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Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
Javier E

Opinion | We Should Have Known So Much About Covid From the Start - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vid-pandemic-michael-mina.html

covid summary overview lessons history policy pandemic culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • I spoke to Mina about what seeing Covid as a textbook virus tells us about the nature of the pandemic off-ramp — and about everything else we should’ve known about the disease from the outset.
  • you can get exposed or you can get vaccinated. But either way, we have to keep building our immune system up, as babies do. That takes years to do. And I think it’s going to be a few more years at least.
  • And in the meantime?We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in mortality. We’ve even seen, I’d say, a dramatic decline in rates of serious long Covid per infection.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • But I do think it’s going to be a while before this virus becomes completely normal. And I’ve never been convinced that this current generation of elderly people will ever get to a place where it is completely normal. If you’re 65 or 75 or even older — it’s really hard to teach an immune system new tricks if you’re that age
  • And so while we may see excess mortality in the elderly decline somewhat, I don’t think we’ll see it ever disappear for this generation who was already old when the pandemic hit. Many will never develop that robust, long-term immunological memory we would want to see — and which happens naturally to someone who’s been exposed hundreds of times since they were a little baby.
  • There’s a similar story with measles. There is no routine later-life sequelae, like shingles, for measles. But what we do see is that, in measles outbreaks today, there are some people who were vaccinated who get it anyway. Maybe 5 to 15 percent of cases are not immunologically naïve people, but vaccinated people.
  • Is it really the case that, as babies, we are fighting off those viruses hundreds of times?The short answer is yeah. We start seeing viruses when we’re 2 months old, when we’re a month old. And a lot of these viruses we’ve seen literally tens, if not hundreds of times for some people by the time we’re adults. People tend to think that immunity is binary — you’re either immune or you’re not. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a gradient, and your protection gets stronger the more times you see a virus.
  • We used to think we just had this spectacular immune response when we first encountered the virus at, say, age 6, and that the immune response lasted until we were 70. But actually what we were seeing was the effect of an immune system being retrained every time it came into contact with the virus after the initial infection — at 6, and 7, and 8, and so on. Every time your friend got chickenpox, or your neighbor, you got a massive boost. You were re-upping your immune response and diversifying your immunological tools — potentially multiple times a year, a kind of natural booster.
  • But now, in America, kids get chickenpox vaccines. So you don’t have kids in America getting chickenpox today, and never will. But that means that older Americans, who did get it as kids, are not being exposed again — certainly not multiple times each year. And it turns out that, in the absence of routine re-exposures, that first exposure alone isn’t nearly as good at driving lifelong immunity and warding off shingles until your immune system begins to fall apart in old age — it can last until you’re in your 30s, for example but not until your 70s.
  • With Covid, when it infects you, it can land in your upper respiratory tract and it just start replicating right there. Immediately, it’s present and replicating in your lungs and in your nose. And that alone elicits enough of an immune response to cause us to feel really crappy and even cause us to feel disease.
  • But we could have just set the narrative better at the beginning: Look, you might get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be really low, and if you get a booster, you might still get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be even lower. That’s something I think humans can deal with, and I think the public could have understood it.
  • But it’s why we don’t see the severe disease as much, with a second exposure or an exposure after vaccination: For most people, it’s not getting into the heart and the liver and stuff nearly as easily.
  • But it doesn’t have to. It’s still causing symptomatic disease. And maybe mucosal vaccines could stop this, but without them we’re likely to continue seeing infections and even symptomatic infections.
  • through most of 2020 and into 2021, though. Back then, I think the conventional wisdom was that a single exposure — through infection or vaccination — would be the end of the pandemic for you. If this is basic virology and immunology, how did we get that so wrong?
  • The short answer is that epidemiologists are not immunologists and immunologists are not virologists and virologists are not epidemiologists. And, in general, physicians don’t know anything about the details.
  • But this failure had some pretty concrete impacts. When reinfections first began popping up, people were surprised, they were scared, and then, to some degree, they lost trust in vaccines. And the people they were turning to for guidance — not only did they not warn us about that, they were slow to acknowledge it, as well.
  • It had dramatic impacts and ripple effects that will last for years to limit our ability to get populations properly vaccinated.
  • the worst thing we can do during a pandemic is set inappropriately high expectations. These vaccines are incredible, they’ve had an enormously positive impact on mortality, but they were never going to end the pandemic.
  • And now, there’s a huge number of people questioning, do these vaccines even do anything?
  • For babies born today, though, I really think they’re not going to view Covid as any different than other viruses. By the time they are 20, it will be like any other virus to them. Because their immune systems will have grown up with it.
