexual misconduct cases
  • Columbia has restored the diploma of Ben Feibleman, whom a three-member university panel had found responsible for sexually assaulting a female classmate. It has also agreed to pay him an undisclosed cash award and to send a statement to prospective employers describing him as an alumnus in good standing, Mr. Feibleman’s lawyer and a spokesman for the university said.
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  • whose campus sexual assault policies broadly favored believing the accusers, who are usually women.
  • It paints a picture of a campus culture in which students have become hyper-aware of the rules of academic sexual misconduct and worry about how every intimate encounter is going to look down the road.
  • Mr. Feibleman willingly sued under his own name, rather than a pseudonym, and because he had made a 30-minute audiotape of the sexual encounter. That recording became a centerpiece of his defense.
  • In the background was the presidential campaign, during which a tape surfaced of Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate for president, boasting about forcing himself on women.
  • Columbia issued its verdict against Mr. Feibleman in June 2017, declining to give him his diploma. He filed a federal suit against the university in May 2019. That suit was settled after the Trump administration had adopted a regulation to give more due process protections to the accused, generally men, effective in August.
  • But a growing movement of men’s rights activists said the guidance went too far because it did not give those accused a chance to defend themselves through basic rights like cross-examination.
  • “While Columbia’s disciplinary findings remain unchanged, the parties have agreed to a confidential monetary settlement, and Mr. Feibleman has additionally been awarded the master of science degree in journalism for which he satisfied all requirements in 2017,”
  • Ms. Lau asserted that people had to “read between the lines” to understand the full impact of the settlement. “You don’t pay somebody anything or award them a diploma if you think they are a rapist,” she said.
  • “Despite the aggressive and harrowing attempts to shame her through the court system, she has no regrets about coming forward with her complaint of sexual assault,” the woman’s lawyer, Iliana Konidaris, said.
  • “Do you own this for the rest of your life, but make sure that the truth is out there?” he asked, “Or do you keep this some secret and hope or just wait, living looking over your shoulder, waiting for someone to do a career assassination at any given point?”
  • Mr. Feibleman sees her daredevil behavior as evidence that she was in control of her faculties; Columbia saw it as evidence that she was intoxicated, according to court papers.They ended up in her bedroom, where, at 1:37 a.m., Mr. Feibleman pressed the record button on his cellphone. (He also chronicled part of the evening, including on the water tower, on his Nikon D750 camera.)
  • “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No, wait. No. What’s going on?”
clairemann

White House Weighs Executive Orders on Gun Control - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-control-executive-orders.html

history US Politics policy gun control

shared by clairemann on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • With Congress unlikely to move quickly on gun legislation, the White House is pressing ahead with plans for a series of executive orders that President Biden expects to roll out in the coming weeks as a way of keeping up pressure on the issue.
  • A day after Mr. Biden called on the Senate to pass a ban on assault weapons and strengthen background checks in response to a pair of mass shootings in the past week that left 18 people dead, White House officials said on Wednesday that while moving legislation on gun safety remained a goal, it would take time, given the vehement opposition from Republicans.
  • For now, administration officials have been reaching out to Democrats in the Senate to consult with them about three executive actions.
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  • Aware that any executive actions on guns will face legal challenges, the White House Counsel’s Office has also been vetting those actions to make sure they can withstand judicial review, officials said.
  • “If there’s one thing we learned in this past year is inaction cost lives,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun violence prevention organization.
  • But Mr. Biden has acknowledged that he does not know what legislation might be possible, even after the recent shootings in Atlanta and Boulder.
  • Since the transition, Biden administration officials have met regularly with Mr. Feinblatt and other proponents of gun control to talk about what actions are possible that do not need cooperation from Congress.
  • They have also discussed whether to declare gun violence a public health emergency — a move that would free up more funding that could be used to support community gun violence programs and enforcement of current laws.
  • Designating gun violence as a public health crisis, Ms. Brown said, would make more money available that would allow for more regular inspections.
  • For now, one of the administration’s biggest pushes has been on classifying “ghost guns,” as firearms. Such a classification would require them to be serialized and subject to background checks.
  • During the campaign, Mr. Biden promised to create a $900 million, eight-year initiative to fund evidence-based interventions in 40 cities across the country.
  • Although there are no plans for any imminent legislative push on guns from a White House that is dealing with crises on multiple fronts, Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have continued to describe legislative action as an imperative.
  • “It is time for Congress to act and stop with the false choices,” she said. “This is not about getting rid of the Second Amendment. It’s simply about saying we need reasonable gun safety laws. There is no reason why we have assault weapons on the streets of a civil society. They are weapons of war. They are designed to kill a lot of people quickly.”
  • One would classify as firearms so-called ghost guns — kits that allow a gun to be assembled from pieces. Another would fund community violence intervention programs, and the third would strengthen the background checks system, according to congressional aides familiar with the conversations.
  • There’s current discussions and analysis internally of what steps can be taken — that has been ongoing for several weeks, even before these two recent tragedies that, you know, he looks forward to getting an update on and seeing what can be moved forward on that front as well. No one is talking about overturning or changing the Second Amendment. What our focus is on is putting in place common-sense measures that will make our communities safer, make families safer, make kids safer. The majority of the American public supports background checks. The majority of the American public does not believe that anyone needs to have an assault weapon.
  • “This isn’t about next week, it’s not about next month, it has to be about today. It has to be immediate.”
  • The ideas they have discussed include the Federal Trade Commission evaluating gun ads for safety claims that are false or misleading, the Education Department promoting interventions that prevent students from gaining access to firearms and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention being required to provide reliable data tracking gunshot injuries.
katherineharron

