Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Line

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
katyshannon

Flint mayor hopes to begin pipe replacement next month - 0 views

www.freep.com/...80049056

flint mayor pipe replacement US crisis lead water

shared by katyshannon on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Flint Mayor Karen Weaver on Tuesday outlined  an estimated $55-million public works project expected to begin within a month to remove Flint's lead-contaminated pipes from the water distribution system.
  • First priority will be given to high-risk households with pregnant women and children, Weaver said at a news conference at City Hall.
  • Last week, Weaver called for the immediate removal of the city's lead-contaminated pipes and announced a plan that included help from Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, who has offered technical assistance from the Lansing Board of Water and Light. Lansing has removed about 13,500 lead pipes in the city.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The Fast Start plan will require extensive coordination between city, state and federal officials,  Weaver said. She was joined Tuesday by retired National Guard Brig. Gen. Michael McDaniel, who said he thinks the project can be done within a year by 32 crews.
  • McDaniel — who is assisting in coordinating activities between the city, the Lansing Board of Water and Light, state and federal agencies, and other stakeholders -- said the project could begin within the next month. But McDaniel reiterated the plan is still in its early phases and much of it is based on "assumptions."
  • The preliminary project scope developed by the BWL shows that up to 15,000 lead pipes could be removed in one year "under optimal conditions," Weaver said.McDaniel noted that while it took the BWL 10 years to remove 13,500 pipes, he thinks they can move quicker in Flint because they've perfected the process. McDaniel and Weaver said Flint crews would also be involved in the project.
  • The project would be done in two phases, with the first targeting high-risk households of children under the age of 6, children with elevated blood-lead levels, pregnant women, senior citizens, residential day care facilities, people with compromised immune systems and households where water tests indicate high levels of lead at the tap.
  • The project will not immediately address schools, businesses and other locations in Flint, according to a document released by the city detailing the plan. The city said most large facilities are served by "high-capacity cast iron water services," and not the typical lines found in residential water services.
  • the document states. "For institutional entities like schools and businesses, bottled water can continue to provide for their short-term needs."
  • Phase two of the program would ramp up to a "full-scale operation" that would bring in 32 crews and a "robust administration and logistics support team to meet the one-year goal," Weaver said.
  • McDaniel said the costs in the projected $55-million effort could fluctuate because of  the architecture and condition of the water distribution system. The estimated cost per line is $3,670, according to a city document. Of the $55 million, about $1.5 million will go toward administration and logistics, according to the city, which said personnel costs are estimated at $900,000 and operations costs are projected to be $600,000. According to the city, the bulk of the cost — $36 million — will go toward the labor and about $9.7 million will go toward the materials.
  • According to the city, the Fast Start program will remove and replace the lines at no cost to the homeowner. However, homeowners will be required to sign an agreement that authorizes Flint to remove and replace the portions of the lines on their private property and allow access to the meter inside the home.Lead lines will be replaced with new copper lines and a water filter will be installed at the kitchen tap for three months as a precaution, city officials said.
  • Flint's drinking water became contaminated with lead in April 2014 after the city, while under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, switched its source to the Flint River as a temporary cost-cutting move and the state Department of Environmental Quality failed to require the addition of needed corrosion-control chemicals. As a result, corrosive water caused lead to leach from pipes, joints and fixtures, causing many citizens to receive water with unsafe lead levels. The state has told residents not to drink the water without filtering and says it is treating all Flint children as having been exposed to unsafe levels of lead
  • The FBI is now investigating the contamination of Flint’s drinking water amid a growing public outcry. U.S. Rep. Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township, proposed an emergency $1-billion grant to be authorized through the Environmental Protection Agency, and two Democratic U.S. senators and U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, proposed up to $400 million in dollar-for-dollar matching funds from the state to do much the same thing.
  • The U.S. Attorney's Office announced Jan. 5 that it was assisting the EPA in the investigation
  • Several lawsuits have been filed in connection with the crisis.
  • When asked at the news conference whether she thinks Snyder will support the plan, Weaver said the city can no longer afford to wait."We’re putting forward our plan and we cannot wait for that," Weaver said. "We don’t trust that and we deserve new pipes. That’s the only way this community is going to be confident and people will stay here and people will come. I cannot imagine that he would not support this plan. If he doesn’t, shame on him."
manhefnawi

In the Blood - The Secret History of the Habsburgs | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/10201

