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jlessner

Anti-Semitism is once again on the march in Europe - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-abe8-e1ef60ca26de_story.html

europe anti-semitism

shared by jlessner on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • In the long and blood-soaked history of Europe’s Jews, the death of four more in a Parisian kosher market is, at best, a footnote. But they were not the accidental victims of the terrorists’ wrath, not just merely in the way or in the line of fire. They were singled out for who they were and not for what they had done — like publish provocative cartoons. They were killed for being Jews.
  • The Arab world weeps for the Palestinians — but only on cue and not too much
  • Here is where the Jew plays a role. He can be blamed.
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  • Anti-Semitism is the most durable and pliable of all conspiracy theories. It supposedly accounts for the death of Christ and the Jewish dominance of the liberal media. It carefully noted the disproportionate number of Jews in the communist movement and in the capitalist movement. Anti-Semitism can account for the wealth of the Jews and their scientific and artistic achievements. They are — we are — a most nimble people. We’ve had to be.
  • Blaming Israel for anti-Semitism misses the point. For at least 1,948 years, anti-Semitism both existed and thrived when Israel did neither. The pogroms of Europe — and the occasional ones of the Muslim Middle East — took place with no Israel in sight.
  • The Holocaust consumed 6 million Jews and not because Hitler was pro-Palestinian. Anti-Semitism infected ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the subtle mind of T.S. Eliot and the tinkering brain of Henry Ford way before any future Israeli had pushed around any future Palestinian. Anti-Semitism does not need a reason. It needs only an excuse.
  • The remedy — the cure — is education and assimilation. In the United States, high levels of anti-Semitism in the Hispanic population dissipate with assimilation.
Javier E

Childhood Lead Exposure Causes a Lot More Than Just a Rise in Violent Crime | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...t-more-just-rise-violent-crime

toxic sixties behavioral problem liberalism conservatism

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • a new paper out that investigates the link between childhood lead exposure—mostly via tailpipe emissions of leaded gasoline—and violent crime. Unsurprisingly, since her previous research has shown a strong link, she finds a strong link again. But she also finds something else: a strong link between lead and teen pregnancy.
  • a new paper out that investigates the link between childhood lead exposure—mostly via tailpipe emissions of leaded gasoline—and violent crime. Unsurprisingly, since her previous research has shown a strong link, she finds a strong link again. But she also finds something else: a strong link between lead and teen pregnancy.
  • The neurological basis for the lead-crime theory suggests that childhood lead exposure affects parts of the brain that have to do with judgment, impulse control, and executive functions. This means that lead exposure is likely to be associated not just with violent crime, but with juvenile misbehavior, drug use, teen pregnancy, and other risky behaviors. And that turns out to be the case. Reyes finds correlations with behavioral problems starting at a young age; teen pregnancy; and violent crime rates among older children.
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  • For years conservatives bemoaned the problem of risky and violent behavior among children and teens of the post-60s era, mostly blaming it on the breakdown of the family and a general decline in discipline.
  • Liberals tended to take this less seriously, and in any case mostly blamed it on societal problems.
  • conservatives were right. It wasn't just a bunch of oldsters complaining about the kids these days. Crime was up, drug use was up, and teen pregnancy was up. It was a genuine phenomenon and a genuine problem.
  • liberals were right that it wasn't related to the disintegration of the family or lower rates of churchgoing or any of that. After all, families didn't suddenly start getting back together in the 90s and churchgoing didn't suddenly rise. But teenage crime, drug use, and pregnancy rates all went down. And down. And down.
  • Most likely, there was a real problem, but it was a problem no one had a clue about. We were poisoning our children with a well-known neurotoxin, and this toxin lowered their IQs, made them into fidgety kids, wrecked their educations, and then turned them into juvenile delinquents, teen mothers, and violent criminals. When we got rid of the toxin, all of these problems magically started to decline.
  • This doesn't mean that lead was 100 percent of the problem. There probably were other things going on too, and we can continue to argue about them.
Javier E

The Gift That Keeps Giving - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-gift-that-keeps-giving.html