Has the world learned the lessons of the Holocaust? I don't think so. - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The rise of the far right in Europe has brought back to the surface fears that many had hoped were gone forever.
  • There is something chilling about the way in which some countries and politicians have treated people fleeing war and persecution.
  • Anti-Semitism has a way of changing over time. It mutates like no other hatred and is camouflaged in so many ways.
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  • At first it was religious, then social, then it was racial and political. Whatever problems would arise, it was always the Jews that were to blame.
  • We are approaching a seminal time. Not only is the entire face of European politics changing. But we are coming to a point where many survivors of the Holocaust are departing this Earth.
  • People have to be informed of what happened. They need to be educated. There can be no room for ignorance. After all, once the survivors have passed, what will be left?
  • It has been a lifelong effort to recover from what happened at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, but I will keep telling my story.
  • Many of these myths about Jews have existed for so long, it will take decades, maybe centuries, for that to disappear.
  • For us to eradicate anti-Semitism, it will take all of us who care, all of us who want our children and everybody's children to live in a peaceful and safe society, to stand up and unite against this ancient hatred.
yehbru

When Black people are wary of vaccine, it's important to listen and understand why (opi... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics Vaccine Covid19 Black Americans Tuskegee Syphilis Study

shared by yehbru on 18 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • But many Black Americans have expressed reluctance to take the vaccine, a wariness some attribute to the enduring legacy of the egregious Tuskegee syphilis study.
  • Both expose the depth of structural discrimination in the United States. Both remind us to listen and hear patients when they express distrust or reluctance about medical treatment.
  • It recruited Black men in Macon County, Alabama, who had already contracted syphilis. The men were told they would be treated for syphilis, but the actual purpose of the study was to learn whether untreated syphilis progressed differently in Black people compared with White people.
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  • The federal government never intended to provide treatment, and though penicillin became widely available in 1943, the men were not treated. At least 28 and perhaps up to 100 men died from syphilis or its complications by the time the study was halted in 1972. Hundreds went on to infect their wives, some of whom then transmitted the disease to their children.
  • Second, the federal government knowingly withheld treatment for 40 years from the same citizens it was supposed to protect.
  • There have been numerous reports of Black people being turned away at emergency departments, sent home without having been examined or treated and later dying of the virus
  • In an August essay about Covid-19 treatment written for the California Health Care Foundation, Dr. Vanessa Grubbs, a nephrologist, noted, "No available data suggest such implicit bias is happening on a large scale and resulting in worse outcomes. But the lack of data is less a sign that the problem does not exist than a reflection of what data we choose not to gather."
  • First, the study had been developed to test the repulsive idea that Black people are biologically different than White people. This idea -- suggesting Black people are somehow less than human -- has powerful echoes in medical training and practice today.
  • We live in a country organized around structural racism. This means Black Americans are less likely to receive the health care we deserve. We are more likely to live in neighborhoods with poor air quality and fewer outlets to purchase healthy food. We are more likely to work in low-paying "essential" jobs that put us more at risk for contracting Covid-19.
  • Because the vaccine came to market so quickly, we do not have long-term safety studies, and there are still many unanswered questions.
  • One of the lasting lessons of Tuskegee is that denying medical care is among the biggest breaches of trust between citizens and their governments. We must ensure that marginalized groups like Black, Indigenous and people of color, immigrants, disabled people and people in prison can receive this vaccine. We must also ensure people are allowed to ask questions to make informed and uncoerced decisions about their health care.
mattrenz16