  • Instead, we set society up for failure, since people feel like the government failed everyone, that biology failed us, and that this was a crazy virus that has broken all the rules of our immune system, when it’s just doing what we’ve always known it would do.
  • How do you wish we had messaged things differently? What would it have meant to communicate early and clearly that Covid was a textbook virus, as you say?I think the biggest thing would have been just to say, we understand the enemy.
  • To say that this is a textbook virus, it doesn’t mean that it’s not killing people. Objectively, it’s still killing more people than any other infectious disease
  • What it means is that we could’ve taken action based on what we knew, rather than waiting around to prove everything and publish papers in Nature and Science talking about things we already knew.
  • We could have prepared for November and December of 2020 and then for November and December of 2021. But everyone kept saying, we don’t know if it’s going to come back. We knew it was going to come back and it makes me want to cry to think about it. We did nothing and hundreds of thousands of people died. We didn’t prepare nursing homes because we all got to the summer of 2020 and we said, cross our fingers.
  • We knew how tests worked. We knew about serial testing and why it was important for a public health approach. We knew that vaccines could have really good impacts once they were around. And if you were looking through the correct lens, we even knew that they weren’t going to stop transmission.
  • We didn’t have to live in a world where we were flying blind. We could have lived in a world where we’re knowledgeable. But instead, we chose almost across the board to will ourselves into this state of fear and anxiety.
  • And that really started in the earliest days. Almost the first experience I had was a lot like that movie with Jennifer Lawrence —Don’t Look Up.
  • none of this was complicated. You just had to ask a simple question: what would happen if you took away all immunity from an adult? Well, once you control for no immunity, adults are going to get very, very sick.
  • Of course, by and large, babies didn’t get very sick from this disease.Babies are immunologically naïve, but they are also resilient. A virus can tear up a baby, but a baby can repair its tissue so fast. Adults don’t have that. It’s just like a baby getting a cut. They’ll heal really quick
  • An adult getting a cut — you go by age, and every decade of age that you are, it’s going to take exponentially longer for that wound to heal. Eventually get to 80 or 90 and the wound can’t even heal. In the immunology world, this is called “tolerance.”
  • why are all these organ systems getting damaged when other viruses don’t seem to do that? It’s natural to think, it’s Covid — this is a weird disease. But it’s much more a story about immunity and how it develops than about the virus or the disease. None of our organ systems had any immune defenses around to help them out. And I think that the majority of post-acute sequelae and multi-organ complications and long Covid — they are not the result of the virus being a crazy different virus, but are a result of this virus replicating in an environment where there were such absent or exceedingly low defenses.
  • Is it the same whenever we encounter a virus for the first time?Think about travelers. Travelers get way more sick from a local disease than people who grew up with that virus. If you get malaria as a traveler, you’re much more likely to get really sick. You don’t see everyone in Nicaragua taking chloroquine every day. But you definitely see travelers taking it, because malaria can be deadly for adults.
  • What about, not severity, but post-acute complications — do we have long malaria? Do we have liver complications from dengue?
  • The really hard part of answering that question is there’s just not enough data on the frequency of long-term effects, because nothing like this has ever happened at such scale. It’s like everyone in Europe and North America suddenly traveled to a country where malaria was endemic.
  • Or think about H.I.V. It essentially kills your immune system, and once the immune barriers are down, other viruses that used to infect humans would get into tissues that we didn’t like them to get into. If there wasn’t such a clear signal of a loss of CD-4 T cells to explain it, people might still be scratching their heads and going, man, I wonder why all these patients are getting fungal infections. Well, there’s a virus there that’s depleting their immune system.
  • Covid is absolutely waking the world up to this — to the fact that there are really weird long-term sequelae to viruses when they infect organ systems that would normally be protected. And I think we’re going to find that more and more cancers are being attributed to viral infections.
  • It wasn’t that long ago that we first learned that most cases of cervical cancer were caused by H.P.V. — I think the 1980s. And now we have a vaccine for H.P.V. and rates of cervical cancer have fallen by two-thirds.
  • what about incidence? We’ve talked at a few points about how important it is to think about all of these questions in terms of the scale. What is the right scale for thinking about future long Covid, for instance, or other post-acute sequelae?
  • I think the absolute risk, per infection, is going down and down and down. That’s just true.
  • he U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, which shows a much lower risk of developing long Covid now, from reinfection, than from an initial infection earlier in the pandemic.
  • the worst is definitely behind us, which is a good thing, especially for people who worry that the problems will keep building and a lot of people — or even everyone — will get long Covid symptoms. I don’t think there’s a world where we’re looking at the babies of today dealing with long Covid at any meaningful scale.
  • a lot of the fear right now comes from the worst cases, and there’s a lot of worst cases. Even one of the people that I know well, I know in their mind they’re worried that they’ll never recover, but I think objectively they are recovering slowly. It might not be an eight month course. It might be a year and a half. But they will get better. Most of us will.
aleija