foreign policy fear terrorism threat opportunity

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • the real star of the book, the ubershaper of everything, is this “age of fear” that has so warped our institutions and policy priorities. Will it ever go away or will bin Laden be forever that gift that keeps on giving?
  • the focus on terrorism, combined with our gotcha politics, has “killed creative thinking” in Washington, let alone anything “aspirational” in our foreign policy.
  • This was a mistake on many levels, Rothkopf insisted: “Not only did it produce the overreaction and excesses of the Bush years, but it also produced the swing in the opposite direction of Obama — who was both seeking to be the un-Bush and yet was afraid of appearing weak on this front himself”
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  • hence doubling down in Afghanistan and re-intervening in Iraq, in part out of fear that if he didn’t, and we got hit with a terrorist attack, he’d be blamed.
  • Fear of being blamed by the fearful has become a potent force in our politics. We’ve now spent over a decade, Rothkopf added, “reacting to fear, to a very narrow threat, letting it redefine us, and failing to rise as we should to the bigger challenges we face — whether those involved rebuilding at home, the reordering of world power, changing economic models that no longer create jobs and wealth the way they used to” or forging “new international institutions because the old ones are antiquated and dysfunctional.”
  • The post-9/11 era will not be seen as a golden age in U.S. foreign policy,” he responded. “Largely, this is because 9/11 was such an emotional blow to the U.S. that it, in an instant, changed our worldview, creating a heightened sense of vulnerability.” In response, “not only did we overstate the threat, we reordered our thinking to make it the central organizing principle in shaping our foreign policy.”
  • the key threats come from crumbling states that can be managed only by rebuilding them at a huge cost, with uncertain outcomes and dodgy partners. Americans don’t want that job. Yet these disorderly states create openings for low-probability, high-impact terrorism, where the one-in-a-million lucky shot can really hurt us. No president wants to be on duty when that happens either.
  • I don’t think Obama has done that badly navigating all these contradictions. He has done a terrible job explaining what he is doing and connecting his restraint with any larger policy goals at home or abroad.
  • 9/11 has distracted us from building resilience the way we used to, by investing in education, infrastructure, immigration, government-funded research and rules that incentivize risk-taking but prevent recklessness.
  • “We used to invest in those things more than anyone,” said Mukunda, “because they offered high-probability, high-impact returns.” Now we don’t, and we are less resilient as a result
  • We’re also not investing enough in the low-probability, high-payoff innovations — like the Internet or GPS
johnsonma23

Egyptian terrorists tied to ISIS, YouTube message says - CNN.com - 0 views

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

egyptian terrorists crisis

shared by johnsonma23 on 12 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • the Sinai-based militant group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, or ABM, allegedly announces its allegiance to ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State.
  • blames tyrants and their "Jewish agents and their allies" for decades of Muslim suffering. The message also calls ISIS "the emergence of a new dawn."
  • The group has killed hundreds of Egyptian police officers and soldiers. The largest attack was last month in the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 31 soldiers.
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  • ABM's attacks
  • Officials in Egypt blame Hamas in Gaza for aiding the militant group, an accusation Hamas denies
  • targeted the Egyptian government, there is growing fear that an association with ISIS could expand the threat to civilian and tourist sites.
  • threat to security forces operating in this area is so severe that at times, a shoot-on-sight curfew goes into effect between Arish, the largest city in northern Sinai, and the Rafah border crossing with Gaza
  • checkpoints dot northern Sinai to prevent the movement of weapons and fighters
  • government relocated more than a thousand families away from the border in a move to eliminate cover for any tunnels between Egypt and Gaza
  • ABM was often associated with al Qaeda. Similar messages on social media proclaimed the group's allegiance
  • ssociation with ISIS could also further damage ABM's image with most Egyptians. Egypt relies heavily on tourism and any organization that threatens this source of income risks loss of support.
Javier E

Economic history: What can we learn from the Depression? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...economic-history-0

policy history depression financial system wall street economics stimulus protectionism crashcri crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Can economic historians give policy-makers advice on the basis of what they believed caused the Great Depression? A discussion of this topic by Britain’s top economic historians in a lecture at Cambridge University on November 4th suggested the question is more complex than it first appears
  • what has made producing lessons more difficult is that many traditional views about the causes of the Depression have been overturned by academics in recent decades.
  • Although the rise of protectionism increased the velocity and depth of the depression when tariffs started rising in 1930, they were still only responsible for part of the fall in world GDP during the Depression
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  • The idea that the Wall Street crash caused the depression has also gone out of favour in recent years.
  • As with the rise of protectionism, it seems that the Wall Street crash was a symptom of problems in the global economy, rather than the underlying cause of them.
  • Economic historians now focus on a different candidate to take the blame for the sudden economic collapse of the 1930s: the structure of the world financial system before 1929. In particular, the work of the economic historians such as Mr Eichengreen and Peter Temin has recently stressed the importance of the malfunctioning of the gold standard currency system as the cause of the Depression, as well as its severity.
  • This system came to a head when the global economy started what, at first, seemed to be a very ordinary business cycle downturn in the late-1920s. When the drop in global demand caused balance-of-payments crises in countries around the world due to gold outflows, they were forced to use fiscal and monetary means to deflate their economies to protect the fixed value of their currencies (they also resorted to tariffs).This amplified the recession into a depression.
  • According to some monetarist historians, the four waves of banking crises in the 1930-33 period that bankrupted half of America’s banks were caused by the Federal Reserve tightening monetary policy in response to gold outflows.
  • According to research by Mr Eichengreen, countries that escaped the gold standard and changed to floating exchange rates first, such as Britain in 1931 and America in 1933, tended to recover earlier and far faster. The critique of monetary policy as a conduit of Depression dates back to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's "Monetary History of the United States", first published in 1963
  • Policy-makers have drawn some lessons from the 1930s. Unlike in the Depression, central banks in Britain and America avoided unnecessary monetary tightening. Instead, they slashed interest rates and used unconventional monetary stimulus such as quantitative easing in an effort to fend off deflation (a scourge of the Depression). The role of banking crises in turning a normal recession into a deep depression has also been recognised. Governments pulled out the stops to prevent the Lehman failure from generating a global financial meltdown, keenly aware of the role of financial contagion in the 1930s. 
  • lessons from the Great Depression for Europe's current problems may be more difficult to discern than one might assume. The euro zone is a fixed-exchange-rate system, with elements similar to those of the gold standard. But the political and economic constraints holding back policy-makers are different from those that prevailed in the 1930s. Economists now say that the higher level of financial integration in Europe today makes leaving the euro-zone a much riskier prospect than was leaving the gold standard was back in the 1930s. And the euro zone has a central bank that can print euros—something the gold-standard system lacked.
  • Perhaps economic historians can make a better contribution by ensuring the past is not abused in debates about modern-day crises. For instance, putting all the blame on Wall Street for the Great Depression—or on bankers in the current crisis—does not stand up to historical scrutiny. The responsibility may more properly lie in a complex combination of factors, like how global financial systems are structured. But this still needs be interpreted from modern day evidence rather than in over-simplistic “lessons” from the past
Javier E