President Biden News: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...joe-biden-news

shared by mattrenz16 on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden, targeting Trump-era policies that established rules for how college campuses investigate sexual violence, will on Monday order the Department of Education to reassess this and other regulations issued under Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools.
  • The review will also seek to assess rules that could allow “discrimination on basis of sexual orientation or gender identity,” an official said. In January, the administration retracted its support for a Trump-era lawsuit seeking to block transgender students from participating in girls’ high school sports.
  • Mr. Biden is also expected on Monday to issue an executive order formally establishing the creation of a White House council on gender equity, an effort that was dismantled during the Trump administration.
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  • The council will be co-led by Julissa Reynoso, chief of staff to Jill Biden, the first lady, and Jennifer Klein, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was first lady. The team will have four other officials, including senior advisers who focus on policies to prevent gender-based violence and on promoting equity for Black, Latina and Indigenous women and girls.
julia rhodes

U.S. Promotes Network to Foil Digital Spying - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rk-to-foil-digital-spying.html

network foil spying nytimes history crisis policy education economic culture

shared by julia rhodes on 21 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A group of academics and computer enthusiasts who took part in the 2011 uprising in Tunisia that overthrew a government deeply invested in digital surveillance have helped their town become a test case for an alternative: a physically separate, local network made up of cleverly programmed antennas scattered about on rooftops.
  • The State Department provided $2.8 million to a team of American hackers, community activists and software geeks to develop the system, called a mesh network, as a way for dissidents abroad to communicate more freely and securely than they can on the open Internet. One target that is sure to start debate is Cuba; the United States Agency for International Development has pledged $4.3 million to create mesh networks there.
  • “There’s so much invasion of privacy on the Internet,” said Michael Holbrook, of Detroit, referring to surveillance by the National Security Agency. “The N.S.A. is all over it,” he added. “Anything that can help to mitigate that policy, I’m all for it.”
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  • “It is in my mind one of the great, unreported ironies of the first Obama administration.”
  • “People are asking us, how do they protect their privacy?” Mr. Meinrath said.
  • Radio Free Asia, a United States government-financed nonprofit, has given $1 million to explore multiple overseas deployments. The countries involved have not been revealed, Mr. Meinrath said, adding, “I can’t talk about specific locations because lives could be at risk.”
  • The mesh software, called Commotion, is a major redesign of systems that have been run for years by experts across Europe, said Mr. Meinrath, who is now director of the New America Foundation’s X-Lab. The idea, he said, was to take the technology out of what he calls “the geekosphere” and make it accessible to the public. (Commotion is available to download free from the project’s website.)
  • Resilience could become the prime argument for mesh networks, with privacy as a bonus, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. That is similar to the original Internet, before it was controlled by corporate hands and scoured by government spies, he said.“It makes mesh more like the Internet than the Internet,” he said.
Javier E