Opinion | For Wildlife, It's Nursery Season. Please Don't Steal Their Babies. - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...spring-wildlife-rescue.html

environment opinion wildlife

shared by aleija on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The best thing to do for a healthy nestling is always to return it to the nest. If the parents are alive, they’ll start caring for their baby again.
  • Wild animals are protected by a host of federal and state laws. It’s unwise — and in most cases illegal — to attempt to raise a wild orphan without a permit.
  • Thing is, it wasn’t mine. It was its own baby bird, and it deserved to live a wild life. Only a licensed wildlife rehabber could give it the best possible chance of that.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Baby birds aren’t the only youngsters brought to Walden’s Puddle by concerned people like me. The problem is that it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a baby animal that needs help and a baby animal whose worried parents are nearby, just waiting for the worried human to go away.
  • Fallen nestlings need help, for example, while fledglings are best left alone. Fledglings are babies too — still learning to fly, still being fed by their parents — but they don’t belong in a nest. “Fledgling songbirds often spend several days on the ground,” said Ms. Campbell. “To us they look tiny and helpless, but if they are fully feathered, then they are fine to be on the ground.”
  • And if a wild animal has moved into your own home — if a groundhog has burrowed under your foundation, say, or a raccoon has built a nursery in your attic — don’t hire an exterminator to trap and kill it, or even to relocate it: Animals evicted from their territories rarely survive, and this time of year they leave orphans behind.
  • The best option is just to wait a few weeks till the babies are ready to leave the nest, and then repair the hole where they entered. If giving them a little time isn’t feasible, humane forms of harassment can inspire the mother to move her family to a more hospitable location.
  • But others will adapt, and we will find ourselves living in ever closer proximity to one another. The least we can do is learn to recognize when a wild creature needs our help. And if we can make it less convenient for them to move into our homes while creating a healthier environment for them outdoors, we can all thrive. Together.
Javier E

The Boomers Are to Blame for Aging America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...592336

boomers aging generation politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history
  • what’s to blame for this institutional aging?
  • One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic
  • most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial g
  • Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s
  • These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.
  • There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.
  • Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.
  • hey also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.
  • even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water
  • the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.
  • these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of lif
  • graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend
  • most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates
  • It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s
  • Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time
  • Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of liabilitie
  • Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.
  • Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence
  • there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending
Javier E

Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-global-decline-cause-ddaf8be2