Maria Theresa

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • 18th-century succession crisis unlocks a tale of dynastic obsession and myth-history in Austria's first family
  • Charles had devoted his whole adult life to maintaining the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. From 1705 when he first arrived in Barcelona he saw himself as the only rightful king of Spain. He never accepted the accession of the Bourbon claimant, Philip V, under the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and thereafter anything that smacked of a French influence was guaranteed to rouse him to fury
  • his brother Joseph I
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • his father Leopold I
  • With his death, that pre-eminence of the House was challenged
  • So, even if the last Habsburg's death had no sinister implications, it was potentially a catastrophe for the dynasty. Charles had no male heir, and his daughters could not succeed him to the Imperial throne. The laws of the Empire permitted only a male to sit on the throne of Charlemagne
  • Among the Habsburgs, gender was less important than blood
  • among the Habsburgs, as opposed, to say, the Valois or the Bourbons, the reality of female power and authority was accepted. Thus Charles' daughters could succeed to his titles and lands but they could not become Holy Roman Emperor
  • Since Frederick III had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1452, the Imperial title had become almost synonymous with the Habsburgs. They had been elected since 1438 in an unbroken succession to the most dignified and honourable office in Christian Europe. Sometimes there had been other challengers and, on occasion, it had seemed likely that the title would pass to another claimant. But the Habsburgs had always succeeded in persuading sufficient electors to favour their candidate
  • it obscured the real power that a Holy Roman Emperor could exercise
  • While the power and effectiveness of the Reich was undoubtedly waning, especially after the peace settlement at Westphalia in 1648, it was, paradoxically, becoming a more effective instrument of Habsburg power
  • its sanctions still carried weight
  • The Emperor Leopold I, in 1687 and 1705, had moved away from the notion of the equal claim towards establishing the precedence of the senior line, with males inheriting first and then females.
  • deprived the daughters of Joseph I, and established that the new primogeniture would begin with his own children. When Charles presented this edict he was initiating a constitutional revolution
  • It is worthwhile noting that Charles' concerns were for the future. In 1715, despite ten years of marriage, he had no heir
  • the lands ruled by the Habsburgs should never be divided, and he was mindful of the wrangles over the Spanish inheritance of his cousin Carlos II, which ultimately deprived him (he believed) of the throne of Spain
  • However, there was a strong body of legal opinion that suggested that so powerful were these claims ‘of blood' that no prior agreement could abrogate them, and certainly nothing could prevent their rights being transmitted to the future children of a female Habsburg
  • The Pragmatic Sanction assumed that males would come before females in order of inheritance, but if there were no male heirs, then a female could inherit all the powers and rights due to the head of the house of Habsburg
  • it was accepted that a female Habsburg could wear the Crown of St Stephen. Constitutional lawyers would insist that, technically speaking, Maria Theresa should become ‘King of Hungary’, although she was always referred to as Queen of Hungary
  • The sudden death of Charles produced a crisis for the Habsburgs, firstly in the political domain, but secondly, in the area of dynastic ideology
  • set apart from ordinary humanity, the chosen vessels of God's will
  • The Habsburgs had made so much of their long ancestry, of the male descent through the generations, since the time of the first Rudolf
  • To describe Charles VI as the ‘last of the Habsburgs’ plays to a widely-held legend of the enfeeblement of the Habsburg line
  • it marked their ancient heritage
  • his descendent Carlos II of Spain
  • This grotesque appearance lay behind the assumption that the Habsburgs had died out in the male line for genetic reasons, as a consequence of their deliberate policy of marrying within the family which they had followed since the middle of the sixteenth century
  • In fact the failure of the Habsburg line had much more to do with epidemic disease and poor standards of infant care in the Habsburg palaces than with any genetic taint
  • The lack of a male heir may have had a hereditary element, because there were many more female than male births in the House of Habsburg, but the disappearance of the male line was more an accident than a sign of waning procreative powers.
  • or this reason he never accepted that it was his elder daughter Maria Theresa who would succeed him, and had done nothing to introduce her to the complexities of government
  • The rules and taboos which constrained other ruling houses were transmuted by the Habsburgs' notion of their own unique collective identity
  • The Habsburgs, from the founder of the family's fortune, Emperor Rudolf I in the thirteenth century, had sedulously constructed a myth of their origins which set them apart from ordinary humanity
  • And most Habsburg rulers year by year, right up until the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916, played a solemn part in the annual Corpus Christi procession through the streets of Vienna
  • It was for this reason that the Darks of Habsburg identity, like the jutting jaw, were a mark of honour not a disfigurement
  • It had been the grimly practical Wallenstein and not the Virgin Mary who had rescued the Habsburg cause in the 1630s. In the 1740s Maria Theresa saved her inheritance with a steely will and an unswerving determination to succeed
  • Her response, conditioned both by her character and the exigencies of the circumstances, was very different from her fussy and pedantic father, obsessed with the lost throne of Spain
  • A young woman inherited the crowns and possessions of her father, but also an empty treasury and an army commanded by dotards. The process by which she stiffened the resolve of her generals, won the nobility and gentry of Hungary to her cause, and organised the resistance to the Prussian, Bavarian and French armies has itself achieved the quality of myth
  • Maria Theresa was as involved with the identity of the house of Habsburgs as he had been. She followed her father in his obsessive concern for the safe keeping of the bones of their ancestors
  • Maria Theresa's son Joseph II has been nicknamed ‘The Revolutionary Emperor' by one of his biographers
  • The transformation which she inspired and then enforced on her territories was less dramatic (and less publicised) than Joseph’s: it was also a lot more successful and longer lasting. The crisis of Maria Theresa's first years and the subsequent revival of Habsburg power is most often looked upon in external terms, both political and economic
  • She moved away from the reliance on the Imperial title as a principle source of Habsburg legitimacy
  • However, even then, she refused to be crowned as Empress, preferring the titles she held in her own right to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia
  • Mother of the Country
  • who ruled briefly as Leopold II, knew better than either of them how to play the twin chords of coercion and free expression
  • But the Habsburgs, from Maria Theresa onwards, turned their backs on the tradition of grandeur and portrayed themselves as the first servants of the nation
  • he believed as ardently as any of his predecessors in the unique role and mission of his clan
  • Historians have come to regard Maria Theresa as one of the most significant and innovative of the long line of Habsburg rulers
  • The potential catastrophe of the 1740s was that the Habsburg lands, like Poland a generation later, might have been dismembered or at best much reduced in scale and power
cartergramiak

N.Y. Severely Undercounted Virus Deaths in Nursing Homes, Report Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nursing-home-deaths-cuomo.html

politics pandemic US crisis history

shared by cartergramiak on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ALBANY, N.Y. — For most of the past year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has tried to brush away a persistent criticism that undermined his national image as the man who led New York through the pandemic: that his policies had allowed thousands of nursing home residents to die of the virus.
  • He also asserted that the lack of data on hospital deaths of nursing home residents was due to concern and caution about the accuracy of data that nursing homes supplied — an issue also raised by the attorney general. “D.O.H. does not disagree that the number of people transferred from a nursing home to a hospital is an important data point,” he said.
  • The report also cast a critical eye on perhaps the governor’s most criticized decision since the beginning of the pandemic last year: a March 25 directive from the Health Department that ordered nursing homes to accept and readmit patients who had tested positive..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-1sjr751{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1sjr751 a:hover{border-bottom:1px solid #dcdcdc;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% - 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:'See more';}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The Democratic chairman of the investigations and government operations committee in the State Senate, James Skoufis, who has accused the Health Department of stonewalling investigators, suggested on Thursday that he would use a subpoena to compel the release of data from Dr. Zucker’s office.
  • The attorney general asked 62 nursing homes — about a tenth of the state’s total — for information about on-site and in-hospital deaths related to the virus; investigators then cross-referenced that information with public reports of deaths issued by the Health Department. The deaths reported to the attorney general’s office at most of those facilities totaled 1,914, compared to the state’s much lower count of 1,229.
  • Under normal circumstances, the attorney general’s office “would issue a report with findings and recommendations after its investigations and enforcement activities are completed,” Ms. James said in her report. “However, circumstances are far from normal.”
anonymous