'A presidency of one': Key federal agencies increasingly compelled to benefit Trump - T... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-a331-2df12d56a80b_story.html

trump presidency

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • “I’m not sure there are many, if any, left who view as their responsibility trying to help educate, moderate, enlighten and persuade — or even advise in many cases,” the former senior official said. “There’s a new ethos: This is a presidency of one.”
  • “It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged,” this official added. “He continues to go further and further and further, and now I don’t think there’s anybody telling him, ‘No.’ 
  • Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser, said the president has long wanted to be the sole driver of his message, with everyone else playing supporting roles
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “He wants to be the one adjusting and taking the lead on where it goes, not adjusting to others,” Nunberg said. “It goes back to how he navigated network TV, the tabloids and business publicity. That’s his playbook.
  • Trump’s moves represent a fundamental reorientation of American democracy, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of “On Tyranny
  • “Rather than having the boring system we take for granted, where you have laws based on facts, instead you have a personality who makes up his own reality,” Snyder said. “At first, that reality is just confusing and seems to gum up the works, but after a while, the leader starts to draw people into that reality by making them defend it or making them prove it. This is what’s happening here.
  • The implicit day-to-day charge for many Trump advisers is simple, according to aides and other officials familiar with the president’s Cabinet and West Wing staff: Figure out how to handle or even polish Trump’s whims and statements, but do not have any illusion that you can temper his relentless personality, heavy consumption of cable news or thirst for political combat.
  • Acquiescence is central to survival. Trump has bonded with aides who take his running complaints about the “deep state” and “fake news” seriously, along with his embrace of people and positions outside of the mainstream
  • Barr’s role in the investigation into the Russia probe’s origins, which is being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut, is extraordinary in part because the probe seeks evidence of misconduct within his own Justice Department to support the conspiracy theory — embraced by Trump and advanced on Fox News — that the Russia inquiry was corrupt and predicated on undermining Trump.
  • Snyder said the investigation Trump sought and Barr is pursuing fits a pattern of behavior in which leaders try to disprove or undermine facts — in this case, the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win — with other investigations.
  • “The idea of investigating the investigation is that you cast doubt on the boring factual staff,” he said. “Even if you don’t win with your adventurous fiction, you also win if your adventurous fiction casts doubt on the boring facts.”
aidenborst

GOP counters Biden's infrastructure plan with $928 billion offer as President's adviser... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US history crisis Culture policy Pandemic GOP Shelley-Moore infrastructure-plan

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Senate Republicans made a $928 billion counteroffer to President Joe Biden's sweeping infrastructure proposal Thursday morning as one of the President's closest advisers rallies allies to embrace the White House's proposals.
  • The group of Senate Republicans negotiating with Biden on infrastructure unveiled their latest infrastructure counter-proposal Thursday morning, just ahead of the latest effort from the President to put the spotlight back on his sweeping economic agenda. The offer falls short of the $1 trillion that Senate Republicans had said Biden was open to during their White House negotiations.
  • The President said Thursday that he plans to meet with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who's leading the Senate GOP's negotiating team, next week about the counteroffer.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "I haven't had a chance yet to go over the details of the counteroffer made by Capito. We're going to meet sometime next week, and we'll see if we can move that, and I'll have more to say about that at the time," Biden told reporters on the tarmac before departing for Cleveland.
  • The GOP's counteroffer is a sign that bipartisan talks will continue, but Republicans and the White House are still far apart on new spending for infrastructure and how to pay for it all. It's unclear how much closer the two sides can get in order to reach a deal ahead of Congress' return on June 7.
  • Biden traveled to Cleveland on Thursday to pitch his economic proposals at a critical moment in the bipartisan negotiations over a potential infrastructure deal.
  • "We've turned the tide on a once-in-a-century pandemic. We turned the tide on a once-in-a-generation economic crisis, and families are beginning to be able to breathe just a little bit easier. We still have work to do, but our future today is as bright and as wide open as it ever has been," Biden said, speaking from Cuyahoga Community College. He continued: "And now we're faced with the question: What kind of economy are we going to build for tomorrow?"
  • In addition to the national vaccination program, Biden touted the sweeping $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief law that delivered economic relief directly to Americans and businesses.
  • Biden pressed for large-scale infrastructure investments, including in research and development, arguing: "We must be number one in the world to lead the world in the 21st century. ... And the starting gun has already gone off -- we can't afford to fall any further behind."
  • "The bottom line is this: The Biden economic plan is working. We've had record job creation. We're seeing record economic growth. We're creating a new paradigm, one that rewards the working people of this nation, not just those at the top," Biden said. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that the White House was "grateful" to Capito for the proposal, which she said "substantially increased the funding level."
  • "At first review, we note several constructive additions to the group's previous proposals, including on roads, bridges and rail," Psaki wrote.
  • Biden, whose most recent proposal was $1.7 trillion, has indicated he'd be open to discussing a $1 trillion plan, senators have told CNN. But the disputes up to this point go far beyond the overall cost, with sharply different views over the scale of any potential compromise proposal and how it would be paid for continuing to serve as major roadblocks.
  • In their offer Thursday, Republicans doubled down that they want to pay for this plan using unspent Covid relief funding, user fees from electric cars and the existing gas tax. But, the White House views unspent Covid relief funds as a nonstarter because they argue much of that money has already been spent. Republicans, meanwhile, still are not budging on making any changes to their 2017 tax bill.
  • "The American Rescue Plan is working exactly as intended -- delivering relief to families, businesses, and communities to bridge our economy to the end of the pandemic and into a strong recovery," she said in a statement, adding, "major provisions of the law for state and local governments, K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and child care providers have been almost entirely allocated. Local governments, schools, and other entities are already budgeting for this year and beyond with these funds."
  • "The American people -- across the political spectrum -- are sending a clear message, the question now is whether Congressional Republicans will listen," Donilon writes.
katherineharron