population demographic revolution decline global response

shared by Javier E on 14 May 24 - No Cached
  • The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
  • Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.
  • Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
  • “The demographic winter is coming,”
  • Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
  • Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
  • A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
  • Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since
  • In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s. Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2
  • He has found that national birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected.
  • China reported 9 million births last year, 16% less than projected in the U.N.’s central scenario. In the U.S., 3.59 million babies were born last year, 4% less than the U.N. projected. In other countries, the undershoot is even larger: Egypt reported 17% fewer births last year. In 2022, Kenya reported 18% fewer.
  • In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100. By 2022 it had lowered and brought forward the peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That, too, is likely out of date
  • the University of Washington now thinks it will peak around 9.5 billion in 2061 then start declining. 
  • The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
  • In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.
  • In 2017, when the fertility rate was 1.8, the Census Bureau projected it would converge over the long run to 2.0. It has since revised that down to 1.5. “It has snuck up on us,”
  • Historians refer to the decline in fertility that began in the 18th century in industrializing countries as the demographic transition. As lifespans lengthened and more children survived to adulthood, the impetus for bearing more children declined. As women became better educated and joined the workforce, they delayed marriage and childbirth, resulting in fewer children. 
  • Some demographers see this as part of a “second demographic transition,” a societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable. 
  • In research published in 2021, the University of Maryland’s Kearney and two co-authors looked for possible explanations for the continued drop. They found that state-level differences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt could explain almost none of the decline
  • “We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify,” they conclude.
  • while raising children is no more expensive than before, parents’ preferences and perceived constraints have changed
  • “If people have a preference for spending time building a career, on leisure, relationships outside the home, that’s more likely to come in conflict with childbearing.” 
  • Once a low fertility cycle kicks in, it effectively resets a society’s norms and is thus hard to break, said Jackson. “The fewer children you see your colleagues and peers and neighbors having, it changes the whole social climate,”
  • Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.
  • Urbanization and the internet have given even women in traditional male-dominated villages a glimpse of societies where fewer children and a higher quality of life are the norm. “People are plugged into the global culture,
  • mothers and fathers, especially those that are highly educated, spend more time with their children than in the past. “The intensity of parenting is a constraint,”
  • Sub-Saharan Africa once appeared resistant to the global slide in fertility, but that too is changing. The share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022
  • Jose Rimon, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, credits that to a push by national leaders in Africa which, he predicted, would drive fertility down faster than the U.N. projects. 
  • Mae Mariyam Thomas, 38, who lives in Mumbai and runs an audio production company, said she’s opted against having children because she never felt the tug of motherhood. She sees peers struggling to meet the right person, getting married later and, in some instances, divorcing before they have kids. At least three of her friends have frozen their eggs,
  • Danielle Vermeer grew up third in a family of four children on Chicago’s North Side, where her neighborhood was filled with Catholics of Italian, Irish and Polish descent and half her close friends had as many siblings as her or more.
  • Her Italian-American father was one of four children who produced 14 grandchildren. Now her parents have five grandchildren, including Vermeer’s two children, ages 4 and 7.
  • The 35-year-old, who is the co-founder of a fashion thrifting app, said that before setting out to have children, she consulted dozens of other couples and her Catholic church and read at least eight books on the subject, including one by Pope Paul VI. She and her husband settled on two as the right number.“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.
  • Perhaps no country has been trying longer than Japan. After fertility fell to 1.5 in the early 1990s, the government rolled out a succession of plans that included parental leave and subsidized child care. Fertility kept falling.
  • In 2005, Kuniko Inoguchi was appointed the country’s first minister responsible for gender equality and birthrate. The main obstacle, she declared, was money: People couldn’t afford to get married or have children. Japan made hospital maternity care free and introduced a stipend paid upon birth of the child. 
  • Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.
  • This year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rolled out yet another program to increase births that extends monthly allowances to all children under 18 regardless of income, free college for families with three children, and fully paid parental leave.
  • noguchi, now a member of parliament’s upper house, said the constraint on would-be parents is no longer money, but time. She has pressed the government and businesses to adopt a four-day workweek
  • If you’re a government official or manager of a big corporation, you should not worry over questions of salary now, but that in 20 years time you will have no customers, no clients, no applicants to the Self-Defense Forces.”
  • Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed one of Europe’s most ambitious natality agendas. Last year he expanded tax benefits for mothers so that women under the age of 30 who have a child are exempt from paying personal income tax for life. That’s on top of housing and child-care subsidies as well as generous maternity leaves. 
  • Hungary’s fertility rate, though still well below replacement, has risen since 2010. But the Vienna Institute of Demography attributed this primarily to women delaying childbirth because of a debt crisis that hit around 2010. Adjusted for that, fertility has risen only slightly, it concluded.
  • The usual prescription in advanced countries is more immigration, but that has two problems.
  • With no reversal in birthrates in sight, the attendant economic pressures are intensifying. Since the pandemic, labor shortages have become endemic throughout developed countries. That will only worsen in coming years as the postcrisis fall in birthrates yields an ever-shrinking inflow of young workers, placing more strain on healthcare and retirement systems.
  • worsening demographics could make this a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth.
  • The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.
  • As more countries confront stagnant population, immigration between them is a zero-sum gam
  • Historically, host countries have sought skilled migrants who enter through formal, legal channels, but recent inflows have been predominantly unskilled migrants often entering illegally and claiming asylum.
  • High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance,
  • Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigratio
  • As birthrates fall, more regions and communities experience depopulation, with consequences ranging from closed schools to stagnant property values. Less selective colleges will soon struggle to fill classrooms because of the plunge in birthrates that began in 2007, said Fernández-Villaverde. Vance said rural hospitals can’t stay open because of the falling local population.
  • An economy with fewer children will struggle to finance pensions and healthcare for growing ranks of elderly. South Korea’s national pension fund, one of the world’s largest, is on track to be depleted by 2055
  • There’s been little public pressure to act, said Sok Chul Hong, an economist at Seoul National University. “The elderly are not very interested in pension reform, and the youth are apathetic towards politics,” he said. “It is truly an ironic situation.”
Javier E

Inequality and Web Search Trends - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ity-and-web-search-trends.html

internet search inequality regional

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • In the hardest places to live – which include large areas of Kentucky, Arkansas, Maine, New Mexico and Oregon – health problems, weight-loss diets, guns, video games and religion are all common search topics.
  • In the easiest places to live, the Canon Elph and other digital cameras dominate the top of the correlation list. Apparently, people in places where life seems good, including Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming and much of the large metropolitan areas of the Northeast and West Coast, want to record their lives in images.
  • Beyond cameras, subjects popular in the easiest places include Baby Joggers, Baby Bjorns and baby massage; Skype and Apple devices like the iPod Nano; a piece of workout equipment known as a foam roller; and various foreign destinations (Machu Picchu, New Zealand, Switzerland and Pyeongchang, the South Korean host city for the 2018 Winter Olympics).
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the main lesson of the analysis is a sobering one. The rise of inequality over the last four decades has created two very different Americas, and life is a lot harder in one of them.
  • Income has stagnated in working-class communities, which helps explain why “selling avon” and “social security checks” correlate with the hardest places from our index. Inequality in health and life expectancy has grown over the same time. And searches on diabetes, lupus, blood pressure, 1,500-calorie diets and “ssi disability” – a reference to the federal benefits program for workers with health problems – also make the list. Guns, meanwhile, are in part a cultural preference, but they are also a health risk.
  • In the places on the other end of the spectrum, the picture is much brighter. People have disposable income to buy new technology and take faraway vacations. Their time spent prostrate on a foam roller or out running with the baby in a jogging stroller is more than enough to make up the occasional cupcake. And of course they are intent on passing down their way of life to the next generation, via Baby Bjorns and early access to technology.
bluekoenig