Tornadoes and heavy winds strike five states as storms continue into the Southeast - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Tornadoes struck the Deep South after a line of storms moved through the region Wednesday, part of a system that is expected to continue further into the Southeast and the Eastern Seaboard on Thursday, leaving millions at risk from severe weather conditions.
  • At least 24 preliminary reports of tornadoes across five states were tracked Wednesday
  • with the greatest storm damage apparent in Alabama and Mississippi.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • A confirmed "large and extremely dangerous" tornado was spotted near Shelton State Community College just south of Tuscaloosa at 2:45 p.m.
  • At least 37 homes were damaged by storms in in the towns of Moundville and Akron in Alabama's Hale County, according to county emergency manager Russ Weeden. Further east, at least a dozen areas of damage are being investigated in the Birmingham, Alabama area
  • In southwestern Alabama, two people were injured as their home was destroyed by the storm. Four other homes in the area were damaged.
  • A possible tornado that touched down in Wayne County in Eastern Mississippi damaged two homes and left roads blocked due to debris, according to Angela Atchison of Wayne County Emergency Management. No injuries have been reported.The greatest threat of storms Thursday now shifts east to parts of the southeastern US, including Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
  • The northern Georgia and metro Atlanta areas are anticipating storms in the morning, which has led Atlanta schools to move to online learning Thursday.
  • The worst of the severe weather pushes into the Carolinas and parts of parts of Central and Southern Georgia late morning. An elevated risk for strong tornado development exists for over 8 million from Southeast Georgia through the Carolinas into the northern Outer Banks. An area of greatest concern is the coastal area of the Carolinas that straddles the state line between North and South Carolina, and include Wilmington and Myrtle Beach.
  • As the line of storms progress throughout the day there is the risk of gaining more energy and become more violent,
  • Other locations that need to be on the lookout for stronger tornadoes Thursday include Raleigh/Durham, Savannah, GA and Columbia, SC.
  • Another line of storms will develop in the late afternoon out of the Ohio Valley and Northern Kentucky and push into the Appalachians of West Virginia and Virginia. The system will not stay organized very long, but the potential for dangerous weather conditions will continue into the early evening
  • The southern end of the line of storms will hit the Florida Panhandle and move into Central Florida through the early evening hours. Risk of strong winds, dangerous lightning, hail and tornadoes will continue into overnight hours.
  • An estimated 45 million people will be under threat for severe storms Thursday, from the Ohio Valley into South Florida, according to the Storm Prediction Center. Tornadoes, some of which may be intense, will be of concern along with damaging winds and large hail,
  • Covid-19 vaccine distribution has also been disrupted by the line of storms, with DeKalb County in metro Atlanta announcing its changes in schedules. Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency Mass Vaccination Sites plan to delay opening or alter its hours to avoid the severe weather.
Javier E

Poverty Is a Choice - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...614701

poverty poor development international progress measures measure choice policy crisis

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • one thing, at least, has gotten better. More than 1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty—so many, so fast, that the world might be able to declare, within a decade, the end of this most miserable form of deprivation. “The global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history,” Jim Yong Kim, a former president of the World Bank, recently argued. “This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time.”
  • Or perhaps not. In an acidic rebuke to world leaders, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, argues that the effort to end global poverty has failed. More people live in deprivation now than two decades ago. “We squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston wrote in his last report.
  • The pessimistic argument is a hard one to make when looking at the raw, headline numbers. The global extreme-poverty rate fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015; the number of poor people dropped from 2 billion to 700 million. But Alston believes that by focusing only on those numbers, the world is deluding itself.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • So who’s right: Alston or Kim?
  • They are in a more important sense interpretive, about whether progress has been fast or slow, and whether today’s global poverty counts are laudable or tragic.
  • This is a realm of yes-ands and no-buts, not direct refutations.
  • “By being able to rely so heavily on the World Bank's flagship figure, they can say, ‘Look, progress has been consistent. We’ve been doing great,’” Alston told me. “The implication of that is that the triumph of neoliberalism has brought with it very significant benefits for poor people. In reality, that’s just not the case.”
  • That poverty threshold represents “a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” Alston argues—it is a catastrophic-destitution measure, not a poverty measure. He emphasizes the lack of progress made at the $3.20-a-day and $5.50-a-day poverty lines, too. Half the world lives on less than the latter figure.
  • Alston takes issue with the fact that the World Bank’s extreme-poverty line is an absolute measure, not a relative one: It sets a line and sees how many people cross it, country by country, rather than pegging the poverty threshold to median income, country by country
  • But “relative poverty is what really counts these days,” Alston told me, as it captures social exclusion, and the way that living on a few dollars a day is more challenging in middle-income countries like India and Kenya than in low-income countries like Afghanistan and Chad.
  • Alston’s most controversial, and most important, argument is that the focus on progress measured against the $1.90-a-day line—the prevalence of “everything’s getting better” arguments, made by Davos types like Bill Gates and Steven Pinker—has hampered progress toward true poverty eradication, and toward civil rights, social inclusion, and a basic standard of living for all.
  • Extreme poverty has declined rapidly, but the extreme-poverty line is very low: A person living below it spends no more than $1.90 a day, enough in many poor countries to cover some starch, a few fruits and vegetables, some cooking oil, a bit of protein, and that’s about it—with nothing left over for utilities, education, health care, transportation, or investment in wealth-generating assets, such as a cow or a motorbike
  • What if the headline story were that half the world still qualifies as desperately poor, and poverty head counts remain stubbornly high in dozens of countries? What if the story were not that we are succeeding, but that we are failing?
  • it would hold the world accountable for the fact that poverty is, always and everywhere, a choice.
  • Alston’s view, and a necessary one, is that the world cannot wait for economic expansion to lift people above the poverty line. It cannot count on trade compacts and infrastructure projects and the ticking of GDP growth rates from 2.3 to 3.2 percent to do it. It needs direct interventions by governments, as fast as possible, to eliminate inequality and build safety nets, even in the poorest places.
Javier E

Welcome to the blah blah blah economy - 0 views

image

unpredictable economy global

started by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 no follow-up yet
Javier E

The Making of the Fox News White House | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ng-of-the-fox-news-white-house