Donald Trump doesn't seem to want to do his job anymore - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump lost the presidential election 10 days ago. Since then, he's done next to nothing -- at least publicly -- to suggest he plans to continue doing the job in any serious manner through January 20.
  • President Donald Trump lost the presidential election 10 days ago. Since then, he's done next to nothing -- at least publicly -- to suggest he plans to continue doing the job in any serious manner through January 20.
  • it's been two weeks since the President last took any questions from the reporters who cover him.
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  • Trump played golf at his club in Virginia twice this past weekend, which makes 283 days spent at a golf course during his presidency,
  • Trump has used his Twitter feed to push any number of disproven or entirely fact-free conspiracy theories about the election.
  • the Pentagon signaled that Trump was planning to draw down American troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • Trump removed Secretary of Defense Mark Esper shortly after the election and has, since that time, carried out a series of removals at of civilian staff at the Defense department.
  • since losing the election, Trump has effectively given up doing any parts of the job that require either consultation with people outside of his inner circle or interaction with anyone who won't affirm his fantasy that he is actually not only winning the election but will eventually claim a second term.
  • Talks with congressional leaders to arrive at a coronavirus stimulus deal, which were active in the run-up to the election, have gone dormant -- with no signs they will begin again despite the clear need for more money to be pumped into the economy in order to withstand the ongoing effects of Covid-19 on the country.
  • My educated guess is that Trump hates the idea of losing or being termed a loser more than anything. And so, even if he doesn't really like doing most of the job that the American public fired him from, he will fight like hell to keep the stink of losing off of him
  • So Trump will keep fighting. And even after he leaves office, he may well float the idea of running again in 2024. Or even do it!
  • these past two weeks have proven is that Trump cares about the winning (and the losing) much more than the job itself.
anonymous

White House proposes arming teachers, backpedals on raising age to buy guns - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US crisis trump culture policy

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration on Sunday night proposed providing some school personnel with "rigorous" firearms training and backed a bill to improve criminal background checks on gun buyers, but backpedaled on the idea of increasing the minimum age to buy certain firearms -- a policy President Donald Trump had said he would support.
  • The proposals, which come more than three weeks after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, also include a plan to establish a commission chaired by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that will recommend policy and funding proposals for school violence prevention, including possible age restrictions on some firearms purchases. The commission does not have a set timeline of when it will report its findings, although an official said it would be within one year.
  • Trump first floated the idea of arming teachers and school officials after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month -- an idea that was met with immediate criticism.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, also will partner with states and local governments to support a public awareness campaign modeled on the department's "see something, say something" anti-terrorism campaign to encourage the awareness and reporting of suspicious activity, the administration announced.
  • Trump is proposing an expansion and overhaul of mental health programs, including those that help identify and treat those who may be a threat to themselves or others, the administration announced.
  • Trump is also calling for a review of the statutory and regulatory privacy protections to determine if any changes or clarifications are needed to improve coordination between mental health and other health care professionals, school officials, and law enforcement personnel.
  • The commission plans to focus on several areas, including age restrictions for certain firearm purchases; current entertainment rating systems; youth consumption of violent entertainment; best practices for school building and campus security and threat assessment and violence prevention; plans for integration and coordination of federal resources to help prevent and mitigate shootings at schools; and opportunities to improve access to mental health treatment, including through efforts to raise awareness of mental illness and the effectiveness of treatment.
  • While the congressman says the recommendations for congressional actions would be "a small, positive first step," he said he believes they are "insufficient."
ethanshilling

