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katyshannon

Periodic table's seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added | Science | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...as-four-new-elements-are-added

IFTTT chemistry new elements periodic table discovery history Education science

shared by katyshannon on 06 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Guardian staff Sunday 3 January 2016 22.28 EST Last modified on Tuesday 5 January 2016 11.48 EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Shares 104,402 104k Comments 1,300 rounded-icon inline-bookmark inli
  • Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally completing the table’s seventh row and rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date.
  • The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The four were verified on 30 December by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the global organisation that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement.
  • IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118.
  • The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the Riken institute in Japan.
  • Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at Riken, said his team now planned to “look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond.” Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry said: “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal”.
  • The elements, which currently bear placeholder names, will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the coming months. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.
  • “IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalising names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).”
  • New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.
  • The four new elements, all of which are synthetic, were discovered by slamming lighter ­nuclei into each other and tracking the following decay of the radioactive superheavy elements.
  • Like other superheavy elements that populate the end of the periodic table, they only exist for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements.
maddieireland334

How El Chapo Was Finally Captured, Again - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...l-chapo-sinaloa-sean-penn.html

shared by maddieireland334 on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Stripped to his undershirt and covered in filth, the world’s most notorious drug lord dragged himself out of the sewers and into the middle of traffic.
  • The Mexican marines had been on Mr. Guzmán’s trail for more than six months, ever since he humiliated the nation by escaping its most secure prison through a tunnel that led into the shower floor of his cell.
  • But it had come at a cost. The authorities had swept through 18 of his homes and properties in his native lands. Days on end in the inhospitable mountains, where even a billionaire like Mr. Guzmán was forced to rough it, left him yearning for a bit of comfort.
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  • Just two blocks away, a big order of tacos was picked up after midnight on Jan. 8 by a man driving a white van, like the one believed to be driven by Mr. Guzmán’s associates, witnesses said.
  • Hours later, on a highway heading out of town, the authorities finally got Mr. Guzmán, arguably the most powerful drug dealer in the history of the trade, for the third time since 1993.
  • Mr. Guzmán’s capture — described using information from interviews with witnesses and government officials, police reports, military video and Mexican news reports confirmed by officials — brings to a close, for now, one of the most exhaustive manhunts the Mexican government has conducted, an endeavor that drew in more than 2,500 people across the nation.
  • As the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Mr. Guzmán is the embodiment of an identity the country has fought to shed for decades.
  • Either way, Mr. Guzmán represents a deep crisis for Mexico’s leaders as they struggle to define the country’s image.
  • His daring escape from prison last July, in view of the video camera in his cell, cast a lurid spotlight on the incompetence and corruption that has long dogged the Mexican state, driving many to view the government on a par with criminals.
  • El Chapo’s image, by contrast, seemed only to grow after his escapes. Perhaps more than the infamy he gained as a cartel chief — responsible for shipping tons of drugs to more than 50 countries around the world, with a wider reach than even Pablo Escobar in his heyday — Mr. Guzmán has earned a reputation as the world’s pre-eminent escape artist.
  • During the 17 months Mr. Guzmán was locked up, he met often with associates, not only to plan his legal defense, but also to plot his escape, Mexican officials said. His men purchased land within sight of the prison, constructing an outer wall and an unfinished building on the site. From there, a mile away, the digging began.
  • The Mexican authorities were monitoring the phones of Mr. Guzmán and his accomplices, reading the odd and unexpectedly tender exchanges between him and the actress. Mr. Guzmán promised to protect Ms. del Castillo as he would his own eyes, an affectionate phrase Mexican parents often say of their children.
  • Six days later, a detachment of marines swept in to capture Mr. Guzmán on his ranch, acting with information from American authorities. During the raid, Mr. Guzmán, who always took his two cooks with him wherever he went, darted into a gully as he fled, injuring his face and leg.
  • In the following weeks, operations continued in and around areas under Mr. Guzmán’s control. The brutal weather of an approaching winter also concerned the cartel leader — Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, where life could be more comfortable, was under constant surveillance. He needed to go somewhere outside his traditional zone of influence.
  • The government, aware that Mr. Guzmán was planning a trip to an urban center, followed one of his associates to a house in Los Mochis, on a busy road with a movie theater, restaurants and shopping nearby.
  • A commander ordered one of the marines to toss a grenade in front of one of the many doors blocking their advance. As the mission continued, two marines advanced down another hallway, pressing cautiously toward a staircase used by the surviving gunmen to escape to the roof, drawing fire away from the interior of the house.
  • After the marines arrived, Mr. Guzmán was taken to Mexico City in a helicopter, the capture finally over. Soon everyone was gone, leaving behind just one thing: an unpaid bill, according to an employee of the hotel.
  • To keep him locked up this time, the authorities said they would rotate his cells, never allowing him to stay anywhere long enough to burrow his way out again. Vigilance would be enhanced, with more officers and round-the-clock surveillance from extra cameras.
  • But to many, the longer the drug lord remains in prison in Mexico, the higher the risk of flight. His imprisonment could drag on for a year, perhaps longer, given the numerous — and creative — injunctions filed by his team of lawyers to fight his extradition to the United States, where he faces federal indictments on charges that include narcotics trafficking and murder.
sgardner35