fox news trump propaganda culture politics

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.”
  • The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
  • Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.”
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
  • Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”
  • Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.
  • Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
  • Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.
  • Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. “Like, every day,” one said.
  • Ailes told Murdoch, “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful he’s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.”
  • In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises—an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm—but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power.
  • both men have tapped into anti-élitist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.
  • In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton
  • Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.
  • he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”
  • “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”
  • In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.
  • As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’ ”
  • Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.”
  • In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits.
  • Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.”
  • For all of Ailes’s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: “Fair and Balanced.
  • Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, “I want to elect the next President.”
  • Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. They’re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC.” (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign.
  • Ailes and Trump were friendly. “They spoke all the time,” a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of “Trump’s crazy behavior”; but Trump’s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes “nervous”: “He thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.”
  • in 2016 that the network’s executives “made a business decision” to give on-air stars “slack” to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O’Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly remained skeptical
  • Kelly kept pressing Trump: “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?” But he’d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump’s image as shamelessly unsinkable.
  • Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.
  • Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump’s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, and said that he’d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.
  • Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes’s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox’s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.
  • For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox’s critics say, is that it’s become a platform for Trump’s authoritarianism. “I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.” Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.
  • News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.
  • Murdoch “was gone a lot,” adding, “He’s old. He likes the idea that he’s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.”
  • Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.
  • ” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.
  • Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.
  • Shine became “an expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,” adding, “He was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.
  • some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, “He’s perfect for the White House job. He’s a yes-man.” Another Fox alumnus said, “His only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.”
  • Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. “We had a file on pretty much everyone,” the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about “putting hits” in the media on anyone who “got out of line.”
  • If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, “Shine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—and, if that didn’t work, he’d warn her it would ruin her career.”
  • Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”
  • Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.
  • Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch’s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”
  • Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company
  • In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.
  • The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN
  • “There may be innocent explanations.” But, he adds, “Trump famously said you’re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.” He says of Murdoch, “He’s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He’s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.”
  • Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that “Murdoch calls me every day.” She recalled that, “back when Trump was still speaking to me,” she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, “Do you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?” Coulter accepted Trump’s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox “within twelve hours.”
  • “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”
  • Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”
  • Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material.
  • Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected
  • Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that “nearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally” every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox’s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.
  • Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox’s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller’s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.
  • By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the “Uranium One” story, which Hannity called “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.” On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.” Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that “the corrupt, lying mainstream media” was withholding this “bombshell” from Americans, because it was “complicit” in a “huge coverup.”
  • other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia.
  • Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on “Fox & Friends” for years before joining CNN, in 2014
  •  ‘Fox & Friends’ was a fun show, but it was not a news show,” she says. “It regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger’s id on TV. He’d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.” She says that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the standards.”
  • Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism.
  • Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.
  • a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”
  • Judging from the timing of Trump’s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records “Fox & Friends” and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. “Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,” Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.
  • Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea “disturbing,” now calls such efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fo
  • White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals.
  • According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President’s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he’s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him
  • Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump’s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.
  • For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, “might as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,” adding, “It seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.”
  • “The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.
  • Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”
  • Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience’s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing
  • A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”
  • Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. “He always thought he did it the best,” a former senior White House official says. “But the problem is that you lose deniability. It’s become a trapeze act with no net, 24/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.”
  • “It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”
  • For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law.
  • Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”
  • “In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”
Javier E

How to Take 'Political Correctness' Away From Donald Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...470271

politics election political correctness norms decency

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 16 - No Cached
oliviaodon liked it
  • A Martian following election coverage via GoGo in-flight WIFI would never know that Trump’s pledge to revenge-kill family members of terrorists—a war crime—violated more important Earth-taboos than his calling a campaign rival “a pussy.” Watching CBS or NBC or ABC, the Martian would likewise conclude that Trump calling Ted Cruz “a pussy” was worse than calling Mexican migrants rapists. Only the former comment was censored. The broadcast rules that produced those results remain in place.
  • Trump has been running against “political correctness.” This has sometimes meant attacking taboos that prevent real discussions, foster social exclusion, and signal snobbery. One key to taking Trump down is pointing out that he is also violating norms that are essential to American democracy. And that is a different offense
  • His supporters are as inclined as the press to treat every utterance as an undifferentiated instance of political correctness—as if the appropriate degree of political correctness is all that’s at stake this election cycle.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • a pol who seeks to gain power by demonizing ethnic-minority groups and threatening their core rights is engaged in a special category of leadership failure.
  • My hope is that people rediscover why we had those norms, and rediscover the spirit of them, not just the dead letter. And if Trump serves as a midwife to that process, then thank you Donald Trump. I guess I have to hope that, because the alternative is Idiocracy on an accelerated time line.
  • One gets the sense from our current political class that, for example, torture and unconstrained drone strike assassination isn’t actually morally wrong as long as you adopt a furrowed brow and a constipated facial expression, sigh loudly, and say in your most patronizing voice, “This hurts me than it hurts you. I’m sorry I have to do this.” It’s adopting the “serious” tone that matters, not the actual content of your actions.
  • Trump can exist because our norms have become hollowed shells of what they purport to be. Our norms have been gamed. It feels very much like we’ve gotten to a point where people in many of our institutions, in positions of authority, follow the letter of the law about civic decency, but have almost entirely abandoned the spirit of the law. Trump just takes the last little leap and ditches the letter of the law too.
  • Our norms of civic decency were evolved for a reason. Watching Trump violate those norms is a really good reminder of why we evolved those norms in the first place. On the other hand, those norms have been profoundly subverted and corrupted for a while now, and used as often as mere cover for all manner of awfulness.
  • They don't think much would change one way or the other if Donald Trump were elected. The political system has failed them so badly that they think it can't be repaired and little's at stake. The election therefore reduces to an opportunity to express disgust. And that's where Trump's defects come in: They are what make him such an effective messenger.
  • The more he offends the superior people, the more his supporters like it. Trump wages war on political correctness. Political correctness requires more than ordinary courtesy: It's a ritual, like knowing which fork to use, by which superior people recognize each other
  • Some “politically correct” codes of conduct, like “Muslim Americans should be treated as equal citizens whose rights are not at all abrogated because some of their co-religionists are terrorists,” help to prevent the U.S. from perpetrating horrific injustices against innocents and serve to uphold the guarantees of our founding documents. Other “politically correct” codes are little more than arbitrary etiquette that people educated at selective colleges use to feel superior to others,
  • In between the core norms that are vital to democracy and the most frivolous demand for political correctness there is a lot of contested territory. Trump’s rise represents large swathes of that territory being seized by people who reject elite pieties.
  • citizens who oppose Trumpism are going to have to take a careful look at everything that falls under the rubric of political correctness; study the real harm done by its excesses; identify the many parts that are worth defending; and persuade more Americans to adopt those norms voluntarily, for substantive reasons, not under duress of social shaming or other coercion.
  • Trumpism cannot prevail in a contest of logic and rationally differentiated controversies; but in a contest of emotion, tribal loyalty, and stigmatizing out-groups, I’m no longer sure that it can be beat.
lmunch