Explainer: The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping Trial | Antiques Roadshow | PBS - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...indbergh-baby-kidnapping-trial

baby kidnapping trial pbs US history culture crisis

shared by bluekoenig on 16 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 16 Dec 19
     
    This is an article about the Lindbergh baby and his subsequent kidnapping and death. Charles Lindbergh's, famous for his flight across the Atlantic, son was kidnapped overnight by Richard Hauptmann who demanded a ransom for the return of his son. Hauptmann received his money from the Lindberghs for the safe return of their child, but lied to them about the whereabouts of their child. It was a month later that Hauptmann had dropped and killed the child trying to transport him out of the Lindbergh house and buried his body two miles from their home. Hauptmann was found and tried for the murder of their child, creating a public fiasco
criscimagnael

Senegal President sacks health minister after hospital fire that killed eleven babies -... - 0 views

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

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Senegalese President Macky Sall has fired his health minister as the country mourns eleven babies killed by a fire at the neonatal ward of a hospital in the western city of Tivaouane.
  • Sarr was attending the World Health Assembly conference in Geneva during the time of the fire at the Mame Abdou Aziz Sy Dabakh Hospital, which occurred late Wednesday. He cut short his trip and returned to Senegal Thursday, the health ministry said.
  • Before his dismissal, Sarr told local radio station RFM that the blaze which engulfed the Tivaouane hospital's newborn unit was caused by an electrical short circuit.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The reported death in April of a pregnant woman who was refused a cesarean by three midwives also sparked outrage in the country.
  • Four babies were killed in the Linguere hospital fire, the health ministry said last April.
  • 'Hospitals now places of death'
  • Too much negligence, indifference, casualness!... Hasn't going to the hospital become a risk today?"
  • "11 babies. How could this happen? How could they leave those babies in the fire? Why didn't they evacuate them when the fire started? Were emergency services alerted in time? Were there no emergency fire extinguishers on these premises...? No, but that is unacceptable!"
maddieireland334

Hillary Clinton: Increase Planned Parenthood Taxpayer Funding - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...ed-parenthood-taxpayer-funding

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Democrat 2016 contender Hillary Clinton tweeted Friday that she would like to see Planned Parenthood obtain an increase in taxpayer funding.
  • In an interview with Fusion, Clinton said that–if elected president–she would urge Congress to give the abortion business a raise in taxpayer funding.
  • “I am not only against defunding Planned Parenthood, but I would like to see Planned Parenthood even get more funding,” Clinton said. “Because, often times, it is both the first and the last resort for healthcare.”
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  • Referring to Planned Parenthood–which was founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger–as the “go-to place” for abortions for black women, Clinton said that when taxpayer funding for abortion services is blocked by federal law, “the people who are going to suffer the most are going to be low-income women of color, that’s just the fact.”
  • In a much-cited report released early in 2014, New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that more black babies were aborted in the city than were born during the year 2012.
  • Planned Parenthood’s recent historic endorsement of Clinton as a primary candidate comes following a series of undercover videos exposing the organization’s apparent practices of selling the body parts of aborted babies on the open market and altering the position of babies during abortions to harvest the most intact organs.
ecfruchtman

Party of Andrej Babis wins Czech election - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by ecfruchtman on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Babis has been dubbed the "Czech Trump" by some media outlets because of his business empire and populist leanings.
  • Babis has been dubbed the "Czech Trump" by some media outlets because of his business empire and populist leanings.
    • ecfruchtman
      ecfruchtman on 24 Oct 17
       
      Will his business influence his political policies?
  • ANO, which has been governing in coalition with the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, held a double-digit lead going into the vote, Reuters said.
    • ecfruchtman
      ecfruchtman on 24 Oct 17
       
      His popularity differs from Trump as his polls held a double-digit lead.
  • ecfruchtman on 24 Oct 17
     
    It's interesting to see someone with a business empire assume the role of power, I wonder what differences they'll be between their political styles.
bluekoenig