Life returns -- slowly -- to MLK's old neighborhood - CNN.com - 0 views

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

shared by sgardner35 on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Besides, Smith says, he had just about everything he needed up on Auburn Avenue, then the center of black life in Atlanta. In 1956, Fortune magazine dubbed it the "richest Negro street in the world."
  • and the nearby King Center, which pays homage to the neighborhood's most famous resident, the Rev. Martin Luther King. Jr.
  • which led families and businesses to leave the neighborhood, and its struggle to rebuild. In the past five or six years, the narrative has taken a cautiously optimistic turn as new businesses and residential real estate open in the area and Georgia State University's footprint in the neighborhood expands.
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  • Smith's journey from Auburn Avenue to Morehouse College to regional division manager of the Federal Aviation Administration is in many ways a realization of King's dream of upward mobility for African-Americans.
  • ned funeral homes, a fast-food seafood joint and a convenience store -- is the masonic hall that was home to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's first office and its new Atlanta headquarters. Around the corner is a restored Madam C. J. Walker salon featuring antique hair care products.
  • "He would be disappointed in all the violence that still goes on and the crime. He would've thought that we would've advanced more toward peace and liberty and respecting everybody's rights. I know we're not there yet."
  • History hides in plain sight; blink and you might miss the explanatory signs hanging on poles and historic plaques on sides of buildings. One block from Smith's childhood home -- past Atlanta's two oldest
  • Today, the gas station is gone, replaced by a shopping plaza with a barber shop and a store selling homeopathic remedies, both popular with the seniors who live across the street in Wheat Street Towers. Ebenezer is still there, adjacent to the King Center, and King's birth home is up the street. The landmarks are the main destinations for tourists disembarking at the King historic district. Due to its relative high foot traffic, the streetcar stop attracts panhandlers offering tour guide services in exchange for donations to get them a bed at the Atlanta Mission.
  • lack-o
  • Today, it's home to a community urban garden, which started in 2010 and has proven sustainable through community farming initiatives.
  • A professional stylist who moved to Atlanta in the 1980s, de Forest was enchanted by the abandoned storefront with the salon's original signage miraculously preserved. Even better were the antique hair care products left behind.
  • Ten years ago, Sweet Auburn Bread Company owner Sonya James moved from the Sweet Auburn Curb Market on Edgewood into the Odd Fellows building, the former headquarters of the Atlanta Chapter of the Grand Order of Odd Fellows. The building's Jacobean revival architecture recalls the grandeur of the era when it served as a hub for black businesses and the site of a black social club.
  • General manager Douglas Jester, another Atlanta native, remembers when Auburn was the epicenter of the civil rights movement. Some of the pictures hanging on the restaurant's wall are of politicians -- Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young -- who visited Jester's school in the nearby Summerhill neighborhood to talk to students about black pride and the value of an education
  • "You're a product of your environment. I'm a good example of that. I would not have advanced in my life like I did had it not been for the environment I grew up in with Ebenezer and the Kings, feeling that failure is not an option," he said. "Then, there is systematic organized racism, against males and females and Hispanics and it's not getting any better with this presidential stuff we got going now. I think Dr. King and "Daddy King" would disappointed with some of the rhetoric we're hearing and the anti-Muslim stuff."
  • It's just one block away, but unlike on Auburn Avenue, white-owned businesses have anchored Edgewood Avenue for decades, many of which are still standing, said Joe Stewardson, president of the Old Fourth Ward Business Association. Even if white-owned businesses outnumber black-owned businesses on Edgewood, he says it's still among the most diverse business corridors and neighborhoods in Atlanta.
johnsonma23