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities | Annual Re... - 0 views

www.annualreviews.org/...annurev-environ-102016-061053

shared by lmunch on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In the most recent iteration, the AR5, each WG report contains more than 1,200 pages. An SPM of approximately 30 pages is produced for each WG report, as well as for the Synthesis Report.
  • The full WG reports are endorsed by government representatives by accepting them, which means that they have not been edited line by line. Each SPM, however, goes through a process of line-by-line editing during approval plenaries in which government representatives approve the final version of the SPM
  • Government representatives from any country can object to and potentially veto any line, requiring IPCC authors to rework the sentence in question until it is rewritten to everyone's satisfaction. In this sense, the SPM produces reports through processes of enforced consensus.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Some authors argue that the consensus process in approval plenaries results in sharper messages, the identification of better and more relevant questions, and greater investment by policymakers in the ultimate outcomes (26). In contrast, a well-known early critique of the IPCC argued that it resulted in bland outputs that do not engage with questions of high disagreement (27). More recently, some authors argue that the process imposes unity in the form of least-common denominator generalities on the very issues that, because they are politically challenging, may be of greatest policy relevance (28–30).
    • lmunch
      lmunch on 09 Mar 21
       
      pros and cons of consensus in SPMs
  • In their study of how eight SPMs produced for the AR4 and AR5 changed through the approval plenaries, Mach et al. (22) find that sensitive issues are often reworked and expanded through approval plenaries. But they also find that sometimes the most sensitive topics are expunged completely
  • When the newly elected Chair of the IPCC, Hoesung Lee (2015) declared that promoting the involvement of developing country scientists was a cornerstone for his tenure, he was articulating a theme of inclusivity that has been present since the IPCC's inception (82).
  • From 1990 to 2007, the number of IPCC authors from developing countries quadrupled, but their numbers are still proportionally low. The number of authors from developed countries also increased over the same period of time; only 17% of authors in the AR4 are from developing countries (83). As a result, there is still a significant “north-south divide” that results in an overrepresentation of science from OECD countries or countries that are classified as high income by the World Bank (84)
  • This tendency is also reflected in the composition of the IPCC; where representation from developing countries has improved, much of it is focused on WGII, which publishes regional chapters on impacts and adaptation (83). Science that is conducted in developing countries, which contribute the least to GHG emissions but are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, often has a different focus than in developed countries, which tend to focus more on large-scale positivist understandings of the physical system and the economics of mitigation (87). Many authors from developing countries who participated in WGIII's AR5 did so through coauthorship relationships and “institutional pathways” that are based in the developed world (88). This might be responsible for the “strong harmonization of views [in AR5 WGIII], compared with the diversity one finds across the social sciences of climate change more broadly” (88, p. 98). The forgoing considerations give rise to the question, how should the IPCC engage with the realities of unequal global development and the vast differences between rich and poor nations.
  • Quantitative bibliometric analysis of climate change publications reveals not only that climate change research is concentrated in the developed countries, but also that developed countries tend to focus more on issues of mitigation whereas developing countries focus more on adaptation, droughts, and disease impacts (86).
  • The IPCC has innovated strategies to improve capacity building, one of which was to recruit early-career scientists to managerial roles in chapter writing processes for WGII and WGIII. Such programs can assist with equalizing quality among chapters and can provide early-career scientists with an opportunity to participate in the IPCC process (89).
  • The justification for inclusivity of science produced in and for developing countries is multifaceted. The credibility of the IPCC in some countries is potentially undermined if it is seen as only representing Western science
  • But different geographical contexts often have different ways of judging the quality and relevance of scientific knowledge. Developing country scientists may have different but equally valid epistemological norms as those found in developed countries, but those norms might be downplayed in favor of so-called Western standards (93).
  • For this reason, redressing the imbalance of knowledge in GEAs requires more than simply increasing the numbers of authors from developing nations; it also is a matter of maintaining critical awareness of the assumptions that inform the social authority of science in developed countries (95, 96). As will be seen in the following case study, this comes to the fore when we consider how adaptation is framed in the IPCC.
  • The international politics of climate change, for most of the IPCC's history, retained this initial focus on abatement and mitigation. The topic of adaptation was shunned partly because it could be interpreted as giving the fossil fuel industry a free pass or capitulating to the status quo. However, since the IPCC's founding in 1988, the impacts of climate change have become more pronounced, and some of the world's most vulnerable people are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, which makes discussion of adaptation imperative (97–99).
  • The IPCC only gave scant attention to adaptation in its first two Assessment Reports, treating it primarily as a “residual” phenomenon that results from the failure to mitigate climate change in particular local contexts (109). Starting with the Third Assessment Report published in 2001, however, adaptation became increasingly important in the IPCC. Early work in climate change adaptation drew from the literature on natural disasters in which human vulnerability is conceptualized as exposure to hazards, as well as work on the resilience of complex social-ecological systems (110–112). This literature developed the concept of adaptive capacity that theorizes adaptation as a generalizable quality which allows human societies to adapt to negative events.
woodlu

The fruits of growth - Extreme poverty is history in China, officials say | China | The... - 1 views

www.economist.com/...history-in-china-officials-say

shared by woodlu on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • EARLY IN DECEMBER China announced that it had eradicated extreme poverty within its territory.
  • some 800m people in China have escaped penury in the past four decades.
  • Never before in the country’s history has destitution come anywhere close to being eliminated.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Speaking frankly, it’s a lie,” says Liang Yong, a gruff villager. The official investigation of Ziyun’s economy was, he says, perfunctory.
  • Provincial leaders popped into his village, rendered their verdict that it had left poverty behind and then sped off. “It’s a show. In our hearts we all know the truth,”
  • Pork is pricey these days, so he eats meat just a couple of times a week. After paying his two children’s school fees, he has little money left.
  • He is poorer than many others in China, especially in its cities.
  • But the ability to scrape enough together for meat, education and heating marks Mr Liang as someone who has in fact left extreme poverty
  • Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”.
  • It has regularly raised the official poverty line, which, accounting for living costs, is about $2.30 a day at prices prevailing in 2011.
  • Poverty lines in rich countries are much higher: the equivalent line in America is about $72 a day for a four-member household at 2020 prices.)
  • In 1978, shortly after Mao’s death, nearly 98% of those in the countryside lived in extreme poverty, by China’s current standards. By 2016 that was down to less than 5%
  • It decollectivised agriculture, giving farmers an incentive to produce more. It allowed people to move around the country to find work. It gave more freedom to entrepreneurs. It helped by building roads, investing in education and courting foreign investors. Its goal was to boost the economy;
  • The government’s approach changed in 2015 when Xi Jinping, its leader, vowed to eradicate the last vestiges of extreme poverty by the end of 2020.
  • tried to encourage personal initiative by rewarding poor people who found ways of bettering their lot
  • They spent public money widely.
  • I
  • n 2020 the allocation per head was more than 26,000 yuan
  • One of the biggest challenges has been the terrain where the poor live.
  • about 30% of the country’s total—that were designated as poverty-stricken when Mr Xi began his anti-poverty campaign were all mainly rural. Most were mountainous or on inhospitable land
  • to introduce industry
  • mostly modern agriculture.
  • government created a 25-hectare zone for growing and processing shiitake mushrooms
  • the shiitake are a cash crop, letting them earn about 80 yuan a day, a decent wage.
  • In the 1980s China broke up communal farms, letting people strike out on their own. Now the government wants them to pool their resources again
  • turning farmers into “shareholders”
  • Residents get stakes in new rural enterprises, which, all going well, will pay dividends.
  • The Luomai shiitake farm is run by China Southern Power Grid, a state-owned firm. But there is a risk that as the anti-poverty campaign fades away, some projects will fizzle.
  • The second approach to helping hard-up villages was more radical: moving inhabitants to better-connected areas.
  • 2016 and 2020 officials relocated about 10m people.
  • The government concluded that it was too costly to provide necessary services, from roads to health care, to the most remote villages
  • A frequent problem after moving people into such housing is finding work for them.
  • the government called on local officials to arrange jobs for at least one member of each household.
  • with her new surroundings. There is a good school just across the street, which is far better for her child.
  • A bigger challenge is relative deprivation, a problem abundantly evident to anyone who has travelled between the glitzy coastal cities and the drabber towns of the hinterland.
  • recent study by Chinese economists concluded that the “subjective poverty line” in rural areas was about 23 yuan per day, nearly twice the amount below which a person would be officially classified as poor.
  • namely setting the relative poverty line at half the median income level. It suggests that about a third of rural Chinese still see themselves as poor.
  • If poverty is calculated this way it becomes almost impossible to eliminate,
  • China does not count any poverty in its cities because welfare safeguards supposedly help those without money.
  • But workers who have moved from the countryside lack the right documentation for ready access to urban welfare.
  • And for any city-dweller, support is meagre. In relative terms about a fifth of China’s urban residents can be classified as poor,
  • To reduce relative poverty, China needs different tactics from the ones used in its campaign against extreme poverty.
  • policies for which it has shown little eagerness.
  • On the streets of Guiyang, the booming capital of Guizhou, hardship is still a common sight.
  • Zhou Weifu, a porter in his 50s, scoffs at the suggestion that poverty is over. “What kind of work is this? I can barely make any money,”
brookegoodman