What Washington Refuses To Admit « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...at-washington-refuses-to-admit

foreign policy intervention history

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The <img class="alignright wp-image-138319" src="https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/troopsjoeraedlegetty1.jpg?w=398&h=265" alt="" width="398" height="265" />president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.
  • These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again
  • This is not just a Republican fixation. It’s a function of the hegemony reflexively sought by liberal internationalists as well.
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  • The US is intervening – despite clear evidence that it can do no real good – simply to make sure that ISIS doesn’t actually take over the country and thereby make president Obama look bad.
  • But the IS was never likely to take over Kurdistan or the Shiite areas of Iraq, without an almighty struggle. And our elevating ISIS into a global brand has only intensified its recruitment and appeal.
  • We responded, in other words, in the worst way possible and for the worst reasons possible: without the force to alter the underlying dynamic, without a breakthrough in multi-sectarian governance in Baghdad, without the regional powers taking the lead, without any exit plan, and all to protect the president from being blamed for “losing Iraq” – even though “Iraq” was lost almost as soon as it was occupied in 2003.
  • the leadership in both parties cannot help themselves when they have a big shiny military and see something they don’t like happening in the world.
  • Worse, our political culture asks no more of them. The Congress doesn’t want to take a stand, the public just wants beheadings-induced panic satiated by a pliant president (who is then blamed anyway), and the voices that need to be heard – the voices of those who fought and lost so much in Iraq – are largely absent.
  • To go back in and try to do again with no combat troops what we could not do with 100,000 is a definition of madness brought on by pride. It is to restart the entire war all over again. It makes no sense – except as political cover.
  • When will Washington actually admit its catastrophic errors and crimes of the last decade – and try to reform its own compulsive-interventionist habits to reflect reality rather than myth?
Javier E

More White People Die From Suicide and Substance Abuse: Why? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-and-substance-abuse-why.html