For the Economy, the Present Doesn't Matter. It's All About the Near Future. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...economy-jobs-future.html

US economics pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The economy is at a major inflection point, and the question is whether job creation will accelerate in the months ahead.
  • The new jobs numbers that the Labor Department released Friday morning don’t matter.These numbers can sometimes be unimportant in the sense that any one economic report offers only a partial view of what is going on, and is subject to margins of error and future revisions.
  • The report that 379,000 jobs were added in February and that the unemployment rate edged down to 6.2 percent is good news.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But the economy is still in a deep hole, with nine million fewer jobs than a year ago, or around 12 million shy of where we would be if pre-pandemic job growth had continued over the last year.
  • In normal times, the total employment gains reported Friday would be a blockbuster number. But continuing to add jobs at that pace would still mean a two-year grind back to pre-pandemic employment levels.
  • One worrisome sign in the new employment numbers: State and local governments appear to be cutting jobs en masse. They cut a total of 83,000 positions, about 69,000 in education.
  • Will many of these jobs come back, if schools are able to operate at full capacity by the fall? The Biden pandemic rescue plan before the Senate includes $130 billion to help schools reopen safely, and an additional $350 billion to support state and local government budgets more broadly.
  • Huge job gains were reported in February in some of the sectors most directly affected by the pandemic, specifically an increase of 355,000 in leisure and hospitality jobs, most of it tied to restaurant employment.
  • Things remain murky on the longer-term implications of the crisis. The surge in employment in February was entirely driven by people no longer being on temporary layoff — the number of these temporarily unemployed workers fell by 517,000 people.
  • It is easy to describe the pathway back for jobs at schools and restaurants. But true economic health will mean that those 2.2 million people find their way back into the ranks of the employed as well, and that could take more than just a shot in the arm.
mimiterranova

The Brewing Political Battle Over Critical Race Theory : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ttle-over-critical-race-theory

battle race education Culture politics policy Sides

shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Last month, Republican lawmakers decried critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions.
  • "Critical race theory asserts that people with white skin are inherently racist, not because of their actions, words or what they actually believe in their heart — but by virtue of the color of their skin."
  • "conservatives, since the 1960s, have increasingly defined American society as a colorblind society, in the sense that maybe there were some problems in the past but American society corrected itself and now we have these laws and institutions that are meritocratic and anybody, regardless of race, can achieve the American dream."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • He said critical race theory posits that racism is endemic to American society through history and that, consequently, Americans have to think about institutions like the justice system or schools through the perspective of race and racism.
  • Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has introduced the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act, a bill that would prohibit the armed forces and academics at the Defense Department from promoting "anti-American and racist theories," which, according to the bill's text, includes critical race theory.
  • Bonilla-Silva, whose book Racism Without Racists critiques the notion that America is now "colorblind," says he too shares King's dream, "but in order for us to get to the promised land of colorblindness, we have to go through race. It's the opposite of what these folks are arguing."
  • The fight over critical race theory will likely continue to be a heated issue ahead of next year's midterm elections. Although November 2022 seems a long way away, Christine Matthews, president of Bellwether Research and a public opinion pollster, says pushback to anti-racism teaching is exactly the kind of issue that could maintain traction among certain voters.
  • "If Republicans can make [voters] feel threatened and their place in society threatened in terms of white culture and political correctness and cancel culture, that's a visceral and emotional issue, and I do think it could impact turnout."
  • "We have seen evidence that the Republican base is responding much more to threats on cultural issues, even to some degree more than economic issues," Matthews said.
saberal