Tulsi Gabbard, running for president, won't seek re-election to Congress - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...on-t-seek-re-election-n1071756

politics us

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.
  • "I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief,"
  • An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."
  • Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.
  • Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."
  • Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.
  • ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."
criscimagnael

Rodolfo Hernández is Colombia's Trump and He May Be Headed for the Presidenti... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-election-hernandez-petro.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.
  • For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’
  • Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • But it also remade the political calculus for Mr. Petro. Now, it is Mr. Petro who is billing himself as the safe change, and Mr. Hernández as the dangerous leap into the void.
  • “There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro said at a campaign event on Sunday night, “they are suicides.”
  • The story line was: left versus right, change versus continuity, the elite versus the rest of the country.
  • Still, Colombia’s right-wing establishment has begun lining up behind him, bringing many of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro look like an uphill climb.
  • “The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” said Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”
  • At 77, Mr. Hernández built much of his support on TikTok, once slapped a city councilman on camera and recently told The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” effect on his supporters, who he compared to the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11.
  • Until just a few days ago, Colombia’s political narrative seemed simple: For generations, politics had been dominated by a few wealthy families, and more recently, by a hard-line conservatism known as Uribismo, founded by the country’s powerful political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.
  • But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, along with a growing acceptance of the left following the country’s 2016 peace process with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seemed to shift the dynamic.
  • Mr. Hernández once called himself a follower of Adolf Hitler,
  • It also reveals that the narrative was never so simple.
  • Mr. Hernández, who won 28 percent of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters eager for change who could never get on board with Mr. Petro.
  • Mr. Hernández, with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s approach to politics, has also attracted voters who say they want someone with Trumpian ambition, and are not troubled if he is prone to tactlessness. (Years after saying he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Hernández clarified that he meant to say he was a follower of Albert Einstein.)
  • Two of the country’s biggest issues are poverty and lack of opportunity, and Mr. Hernández appeals to people who say he can help them escape both.
  • “Political people steal shamelessly,” said Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a solar energy company in Cali.
  • He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, precisely because of his lack of political experience.
  • If Mr. Hernández can walk that difficult line — courting the establishment’s votes without tarnishing his image — it could be difficult for Mr. Petro to beat him.
  • As the results became clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his campaign headquarters on one of the main avenues in Bogotá, the capital.
  • Many wore bright yellow campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they said they’d bought themselves instead of being handed out free by the campaign, in keeping with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting principles.
  • “He is a phenomenon,” he said. “We are sure that we are going to win.”
Javier E

Trump's presser was remarkable. It means we're heading into truly uncharted territory. ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...into-truly-uncharted-territory

trump ethics corruption transparency gop press

shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Trump tore into CNN as “fake news” for publishing a careful if provocative and envelope-pushing story on unverified claims that Russian intelligence gathered compromising information on him. Trump ferociously attacked Buzzfeed for publishing a dossier of those claims, pointedly noting that Buzzfeed would “suffer the consequences.”
  • it all starts to smack of an effort to stamp out the very possibility of shared agreement on the legitimate institutional role of the news media or even on reality itself. It’s easy to imagine that, if and when a news organization uncovers potential conflicts, Trump will simply deny the reality of what’s been uncovered (“fake news”) and begin threatening “consequences” towards that organization.
  • One thing that remains clear: Congressional Republicans are not going to step up and try to mitigate this situation. Republicans are not going to take any of the steps they could be taking to try to prod Trump into showing more transparency about his holdings, which would make conflicts and corruption less likely.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It’s hard to see that changing, unless, perhaps, intensified media scrutiny shakes loose enough scandalous stories to make the lack of congressional action untenable.
Javier E

A blueprint for resistance to Trump has emerged. Here's what it looks like. - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...erged-heres-what-it-looks-like

resistance trump politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The outlines of a meaningful blueprint for resisting Trump are now taking shape.
  • This applies both to the battle against Trump’s authoritarian impulses and serial shredding of our democratic norms, and to the battle against the various ways in which Trump will work with Republicans to advance a more conventional GOP agenda.
  • 1) Have (guarded) faith in our system.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • this is template for further resistance by states, in the courts and out, that could make a difference in other areas where Trump may unleash regressive and destructive onslaughts, such as Obamacare, climate change and other aspects of his promised immigration crackdown.
  • 2) Keep pressuring Republicans to exercise real oversight on Trump
  • congressional Republicans cannot ignore any and all of the Trump White House’s ethical transgressions forever.
  • all the procedural tools that Senate Democrats can use to “focus attention on controversial parts of the president’s agenda and force Republicans to cast potentially unpopular votes
  • 3) Fight hard in the Senate with all available procedural weapons.
  • A schoolteacher stood up and demanded to know: “Where is your line in the sand?”
  • 4) Keep looking to civil society and try to fortify it where possible.
  • civil society — a loosely knit coalition of legal and political groups, given ammunition by intense scrutiny from watchdogs and media outlets, and backed up by meaningful, sustained public mobilization — can have a real illuminating and constraining impact.
  • 5) Keep Trump distracted and off balance, to minimize the damage he can do.
  • Trump’s cause is also harmed by trivial, petty and burlesque distractions.
Javier E