Baby Fae's Baboon to Human Heart Transplant: How It Happened | Time - 0 views

time.com/...baby-fae-history

heart transplant time heart transplant science medicine us history culture

shared by bluekoenig on 15 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 15 Nov 19
     
    This is a very interesting article about Baby Fae, an infant born with a fatal heart defect that received a heart transplant from a baboon and became the longest living animal heart recipient up to that date.
bluekoenig

The Nanny Murder Trial | Retro Report | The New York Times - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

US history crisis culture retro report retro report medicine new york times medical crime

shared by bluekoenig on 10 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 10 Dec 19
     
    This is a Retro Report on the murder trial of a British nanny who was accused of killing baby Matthew through a little known abuse syndrome called "shaken baby". "Shaken Baby Syndrome" has become a much-debated accusation as it is a huge criminal charge for a triad of signs that can come from a multitude of causes and places and are often not directly witnessed when they occur. It is difficult to diagnose with total certainty "shaken baby" and that type of child abuse
Javier E

Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616581

politics history crisis culture US trust anomie polarization progressive progress

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion
  • Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s
  • A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
  • ...168 more annotations...
  • In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.
  • Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
  • Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g
  • When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.
  • This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society
  • under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still
  • We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.
  • The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.
  • The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.
  • Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice
  • A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.
  • I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.
  • Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.
  • The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.
  • The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”
  • Nations with low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling economies.
  • We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos
  • The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.
  • The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.
  • The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.
  • For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations
  • Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.
  • moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.
  • This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.
  • It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them
  • Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.
  • Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.
  • Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations
  • gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.
  • When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.
  • Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.
  • People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.
  • Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see.
  • As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”
  • During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions
  • In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.
  • By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.
  • Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi
  • sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate
  • In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.
  • In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.
  • In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”
  • Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.
  • There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.
  • Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.
  • Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.
  • Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons
  • As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.
  • high national trust is a collective moral achievement.
  • High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.
  • Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America are among the most marginalized.
  • Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust
  • In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.
  • People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.
  • In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.
  • The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the lower-middle class and the working poor.
  • this group makes up about 40 percent of the country.
  • “They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”
  • the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.
  • In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted
  • Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.
  • A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing.
  • Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.
  • Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.
  • “values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away
  • Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home
  • the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.
  • By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth
  • First, financial insecurity
  • As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
  • Next, emotional insecurity:
  • fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
  • Then, identity insecurity.
  • All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.
  • liquid modernity
  • Finally, social insecurity.
  • n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?
  • Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”
  • In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.
  • Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.
  • People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t there; they become risk averse
  • Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent
  • People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”
  • In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed
  • People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.
  • fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.
  • When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.
  • By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.
  • From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession
  • These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.
  • The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the hardest
  • “low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic
  • Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.
  • Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them
  • The president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily disaster area
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.
  • The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.
  • In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.
  • In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.
  • Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.
  • South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.
  • For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.
  • On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system
  • On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy
  • In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.
  • In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”
  • Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil
  • 55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths
  • Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.
  • This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.
  • institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.
  • By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed,
  • Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.
  • People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.
  • The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
  • The Failure of Society
  • The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”
  • Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.
  • While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed
  • in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.
  • Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value
  • When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.
  • The Crack-up
  • This wasn’t just a political and social crisis, it was also an emotional trauma.
  • The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent
  • By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001
  • In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.
  • By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.
  • The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.
  • The Age of Precarity
  • Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.
  • The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.
  • This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.
  • From risk to security.
  • we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers
  • In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.
  • From achievement to equality
  • In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy
  • Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.
  • From self to society
  • If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.
  • The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”
  • From global to local
  • When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.
  • From liberalism to activism
  • enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.
  • Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.
  • liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle
  • The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.
  • The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.
  • How to Rebuild Trust
  • Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.
  • In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.
  • But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.
  • As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on
  • After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.
  • The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.
  • Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?
  • I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.
  • The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.
  • The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?
  • social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.
  • Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.
  • Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.
  • For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust
  • But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.
  • By David Brooks
Javier E

Opinion | Reflections on Stephen L. Carter's 1991 Book, 'Reflections of an Affirmative ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ive-action-stephen-carter.html