death rate statistics white narcotic

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Why would the death rate for middle-aged non-Hispanic whites be increasing after decades of decline while rates for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continue to fall? And why didn’t other rich countries have the same mortality rate increase for people in midlife?
  • if the death rate among middle-aged whites had continued to decline at the rate it fell between 1979 and 1998, half a million deaths would have been avoided over the years from 1999 through 2013. That, they note, is about the same number of deaths as those caused by AIDS through 2015.
  • The major causes of the excess deaths are suicides, drug abuse and alcoholism.
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  • In the past, drug abuse deaths were more common in middle-aged blacks than in middle-aged whites. Now they are more common in whites. The same pattern holds for deaths from alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. The suicide rate for whites was four times that of blacks.
  • Could people be taking drugs and killing themselves as a response to the economic slowdown? Maybe. But, if so, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case said, then why aren’t people in other countries responding the same way?
  • Recent reports of illness and disability might provide some clues. More middle-aged whites report that their general health is not good; and, more report chronic pain
  • older people are actually doing better — less addiction, disability rates falling.
  • how much of what they are seeing might be attributed to the explosive increase in prescription narcotics.
  • the people who report pain in middle age are the people who report difficulty in socializing, shopping, sitting for three hours, walking for two blocks.
  • Dr. Deaton envisions poorly educated middle-aged white Americans who feel socially isolated are out of work, suffering from chronic pain and turning to narcotics or alcohol for relief, or taking their own lives. Starting in the 1990s, he said, there was a huge emphasis on controlling pain, with pain charts going up in every doctor’s office and a concomitant increase in prescription narcotics.
  • Dr. Deaton noted that blacks and Hispanics may have been protected to an extent. Some pharmacies in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics live do not even stock those drugs, and doctors have been less likely to prescribe them for these groups.
  • So we're all the same after all.Under the right conditions - no control over your life, low pay, no job, little in the way of job prospects, no healthcare, little education, families break down when the man can't be the breadwinner, and then along comes poor health, substance abuse, depression, despair - all those ills that were blamed on black people's supposed lack of morals.Now that white kids are dying of heroin we need to change the laws, end the war on drugs, legalize pot, and change how we talk about what were formerly known as 'junkies'.White men are in despair as a result of economic problems, white kids are doing hard drugs in numbers that everyone's starting to notice, and AIDS is plaguing white communities, and now we need to care. So we're all human?
  • Because white people are depressed over their diminution in society by the policies of the Federal Government, the education system, racial animosity and biased media outlets that are rampant through the society. These doctors are clueless liberals that will try to find any reason to blame, other than the truth. It's not the drugs, it's what is causing them to want the drugs. White males have been denigrated for the past 50 years. The effects have to be building up and weighing on them.
  • John is a trusted commenter Boston 6 hours ago No, their diminution in society came from globalized capitalism. A lot of these working class white people were Reagan voters. I'm the same age as them, I saw it happen. They thought they were getting "Morning in America" but instead they got morning for Walmart and sunset for the working class. That's enough to make anybody turn to pills and booze.
  • DougH Lithonia, GA 7 hours ago To some extent, it's of their own making. High school educated whites tend to vote Republican. Over the last 30 years, Republicans have sold them a bill of goods. They abandoned unions, opposed increases in the minimum wage, and opposed regulation, including safety, wage fairness, etc.So now they are paid less. They have no way of changing that (short of high education) and the big beneficiaries of lower taxes have been the businesses and owners that for which they work. Did those owners bless the workers with the fruits of their benefits? Of course not. They kept the reduced expenses as profit, increased CEO wages, and kept cutting benefits before finally shipping their jobs overseas.Perhaps, if they stopped voting against their own interests, they would fair better.
  • dw659 Chicago 8 hours ago Why? Simple. Because to males, a 'loss of control' is an unacceptable change. 200 years of being 'in control' just because you are born white and male is ending. Many men can't face a world where they are of 'lower status' than women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. They don't want to live in that world.....
  • dale south africa 5 hours ago Its true ! I am a conservative man and i live i johannesburg. I cant imagine what it must be like respecting all things under the suns . From females, gays blacks etc Children of slaves dictating societies . oprah picking presidents. the bully is not allowed to be at his natural best and strongest with this new liberal socialist agenda , everyone equal attitude. im not white but if I was who would want that
  • Linda is a trusted commenter Oklahoma 54 minutes ago I know so many white men in this small town I live in who never had anything to do with their children. They didn't care about anybody through their productive years and now they're surprised that nobody cares about them.
  • AC USA 5 hours ago Could it be because these guys have no close family ties? They are the ages that their parents are probably in nursing homes or already passed away. These blue collar, high school educated guys fathered unwanted children with women to whom they may or may hot have been married and divorced. But now at middle age comes time for them to feel wanted and valued by their progeny (dad, dispense some life wisdom to us, help us with college, getting married, a down payment on a house, take your grand-kids fishing, etc.), but they dumped their kids by not wanting to pay child support, or having a bad attitude and not helping their kids at all past age 18. So they kids moved on without dad's love and "support" (monetary or emotionally). The "all for myself mentality" they have espoused has finally come home to roost. There is no going back in time, they are all alone, have no purpose as jobs are hard to come by at that age - even more-so blue collar ones - so they drink/take pills to dull the pain, then overdo it.
  • suzinne bronx 5 hours ago Think white families more often DO NOT stick together. At middle age and white, have ZERO contact with any family members. By the time I was 16 most had died, moved away or become estranged. Know this amps up my chances for suicide, and that's probably going to pan out too. Flag
  • Paul '52 is a trusted commenter NYC 2 hours ago The is the first cohort to experience the phenomenon that if you do the same job as your parents you won't do as well or better. These are the auto workers, the airport baggage handlers, the truck drivers. They are, in fact, more productive than their fathers, but they're not paid as well and they don't have pensions. And the disappointment is taking its toll.
johnsonma23

GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...sson-how-not-respond-terrorism

gop terrorism politics US

shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism
  • About 10 months ago, after terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 11 people, congressional Republicans quickly began looking for ways to blame American leadership
  • Republican field is dominated by candidates with no meaningful experience in or understanding of foreign affairs, and nearly all of whom continue to think the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was a great idea.
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  • A dark portrait of a vulnerable homeland – impotent against Islamic State militants, susceptible against undocumented refugees and isolated in a world of fraying alliances –
  • Ted Cru
  • military strikes against ISIS targets should be less concerned about “civilian casualties.”
  • the disastrous war McCain celebrated, should be blamed on President Obama’s foreign policy.
  • The one reaction nearly every Republican candidate agreed on is a refusal to accept Syrian refugees – as if the real lesson of the Paris attacks is feeling less sympathy for ISIS’s victims
  • the Republican’s rush toward “stop letting in refugees” is reminiscent of “the ‘travel ban now or we all die of Ebola’ fad of last year.”
  • But there’s also the unnerving track record of many Republican officials – including would-be presidents – who seem to fall to pieces every time there’s a crisis
  • The GOP’s responses to Friday night’s bloodshed was a discouraging reminder of a party that still doesn’t know what to do or say when mature leadership is required
cjlee29