Opinion | The American Rescue Plan's Potential - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ids-lead-use-money-wisely.html

shared by saberal on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Mr. Gordon is senior counselor at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan. He was the former director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama. Ms. Jolin is the CEO of Results for America, a nonprofit organization that uses data and evidence to improve government performance.
  • President Biden offered a vision of government as an instrument for progress not heard from a president since Lyndon Johnson.
  • A key test comes from more than $450 billion earmarked for states and local governments to spend quickly as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan enacted last month. This money may be used to fill budget holes.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The main work will fall to governors and state legislators, mayors and city councils, county executives and commissioners, school superintendents and boards.
  • While they fend off padded proposals from vendors, the normal political process churns toward what policy wonks call the “peanut butter spread” problem — in other words, giving everyone something, yet falling short of lasting change.
  • Putting these principles into action, we’d focus on serving the children who have suffered most from the pandemic. School closures, parents’ job losses and social isolation have set back children in ways we are only starting to understand. Here’s just one stunning example: The share of Virginia’s early elementary students at high-risk for reading failure increased by more than 50 percent this fall, with the biggest increase seen among children who are Black, Latino, or poor
  • Rescue Plan dollars can meet all these challenges. Start with lead: As part of his infrastructure plan, Mr. Biden has committed to eliminating all lead service pipes. But there’s no reason to wait for that bill to pass, and we can’t focus on pipes alone. In addition to some nine million U.S. homes with lead service lines, 24 million homes (built before 1978), including four million with young children, have lead-based paint hazards. Lead exposure in children — from inhaling the dust or eating the paint — may lead to reductions in educational outcomes and potentially criminal behavior. This is a perfect use of Rescue Plan dollars: one-time, proven impact and huge results for those at greatest risk.
  • We know these connections are crucial so families get the help they need when they need it. The platform also generates data essential to determining the results investments are getting.
lilyrashkind

Federal officials say efforts in Wilmington are national example of how to address hous... - 0 views

www.wdel.com/...c8-11ec-ac70-eb1e5f42b434.html

housing wilmington US

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • On a day where, nationally, federal officials unveiled an initiative to address the affordable housing shortage, efforts to provide such opportunities in Wilmington were highlighted as an example of what was achievable when all levels of government and community worked together for the greater good. While U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Regional Administrator Matthew Heckle noted June is a month where homeownership is celebrated, he called June 1st a "national day of action" to answer President Joe Biden's call to "solve the housing supply deficit that our nation faces, and makes it so difficult for so many families to find, afford and keep a roof over their heads."
  • From the front yards of the Habitat For Humanity-built Amara Way II townhomes along Bennett Street in Wilmington--and across from the Amala Way I homes previously completed--HUD Deputy Secretary Adrianne Todman said everywhere she travels across the country, she's heard from someone who's had trouble accessing home ownership.Luckily, she said, the problem is one that can be addressed, and through the Our Way Home initiative, HUD's "answer to the president's call to solve the housing supply deficit that our nation faces," the steps to do so are ones being accomplished in Wilmington already. 
  • "One of the reasons I love coming to events like this is that I pick up something, I learn something that I then talk about throughout the rest of the country," Todman said. "What you're doing here, I will be talking about in Nevada, in Idaho, in Florida, in Wyoming, because it's going to take this level of intentionality...for us to be moving forward as a country, as we should."Addressing housing issues should be everyone's focus, said U.S. Sen. Chris Coons, because it's the number one priority to be fixed that can impact all the other issues that drag a community down. Ensuring access to safe, affordable, quality housing trickles down to ultimately impacting issues in education, public health, public safety, and challenges with families, children, and seniors. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Additionally joined by U.S. Sen. Tom Carper, New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, and Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki, Habitat for Humanity of New Castle County CEO Kevin Smith told everyone to get ready for a serious facelift for a Wilmington neighborhood that often gets a bad rap.
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