affirmative action racism essentialism preference race reflections

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.”
  • “I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”
  • The fact that Thomas was very likely nominated because he was Black and because he opposed affirmative action posed a conundrum for many supporters of racial preferences. Was being Black enough? Or did you have to be “the right kind” of Black person? It’s a question Carter openly wrestles with in his book.
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  • A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.
  • The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face
  • The demise of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”
  • Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.
  • What immediately struck me on rereading it was how prescient Carter was about these debates 32 years ago. What role affirmative action should take was playing out then in ways that continue to reverberate.
  • But the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.
  • An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”
  • Carter took issue with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race consciousness would be central to overcoming racism
  • , it’s hard to imagine Carter welcoming the current vogue for white allyship, with its reductive assumption that all Black people have the same interests and values
  • He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”
  • Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”
  • In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.”
  • However well intentioned you may be, when you reduce people to their race-based identity rather than view them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you risk making sweeping assumptions about who they are. This used to be called stereotyping or racism.
  • he rejected all efforts to label him, insisting that intellectuals should be “politically unpredictable.
  • “Critics who attempt to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the Black right wing will be making a mistake. He is not a conservative, neo- or otherwise. He is an honest Black scholar — the product of the pre-politically correct era — who abhors the stifling of debate by either wing or by people of any hue.”
  • This strikes me as the greatest difference between reading the book today and reading it as an undergrad at a liberal Ivy League college: the attitude toward debating controversial views. “Reflections” offers a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas, something academia, media and the arts still prized in 1991.
  • Today, a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away
criscimagnael

Biden administration sourcing 380,000 pounds of baby formula from Australia as part of ... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ustralia-operation-fly-formula

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  • The Biden administration announced Wednesday it is acquiring more than 4 million 8-ounce bottles and 380,000 pounds of infant formula from Australia to be delivered to the United States by next week to address the ongoing baby formula shortage gripping the nation.
  • Operation Fly Formula,
  • Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that Bubs Australia could export infant formula. It is expected to export enough powdered formula to produce 27.5 million 8-ounce bottles in the U.S.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Biden also on Wednesday announced a third Operation Fly Formula mission to ship approximately 3.7 million 8-ounce equivalents of Kendamil infant formula.
  • The White House has said it is working "24/7" to address the issue.
  • Abbott Nutrition's Sturgis, Michigan, facility, which exacerbated the industry-wide shortage, is expected to restart production June 4, meaning products from the plant won't return to store shelves until at least mid-July, according to the company's production timeline. 
Javier E

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nary-science-of-junk-food.html

food nutrition science technology oligopoly economics culture profit addiction

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.
  • The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive
  • the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.
  • He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.
  • as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”
  • When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.
  • One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.
  • This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.
  • The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”
  • at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category
  • he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”
  • men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)
  • I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt
  • the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.
  • Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year
  • Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.
  • “We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”
  • The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.
  • He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”
  • Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.
  • There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools
  • The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.
  • Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”
  • the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.
  • If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.
  • Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”
malonema1

The Pritzker Prize, Architecture's Most Prestigious Award, Gets Political | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...e-prizes-political-crazy-world

us

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World Related Galleries Stunning Images Show the Earth's Imperiled Water Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World The FCC Graciously Sets Internet Providers Free to Sell Your Data Keeping Fentanyl Out of the US Will Take More Than a Wall Range Rover's New Baby SUV Will Swaddle You for $50,000
  • “Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”
  • “That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Consider RCR Arquitectes’ choice to run its shop in a town of 30,000 people, instead of the nearby metropolis Barcelona. It’s quaint in that way—practically mom-and-pop. Yet, the firm’s three architects work collaboratively, building open structures that anyone can enjoy, the jury says. It’s a much lighter declaration than choosing, say, a woman like Jeanne Gang or an Iranian practice like Admun Studio.
  • RCR Arquitectes’s buildings evoke the same sentiment, by letting light and greenery inside.
Javier E

Epidemiology: Study of a lifetime : Nature News - 0 views

www.nature.com/...471020a.html

UK generation epidemiology tracking

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • "It's unique and groundbreaking in the history of epidemiology. It's the only study to have chased an entire cohort across its life course — and it's not yet finished," says Ezra Susser, an epidemiologist who works with cohort studies at Columbia University in New York. He says that cohort research has been vital in seeding the idea that disease evolves as a result of events throughout life. "You gain enormous depth of understanding in how that disease came to be by following someone over their life course."
  • Bright children from the middle classes were more likely to pass the 11+ and do well at school than were equally bright working-class children, although supportive parents and good teachers could better a child's odds. The attrition of smart but poor boys (girls counted for less) became known as the 'waste of talent', turning Douglas's next two books — The Home and the School (1964) and All Our Future (1968) — into must-read educational references and contributing to the introduction of non-selective 'comprehensive' schools in the 1960s
  • He found that babies with the lowest birth weights had the highest risk of heart disease as adults. Study after study from the 1946 cohort supported the link, showing a tangle of connections between infant and child growth or development and adult traits from cognitive ability to frailty, diabetes, obesity, cancer and schizophrenia risk. "It isn't the same story every time, but we find an endless stream of long-term associations in quite 'noisy' data," says Kuh. "Big babies were more likely to get breast cancer. Small babies were more likely to have poor grip strength. Those who grew fast postnatally have more cardiovascular risk."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Kuh and others emphasize that fates are not fixed by early life. "I don't ever want the findings to be interpreted as purely deterministic," says Kuh; she prefers the more optimistic idea that disease risks result from an accumulation of experiences throughout life, and that education, diet or other factors can shift poor trajectories to better ones.
Javier E