China's 'Fault Lines': Yu Jie on His New Biography of Liu Xiaobo by Ian Johnson | NYRbl... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...-fault-lines-yu-jie-liu-xiaobo

china historical intellectual influence european democracy Christianity

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Yu Jie is one of China’s most prominent essayists and critics, with more than thirty books to his name. His latest work is a biography of his friend, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, that was published in Chinese in Hong Kong a few weeks ago. It is not the first time he has stirred up controversy in China. Yu first gained fame in 1
  • In 2003, Yu converted to Christianity and increasingly complemented his provocative writing with political activism of his own. He was an early signer of Charter 08, the landmark human rights manifesto, and in 2010 cemented his position as a leading political critic by writing a biography of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in which he refers to his subject as “China’s best actor.”
  • How would you describe his ideas? He’s similar to [Soviet dissident Andrei] Sakharov. He’s not just a critic of communism but also someone who promotes virtues and values. This is an important point because there are a lot of people who criticize the communists. Liu Xiaobo also has a constructive ideology too. That line—”I have no enemies”—is really important. It’s similar to Mandela.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • China doesn’t have apartheid. No, China doesn’t have the racial component perhaps quite as much but it has fault lines, for example between country and city. The way that rural laborers are treated in the cities is similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa. If you don’t have an ideology like Liu’s to push for peaceful change, then change could result in violence.
  • Over the past hundred years, China has studied a lot from the West but we haven’t studied the link between faith and liberty. Chinese have mainly learned from France and Germany: from France, the French Revolution, and from Germany, of course Marx and nationalism, which came to us via Japan. And from Russia we learned Leninism. But we haven’t learned much from this British-American tradition. Even in the early twentieth century we didn’t look very closely at the relationship between the political system and faith. Hu Shih, for example, never talked about the link between the separation of powers and religion. I think it’s only with our generation that we’re starting to think about this. One of the basic points is that the liberty to choose is God-given—not given by the state but by God. This means it’s higher than the state. It’s the foundation of Western democracy but many Chinese don’t understand this.
  • Chinese churches need to develop more democratic institutions. In the West, [Protestant] churches are run by committees; they are like small parliaments that are elected, just like the governments. Chinese congregations don’t know about this, so I wanted to show them. I think there will be a big change in China in the next ten or twenty years and at that point there will be some sort of religious freedom. So the bigger issue is how the congregations will manage themselves. Will they be democratically organized? Will they have a strong theological foundations? Or will they remain a new form of Chinese folk religion, a movement like the Boxers with a new foreign name plate?
Javier E

Speedy Trains Transform China - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-huge-success-for-china.html

trains china development economic

shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.
  • The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early.
  • China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • it has not been without costs — high debt, many people relocated and a deadly accident. The corruption trials this summer of two former senior rail ministry officials have cast an unfavorable light on the bidding process for the rail lines.
  • Chinese workers are now more productive. A paper for the World Bank by three consultants this year found that Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.
  • New subway lines, rail lines and urban districts are part of China’s heavy dependence on investment-led growth.
  • Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.
  • “More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,”
  • China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people
  • Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha.
  • Another impact: air travel. Train ridership has soared partly because China has set fares on high-speed rail lines at a little less than half of comparable airfares and then refrained from raising them. On routes that are four or five years old, prices have stayed the same as blue-collar wages have more than doubled. That has resulted in many workers, as well as business executives, switching to high-speed trains.
  • Airlines have largely halted service on routes of less than 300 miles when high-speed rail links open. They have reduced service on routes of 300 to 470 miles.
Alex Trudel

On the front line: Fighting ISIS in Syria - CNN.com - 0 views

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

front line syria politics Obama crisis US policy culture

shared by Alex Trudel on 27 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Lightly armed, poorly equipped and exhausted by months under fire -- but determined to keep fighting:
  • reality of life on the front line
  • Kurdish YPG
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • scrappily clad in plaid shirts as well as camouflage gear, and armed with hunting rifles alongside their ancient AK-47s.
  • On October 11, more than 100 parachutes floated down through the night sky over northern Syria
  • The United States is trying to help relieve the shortage of supplies.
  • The YPG, a Kurdish group of some 30,000 fighters, is the senior partner in the Syrian Democratic Forces, which also includes some smaller Arab and Christian groups
  • instalment in a new U.S. strategy
  • failure
  • "train and equip"
  • A Kurdish commander in the province of Hasakah confided
  • pallet of ammunition.
  • raw courage of YPG fighters, nor of the Kurdish Women's Defense Unit (YPJ) that fights alongside them.
  • "They throw themselves into battle, have no sense of covering fire, just charge at the enemy," said a Dutch veteran who is now a sniper with the YPG.
  • Just weeks ago, a massive vehicle bomb blew up the entrance to the YPG headquarters here.
  • The camp appears to have been occupied by an elite squad of suicide bombers,
  • Kurds, Assyrian Christians, different Arab tribes. They fight together and against each other.
  • e.Other Arabs here resent that the Kurds were slow to join the insurgency against the regime, preferring to sit it out. Even now, the YPG co-exists with a substantial contingent of Syrian soldiers inside Hasakah city. "We have nothing to do with them, though sometimes we have an agreement not to encroach on an area," Commander Lawand told CNN inside the YPG's bombed headquarters. "We are the real opposition to the regime, but first we must fight the terror groups."That's just what the U.S. wants to hear. In the wake of its failed efforts to train and equip moderate rebel groups elsewhere in Syria, there is a lot riding on the Kurds and their Arab allies. American airstrikes were instrumental in helping the Kurds save the city of Kobani on the Turkish border and then pushing ISIS back. In a country of shifting alliances, it's a proven partnership.
katyshannon