In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...but-many-strands-of-blame.html

shared by cjlee29 on 18 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Having declared itself a caliphate — the successor to past Islamic empires, ending with the Ottomans — the Islamic State has made Syria and Iraq the central arena for global conflict.
  • Having declared itself a caliphate — the successor to past Islamic empires, ending with the Ottomans — the Islamic State has made Syria and Iraq the central arena for global conflict.
  • Having declared itself a caliphate — the successor to past Islamic empires, ending with the Ottomans — the Islamic State has made Syria and Iraq the central arena for global conflict.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • It has overcome its former partner and eventual rival, Al Qaeda, first in battle, then as the world’s pre-eminent jihadist group in reach and recruitment.
  • “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
  • Having declared itself a caliphate — the successor to past Islamic empires, ending with the Ottomans — the Islamic State has made Syria and Iraq the central arena for global conflict.
  • In an echo of the Cold War, Russia has committed its own planes and missiles, a challenge to the West’s perceived indecision and inaction.
  • struggles in the Middle East, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, between Shiite and Sunni, are also playing out.
  • The climax of the Islamic State’s rise came in June 2014, when it routed the Iraqi military police and captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, erasing the century-old border between Iraq and Syria established after World War I.
  • An American airstrike finally killed Mr. Zarqawi in June 2006. Four months later, his successors declared the founding of the Islamic State of Iraq.
  • in March 2008 an American lieutenant colonel, recalls vividly finding the Islamic State’s black, gold-fringed banner some 50 miles north of Baghdad.
  • They were not the only ones — Mr. Obama likened the group to the “J.V. team.”
  • Each was shaped by the larger forces of the Islamic world, in particular religious zeal, Al Qaeda and America’s war with Iraq. Each rejected the secular culture of the West, which many say was the target of the attacks in Paris.
  • “They rushed to announce the caliphate and appoint a leader,” he said. “This is a duty incumbent on Muslims, which had been absent for centuries and lost from the face of the earth.”
  • The question for the Islamic State, after years of expansion and success on its terms, even evidence of using mustard agent, is whether Paris proved one move too far — a brutality the world will not tolerate.
  • : Aerial attacks have in fact damaged its moneymaking oil infrastructure.
sarahbalick

Syria Blames U.S. in Base Bombing, but Americans Blame Russia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...syria-airstrikes.html

syria u s bombing americans russia

shared by sarahbalick on 08 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The Syrian accusation, in a statement carried by the official news agency, was the first time that President Bashar al-Assad’s government had held the Americans responsible for bombing a Syrian military facility since the United States began airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria more than a year ago.
  • A statement from the United States-led Combined Joint Task Force said that the coalition had conducted four airstrikes on Sunday, “all against oil well heads,” about 35 miles from the base. “We did not strike any vehicles or personnel targets in this area,” the statement said. “We have no indication any Syrian soldiers were even near our strikes.”
  • “We’ve got a radar track showing a Backfire bomber flying directly over the town that the Syrians named a few minutes before the first claims that we killed some Syrian troops,”
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  • “Both President Putin and Russian officials at various levels repeatedly emphasized our belief that an effective counteraction against these dangerous developments is only possible on the platform of a united coalition and an absolute coordination of any joint efforts,”
mcginnisca

We Talked to One of the World Trade Center Bombers About ISIS and Mass Shootings | VICE... - 1 views