Why Conservatives Must Abandon Trumpocracy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550685

conservatism gop trump politics boomers party

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican Party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
  • The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.
  • If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • That means slowing the pace of immigration so that the existing population of the country does not feel it is being displaced and replaced. Economists will argue that a country with a slow-growing population needs more immigrants to sustain the growth of its labor force. But a population is a citizenry as well as a labor force, and when it grows slowly, it can less easily assimilate newcomers. Immigration is to natural population increase as wine is to food: a good complement, a bad substitute.
  • In the most immediate sense, that means accepting that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and to work to reform it so that it costs less and protects middle-class families more
  • The stability of American society depends on conservatives’ ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.
  • Then struck the financial crisis, followed by the presidency of Barack Obama. The proportion of baby boomers who called themselves “angry with government” surged from 15 percent before 2008 to 26 percent the next year. By 2011, 42 percent of baby boomers were labeling themselves “conservative,” the same percentage as the next generation up.
  • Here’s what those right-leaning boomers did mean by “conservatism.” If read a list of scally liberal statements like, “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” boomers became increasingly likely to deliver a stern no over the 20 years between the 1990s and the 2010s. In fact, by 2010, they had become the age cohort most likely to answer no, more so than either their elders or juniors.
  • They were the cohort most likely to attribute individual economic troubles to those individuals’ own personal failings, rather than to ill fortune, racism, or any other systemic cause.
  • The boomers had faced more competition for everything, from jobs to housing, and now faced an ominous retirement environment. If they acted like shipwreck survivors in an already overcrowded lifeboat … well, the boat really was jammed awfully tight.
  • Americans
  • “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts,” reported Teresa Ghilarducci of The New York Times. They would need their federal retirement benefits much more than they had anticipated back when they were younger and more liberal.
  • As when they had resisted the draft in the 1960s, so now when they refused changes to Medicare, the politics of the baby boom generation were the politics of generational self-defense.
  • “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” Tea Partiers differentiated between those who worked (or who had worked) and those who sought something for nothing—in other words, between people as they imagined themselves and the people they imagined competing against them.
  • In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution.
  • Of the U.S. residents who lacked health insurance prior to the 2008 financial crisis, 27 percent were foreign born. As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.”
  • The social scientist Robert Putnam observed with dismay in 2007 that “new evidence from the U.S. suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Projects of social and economic reform crash into the reality that human beings most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity. In a society undergoing rapid demographic change, loyalties narrow.
  • Republican politicians since the 1980s had spoken a language of “hope” and “opportunity.”
  • “Believe in America!” “A new American century!” What are they talking about? wondered voters battered and bruised by the previous American century.
  • the political language of the 1980s had lost its power. The most common age for white Americans in 2015 was 55. These older white voters were more eager to protect what they had than to hustle for more. They wanted less change, not more. They cared about security, not opportunity. Protection of the status quo was what candidate Trump offered.
  • One poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified. The Left’s hopes for a social democratic politics founded on class without regard to race look only slightly less moribund than the think-tank conservatism of low taxes and open borders.
  • Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonalit
  • Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.
  • Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.
anonymous

Smuggled, Beaten and Drugged: The Illicit Global Ape Trade - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...icking-bonobos-orangutans.html

congo apes trade wildlife nature culture

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The Illicit Global Ape Trade
  • Mr. Stiles found an Instagram account offering dozens of rare animals for sale, including baby chimpanzees and orangutans dressed in children’s clothes. He sent an email to an address on the account — “looking for young otans” (the industry standard slang for orangutans) — and several days later received a reply.“2 babies, 7.5k each. Special introductory price.”
  • Such ape shows are a growing business in Southeast Asia, despite international regulations that prohibit trafficking in endangered apes.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Apes are big business — a gorilla baby can cost as much as $250,000 — but who exactly is buying these animals is often as opaque as the traffickers’ identity.
  • Ape trafficking is a little-known corner of the illicit wildlife trade, a global criminal enterprise that hauls in billions of dollars. But unlike the thriving business in elephant ivory, rhino horns, tiger bone wine or pangolin scales, ape smuggling involves live animals — some of the most endangered, intelligent and sensitive animals on Earth.
  • n central African towns (as elsewhere in the world), many chimpanzees are kept as pets. Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, who lives in a riverside mansion in Kinshasa, the capital, has a large chimp locked up in a cage.
  • But poaching an ape is a serious crime in Congo, and nonprofit wildlife groups have been assisting the Congolese authorities in prosecuting offenders.
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