The sarcastic lines that made Justice Scalia the king of Supreme Court sarcasm - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-king-of-supreme-court-sarcasm

lines justice supreme court sarcasm washington post antonin scalia politics US obama

shared by katyshannon on 16 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Washington Post Supreme Court correspondent Robert Barnes quotes Erwin Chemerinsky, now dean of the University of California, as writing that “No justice in Supreme Court history has consistently written with the sarcasm of Justice Scalia.”
  • So while Antonin Scalia, who was found dead Saturday, may be primarily remembered as one of the giants of conservative legal thought, he will also be known as someone who made sarcasm a linchpin of the highest court's opinions.
  • Overall, Hasen found that Scalia authored 75 of the 134 sarcastic opinions. "His ability (and willing-ness) to engage in nastiness, particularly directed at other Justices’ opinions, is unparalleled," Hasen writes. The law professor says this isn't all bad. "Sarcasm makes his opinions punchy and interesting, clarifying where he stands in a case and why and gaining attention for his ideas. On the other hand, such heavy use of sarcasm can demean the Court."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, wrote: Justice Scalia is the most sarcastic justice on the Supreme Court. He has been for at least the last thirty years, and there is good reason to believe no other Justice in history has come close to his level of sarcasm. Now your first reaction to this claim, if you are a (sarcastic) Supreme Court aficionado or reader of the Green Bag (the two categories overlap almost perfectly), is probably: “Well, duh!” And your second reaction is likely: “Oh really? Well how can you prove that?”
  • In a recent dissent, Justice Scalia declared: 'Today’s tale . . . is so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution. But reaching a patently incorrect conclusion on the facts is a relatively be- nign judicial mischief; it affects, after all, only the case at hand. In its vain attempt to make the incredible plausible, however – or perhaps as an intended second goal – to- day’s opinion distorts our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence and leaves it in a shambles. Instead of clarifying the law, the Court makes itself the obfuscator of last resort.'
  • ustice Scalia has remarked that “Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its Members.” In a civil rights case, he ended his dissent by stating that “The irony is that these individuals – predominantly unknown, unaffluent, unorganized – suffer this injustice at the hands of a Court fond of thinking itself the champion of the politically impotent.” In a gender discrimination case, he wrote: “Today’s opinion is an inspiring demonstration of how thoroughly up-to-date and right-thinking we Justices are in matters pertaining to the sexes (or as the Court would have it, the genders), and how sternly we disapprove the male chauvinist attitudes of our predecessors. The price to be paid for this display – a modest price, surely – is that most of the opinion is quite irrelevant to the case at hand.”
  • More recently, Scalia had some snarky things to say in his opinion on the Affordable Care Act case, which he has redubbed SCOTUScare, and on hippies who support gay marriage.
qkirkpatrick

Rediscovered trenches bring WWI to life in England - Washington Times - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...s-bring-wwi-to-life-in-england

wwi britain history culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Two lines of trenches face off across No Man’s Land. A soldier marches, rifle in hand, along a ditch. These are instantly familiar images of World War I - but this is Britain, a century on and an English Channel away from the battlefields of the Western Front.
  • This overgrown and oddly corrugated patch of heathland on England’s south coast was once a practice battlefield, complete with trenches, weapons and barbed wire. Thousands of troops trained here to take on the German army. After the 1918 victory - which cost 1 million Britons their lives - the site was forgotten, until it was recently rediscovered by a local official with an interest in military history.
  • Now the trenches are being used to reveal how the Great War transformed Britain - physically as well as socially.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The trenches, near the town of Gosport, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of London, were rediscovered a few months ago by Robert Harper, head of conservation at the local council. A military history buff, he noticed some crenellated lines on a 1950s aerial photograph of the area, and was startled to recognize the pattern of “the classic British trench system.”
  • the aim at the mock battlefield is “to repopulate the landscape,” to tell the stories of some of the troops who trained there. Soldiers from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. all passed through this area, close to the major naval base of Portsmouth, on their way to the front.
  • qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15
     
    A line of trenches is discovered in Britain and is now proposed to be the site of a new battlefield.
Javier E

At Carrier, the Factory Trump Saved, Morale Is Through the Floor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-trump-absenteeism-morale.html

working class manufacturing jobs

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • From afar, one might assume the picture is rosy: Indiana has an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent, and for people without a college degree, few employers offer the kind of salary and benefits that Carrier does. But when I got to Indianapolis in July, I found that the factory Mr. Trump is often credited with saving is plagued by rising absenteeism and low morale.
  • What’s ailing Carrier isn’t weak demand. Furnace sales are strong, and managers have increased overtime and even recalled 150 previously laid-off workers. Instead, employees share a looming sense that a factory shutdown is inevitable — that Carrier has merely postponed the closing until a more politically opportune moment.
  • In some ways, the situation is a metaphor for blue-collar work and life in the United States today. Paychecks are a tad fatter and the economic picture has brightened slightly, but no one feels particularly secure or hopeful
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Several times in late July and early August, so many workers were missing that the furnace line had to shut down in midday — even more disruptive than an early-morning halt. That hadn’t happened in years, employees said. Some workers cite illness, while others claim days under the Family and Medical Leave Act, saying they are taking care of sick relatives
  • On the worst days, according to one group leader, up to one in five workers are out. It’s true that the company has been running the factory hard — up to 60 hours a week with mandatory overtime, six days in a row — and some absenteeism could be due to sheer exhaustion, Mr. Roell allowed. But “bad blood,” as he put it, is at least as much to blame. “Workers feel like Carrier is going to leave,” he said, “whether we come to work or not.”
  • A week after the election, the president-elect called the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies. They worked out terms: Carrier would lay off 632 of its roughly 1,350 blue-collar employees in Indianapolis, but in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks, it would keep the plant open and invest $16 million in new equipment. A little more than half of the workers would keep their jobs.
  • “There have been a few days when three people don’t show up and I’ve had to work on the line all day,” Mr. Maynard said. “The attitude, the demeanor — they’re not grateful that they have a job. The absenteeism is real bad. A lot of us need our jobs. Others look at it and they don’t really care anymore.”
  • The bad vibes can be catching. “It makes it so depressing you don’t feel like going in,” he added. “I need the job, but some days you just want it to be over with.”
  • Yes, Mr. Hayes said, the company would invest in the Carrier facility, as it had promised Mr. Trump. But those funds were earmarked for automation, and would ultimately mean fewer jobs in Indianapolis, not more. Assembly-line positions there were not ones “that people really find all that attractive over the long term,” Mr. Hayes said. There were “great, great people” there, he added, “but the skill set to do those jobs is very different than what it takes to assemble a jet engine.” The Carrier faithful didn’t appreciate the slights
  • Even before the closure announcement, he said, supervisors gathered people from the lines and pointed out, ominously, that their counterparts in Mexico missed fewer days. “I’m worried they will use the absenteeism as an excuse to shut the factory,” Mr. Roell said. “They aren’t doing anything to improve morale.”
  • Mr. Roell doesn’t want his son, 10, or his daughter, 15, to follow him into factory work. “We tell them all the time to go to college or trade school,” he said. “It’s just not stable working in manufacturing. One day, the factory is going to go to another state or country.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 1659 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page