www.vice.com/...lamic-state-and-mass-shootings

world trade center US politics history ISIS terrorism

shared by mcginnisca on 08 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Eyad Ismoil is one of the half-dozen men convicted for carrying out the World Trade Center bombings in 1993
  • sentenced to 240 years in prison for driving a rental van packed with a bomb into a garage, killing six and injuring about 1000 more
  • for someone who's supposed to "hate the infidels," he shows no signs of loathing towards the many prisoners and staff who openly despise him.
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  • when I first asked Ismoil about ISIS after the Paris attacks, he asked me one question back: "Why do you think they did it?" I responded with the only thing I knew: "They hate us."
  • He said that to resolve the conflicts between extremists in the Middle East and the West, it was important to talk "human to human," but he also made it clear that he empathizes at least somewhat with the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, many of his views would be considered appalling to the vast majority of Americans, but our conversation gave me a window into the worldview of people who think the US is to blame for terrorism.
  • So, the question should be who is the first to be blamed? Tell both sides of the story.
  • You don't have to recruit people for ISIS. They're Muslims from all over the world that have seen an injustice after 25 years and want to help their brothers. What you have to understand is the Iraqi people are the most stubborn of the Muslim world. They won't accept occupation or humiliation.
  • People over in America ask why ISIS did this. [But] people in the Middle East ask, "Why is the US doing this to us?" Put yourself in their shoes—France is dropping bombs for a year in Iraq and [more recently] Syria, destroying everything, women, children, buildings... A bomb doesn't discriminate between ISIS or women and children—it just destroys.
  • Imagine the Iraq and Syrian people. After a year of bombing, you see your people killed, land destroyed, children scared to do anything more than hide in the corners all day. All this coming from bombs in the sky and you can't stop it. What would you do?
  • ISIS is not jihadists recruited from all over to fight. They are the Sunni Muslims that have lived through 25 years of wars, torture, and rapes. They are the Iraqi and Syrian people that have suffered from unjust wars started by the US government. And when the US government [mostly pulled out of] Iraq in 2010, the Shia and Maliki government started killing the Sunni day and night under the watch of the Americans.
  • My religion prohibits attacks on civilians. Unfortunately, many Muslims don't know much about Islam
  • What about the Planned Parenthood attack?What this man did is worse then what the doctors do. If this is what he's angry at, taking life, he did worse. Islam doesn't believe in abortion—all life is precious....[But] what he did was kill adult people who are grown. How is he trying to solve the issue?
  • For every action, there's a reaction. If you throw a ball against a wall, it's going to come back at you. If you throw a ball hard, it's going to come back at you hard. This is the problem with all sides in these wars. We hit you, you hit back. We hit you hard, you hit back harder. Back and forth, back and forth. Nobody wins. Both sides end up with death and destruction.
  • To solve the problem from the root, everyone has to become human. They need to talk, human to human. Let the people decide what they want. Leave them alone. Everyone can come together and say enough is enough. How long are we going to keep this action up? For the rest of our lives?It's the law of the jungle that we're living in right now. We were given more sense than this. We walk on two legs, with our heads high. But right now, we are walking with our heads down. We need to lift our heads up, and use the brains God created for us.
  • The only thing that keeps us just is Islam. Because in Islam, the peace, the justice, comes from the sky. The one who created earth and man, he knows best.
  • The Arabs are not radicalizing themselves. Your government action is radicalizing the Arabs
  • "hate the infidels,"
Megan Flanagan

Istanbul bombing: Worst attack on Germans in over 13 years - CNN.com - 0 views

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

attack bombing crisis

shared by Megan Flanagan on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • suicide bombing on Sultanahmet Square Tuesday killed 10 people -- all of them Germans, the German Foreign Ministry confirmed Wednesday.
  • deadliest attack on Germans abroad in more than 13 years
  • Turkey detained 68 suspected terrorists in sweeps across seven provinces,
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  • As long as there is a training ground for ISIS on the other side of our border we will continue to have this problem, not only Turkey but Europe and U.S
  • Officials quickly blamed ISIS for the attack.
  • We have a free society ... but there are people who want us harmed,
  • No group claimed responsibility for the blast, yet Davutoglu pinned blame on ISIS, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq.
  • If Tuesday's blast is confirmed to be the work of the terrorist group, that will force Ankara to step up its anti-ISIS fight
  • An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,"
  • More than half the country's 17 million residents have fled
  • has begun allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey
  • Those explosions killed as many as 100 people and injured more than 240 others.
Javier E

Ted Cruz Says Donald Trump Is to Blame for Violence at His Rallies - First Draft. Polit... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...me-for-violence-at-his-rallies

violence campaign 2016 demagogue culture politics

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • “But in any campaign, responsibility starts at the top,” Mr. Cruz continued. “And when you have a campaign that disrespects the voters, when you have a campaign that affirmatively encourages violence, when you have a campaign that is facing allegations of physical violence against members of the press, you create an environment that only encourages this sort of nasty discourse.”
  • “When the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence, to punch people in the face, the predictable consequence of that is that it escalates,” Mr. Cruz said. “And today is unlikely to be the last such instance.”
  • But at the debate on Thursday, Mr. Cruz declined an opportunity to condemn Mr. Trump for the tenor of his events.
Javier E

The Sexual Politics of 2016 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-sexual-politics-of-2016.html

misogyny sexism demagogue culture

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a revolution in manners, a rejection of the civility codes of the educated class. As part of this, he rejects the new and balanced masculine/feminine ideal that has emerged over the past generation. Trump embraces a masculine identity — old in some ways, new in others — built upon unvarnished misogyny.
  • Traditional misogyny blames women for the lustful, licentious and powerful urges that men sometimes feel in their presence. In this misogyny, women are the powerful, disgusting corrupters — the vixens, sirens and monsters. This gynophobic misogyny demands that women be surrounded with taboos and purgation rituals, along with severe restrictions on behavior and dress.
  • Trump’s misogyny, on the other hand, has a commercial flavor. The central arena of life is male competition. Women are objects men use to win points in that competition. The purpose of a woman’s body is to reflect status on a man. One way to emasculate a rival man is to insult or conquer his woman.
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  • Trump represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility. He effectively tells men: You may be struggling, but at least you’re better than women, Mexicans and Muslims.
  • I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise. Many of them are victims of economic dislocation and it is hard to fault them for seeking a change, of course, even if it is simplistic and ignorant.
  • But in the realm of cultural politics, Trump voters do need to be held to account. They are participating in a descent into darkness. They are supporting a degrading wrong. This is the world your daughters are going to grow up in.
Javier E

Christians are suffering from complete spiritual blindness - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html

evangelicalism gospel suffering gop

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” claims that social justice is not, in fact, a definitional component of the gospel, and that it is heresy to elevate “non-essentials to the status of essentials.” As you might expect, the document affirms traditional beliefs on same-sex relationships and “God-ordained” gender roles. But it seems particularly focused on rejecting collective blame in racial matters. “We deny that . . . any person is morally culpable for another person’s sin,” the statement argues. “We further deny that one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.”
  • In case this wasn’t clear enough, the document goes on: “We reject any teaching that encourages racial groups to view themselves as privileged oppressors or entitled victims of oppression. . . . We deny that a person’s feelings of offense or oppression necessarily prove that someone else is guilty of sinful behaviors, oppression or prejudice.” Christians, in the view of MacArthur and his fellow signatories, must condemn both “racial animosity” and “racial vainglory.”
  • The MacArthur statement is designed to support not a gospel truth but a social myth. The United States, the myth goes, used to have systematic discrimination, but that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racism is now purely an individual issue, for which the good people should not be blamed. This narrative has nothing to do with true religion. It has everything to do with ignorant self-satisfaction.
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  • The purpose of “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” is clear enough. It is, as one prominent evangelical leader put it to me, “to stop any kind of real repentance for past social injustice, to make space for those who are indeed ethnonationalists, and to give excuse for those who feel Christians need only ‘preach the gospel’ to save souls and not love their neighbors sacrificially whether they believe as we do or not.”
  • It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the continuing social effects of hundreds of years of state-sponsored oppression, cruelty and stolen wages. It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the current damage of mass incarceration and failed educational institutions on minority groups. Prejudice and institutional evil are ongoing — deeply ingrained in social practice and ratified by indifference. Repentance is in order — along with a passion for social justice that is inseparable from the Christian gospel.
  • it seems this statement was created in outraged response to another group of evangelical Christians — the Gospel Coalition — that held a conference on the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. MacArthur clearly wants to paint the participants — including prominent pastors Tim Keller, Russell Moore, Thabiti Anyabwile and John Piper — as liberals at risk of heresy
Javier E

Capitalism in crisis: U.S. billionaires worry about the survival of the system that mad... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html

capitalism survival automation rich reform revolution crisis politics radical

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.
  • Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.
  • Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.
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  • in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.
  • “It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.
  • Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
  • One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it
  • “Winners Take All,” a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School. Giridharadas’s book was a withering attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that America’s iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have eluded a plodding and divided government.
  • For many of the students, schooled in the notion that business could make a profit while making the world a better place, Giridharadas’s ideas were both energizing and disorienting. Erika Uyterhoeven, a second-year student, recalled one of her fellow classmates turning to her when Giridharadas was finished. “So, what should we do?” her colleague asked. “Is he saying we shouldn’t go into banking or consulting?
  • Added another student: “There was a palpable sense of personal desperation.”
  • “The best thing that happened to me was that I lost my 2014 election,” he said. “Had I won . . . maybe I would’ve been a traditional neoliberal. It really forced my self-reflection and it pointed out every weakness I ever had.”
  • Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.
  • some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.
  • thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live
  • To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,”
  • The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said
  • Khanna had a different view. He saw the country’s problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.
malonema1

Full Transcript: Jeff Flake's Speech on the Senate Floor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-transcript-senate-speech.html

US Trump politics

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • JEFF FLAKE, Senator from Arizona: At a moment when it seems that our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than by our own values and principles, let me begin by noting the somewhat obvious point that these offices that we hold are not ours indefinitely. We are not here simply to mark time. Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office and there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.It must also be said that I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret because of the state of our disunion. Regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics. Regret because of the indecency of our discourse. Regret because of the coarseness of our leadership. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Regret for the compromise of our moral authority, and by our, I mean all of our complicity in this alarming and dangerous state of affairs. It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end. In this century, a new phrase has entered the language to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal.
  • “Ambition counteracts ambition,” he wrote. But what happens if ambition fails to counteract ambition? What happens if stability fails to assert itself in the face of chaos and instability? If decency fails to call out indecency? Were the shoe on the other foot, we Republicans — would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats?
  • When a leader correctly identifies real hurt and insecurity in our country, and instead of addressing it, goes to look for someone to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a pluralistic society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops.
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  • We resisted those impulses. Instead, we financed reconstruction of shattered countries and created international organizations and institutions that have helped provide security and foster prosperity around the world for more than 70 years.
Javier E

Jordan Peele Is the New Master of Suspense - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...master-of-suspense-11551708118

comedy suspense race exploitation culture movies

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Peele draws a straight line from his past, conducting laughs, to his present, conducting dread: “People who have done live comedy and who have written comedy develop a real sense of how an audience is going to react. It’s a skill that continues to sharpen, and in my directing career, it’s left me obsessed with riding the audience like a wave.”
  • “I do like to give the audience enough to figure it out, if they were to watch the movie enough, but I feel similarly to David Lynch in that I don’t think the audience needs to know everything. The key for me, as a director, is that I need to know everything, because the audience can sense it if I don’t. The beauty of Lynch’s work is that you can leave fulfilled and, at the same time, clueless as to what it was about.”
  • Peele wants social critiques to intertwine with his scares. “When you look at the great horror directors—George Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Alfred Hitchcock—they’re all talking about something without talking about it,
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  • Peele repeatedly explained how the notion of a post-racial America, which circulated around the 2008 election, struck him as part of a destructive national mind-set of denial. “The thing I didn’t feel we were talking about in any substantive manner was race. With this one, I asked myself, ‘What are we not ready to talk about now?’ And the answer for me was, ‘What is my part in this mess?’
  • “We’re living in a messy time,” he continues. “A dark time. And I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but what I don’t see happening enough is people looking at their own part in this dark turn. It’s so much easier to blame the other. It connects to something in human nature, and to a duality in the history and present of this country as well: this fear of the outsider. This movie was a way to say, What if the intruder is us? Maybe the monster has our face, and we’re so obsessed with some unrecognizable monster that we’ve been blinded to the real one.”
  • By the time he dropped out of Sarah Lawrence he’d become hyperliterate in horror and, simultaneously, obsessed with improv comedy. In both idioms, he has addressed complex questions about race, such as what it means to be authentically black—a question with particular resonance to a kid whose own dad once asked him why he “talked white.”
  • in Us. Rather than another meditation on race, Peele says, he wanted to explore questions of economic privilege, training his lens on an upper-middle-class American family that happens to be black.
  • “There’s this idea that we deserve our privilege,” Peele says, “but when someone enjoys privilege, there almost has to be someone suffering so you can have that. Which means it’s not deserved. It’s violent. In this country we shield ourselves from the people who make our shoes. The people who have to work three jobs. The people we’ve murdered to build over. The wars that have happened so that we can have what we have. If we really acknowledge our place in the world, we have to acknowledge the atrocities, even if we’re not active members in them.”
  • I observe that Peele has just paraphrased Marx’s theories of alienation in describing a potential Hollywood blockbuster, and he doesn’t miss a beat: “The Tethered are wearing red.”
  • “I can watch Us, just like I watched Get Out, and learn what I’m trying to say to myself,” he says. “You never make a film and know what you were doing entirely.”
  • Peele says that, in Hollywood, “the presumption used to be that a successful story is about someone who looks and feels like the audience. With the majority population being white, why would you make a movie with a protagonist of a different race than where your money is? It was a failure of imagination. Black people always saw white movies—because we had to! But also because when a story works, you see yourself in it no matter who you are.”
malonema1

Trump blames everyone but Russia - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

US crisis Russia

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • West Palm Beach, Florida (CNN)President Donald Trump, ensconced in his opulent private club of Mar-a-Lago this weekend, had a screed of combative thoughts.
  • Just 40 miles north of Parkland, the President blasted the FBI for missing warning signs about the shooter — and promptly turned the subject back to himself by suggesting the bureau was too preoccupied with the Russia investigation and could have prevented the shooting.Read More
  • In a series of tweets -- over a dozen since the indictment was revealed -- Trump has repeatedly said his 2016 campaign did not collude with Russian operatives ("no collusion!" he wrote), labeled Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Intelligence committee, a "leakin' monster of no control" and lamented the fact that "they are laughing their asses off in Moscow."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The tweets come hours before Trump will meet with House Speaker Paul Ryan, a lawmaker who has tried to avoid commenting on the President's Twitter missives. The messages threaten to overshadow a previously planned meeting on the party's legislative agenda and mid-term election outlook.
  • Late on Saturday night, Trump linked the admitted mistake by the FBI around last week's school shooting in Parkland with the Russia investigation. The Wednesday shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killed 17 people.
  • The FBI announced on Friday that they failed to act on a tip about Nikolas Cruz, the confessed shooter in the Parkland school massacre. A person close to Cruz, according to the FBI, contacted them on February 5 to report concerns. But the bureau did not appropriately follow established protocols in following up on the tip.
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