North Korea: How to get serious with it (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

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

korea opinion US

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • How to get serious with North Korea
  • (CNN)North Korea's nuclear test last week follows a well-worn pattern that spans over a quarter century: Resort to periodic provocations, wait out the flurry of condemnations
  • All the while as Pyongyang advances its nuclear and missile technolog
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  • The record of the past quarter-century of nuclear diplomacy vis-à-vis Pyongyang is distinguished by blame, denial, and fantasy masquerading as policy.
  • The only way to change this equation is to persuade Pyongyang that its regime preservation is dependent on reform and disarmament.
  • Today, China will yet again make token gestures like signing on to U.N. Security Council resolutions while repeatedly violating those resolutions and actually increasing trade with Pyongyang
  • Second, delegitimize Kim's rule in the eyes of his people and the world by engaging them through broadcasting and other information operations directed at the North Korean people
  • Such tactics proved lucrative during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, when the U.S. appeased Pyongyang with some $1.3 billion in effectively unconditional aid. Instead, we must show Pyongyang that time is not on its side.
  • Pyongyang's first long-range missile test on August 31, 1998, led to the Clinton administration's reengagement of the North
  • First, block the Kim Jong Un regime's offshore hard currency reserves and income with financial sanction
  • But all Beijing has done so far is demonstrate a disingenuous pattern of diplomatic ambidexterity.
  • China will not solve the North Korea problem for the United States until China sees the Kim regime as a financial liability
  • A regime that systematically brutalizes its own people, deliberately starves its population and remains unaccountable to its people or the norms of civilization will feel little moral restraint about making war on its neighbors or arming terrorists.
  • Recent U.N. reports confirm that North Korea continues to rely on the dollar, and its access to the dollar system, to move its streams of hard currency, much of it derived from proliferation and illicit activities, in and out of its vast offshore deposits.
  • sanctions against North Korea have failed to achieve their objectives.
  • The Treasury Department has blocked the assets of Sudanese officials for human rights violations, of Iranian entities for censorship, of the leaders of Belarus and Zimbabwe for undermining democratic processes or institutions, and of Russian officials and financiers for aggression against a neighboring country
  • It has imposed comprehensive anti-money laundering restrictions on Iran and Myanmar, but not North Korea, the only state in the world known to counterfeit U.S. currency.
  • Until Washington applies sufficient financial pressure to threaten the survival of the regime in Pyongyang, it will lack sufficient leverage for diplomacy to work. T
  • The North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which this Tuesday passed the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly, would codify this strategy and require the administration to keep this pressure in place until it verifies North Korea's disarmament and humanitarian reforms.
Javier E

The 'insurgent left' and path dependency - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rgent-left-and-path-dependency

Democratic party strategy reform path dependency Politics

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • the insertion of the insurgents into the Democratic Party is allegedly creating anxiety among mainstream Democrats who worry that it provides the hard right with just the angle they need right now to hold onto power.
  • their goals are ambitious. But are they extreme and dangerous? Not at all, and in fact, the insurgents’ goals are directionally shared by moderates. The questions are how far to go and how best to get from here to there
  • Ocasio-Cortez ran on, among other things: Medicare for all, free public college and trade school, a job guarantee, ending private prisons and abolishing ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Consider the motivation for these ideas:
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  • is the angst of mainstream Democrats well-founded? I’m not sure it’s even real.
  • Look at the policy agenda of moderate Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb, who won a congressional district that went for Trump by almost 20 points. He’s for jobs through infrastructure investment, increasing health coverage through building on the Affordable Care Act, raising wages through strengthening unions and reducing student debt through refinancing at lower rates and partial debt forgiveness in exchange for public service.
  • It’s also an agenda that points in the same broad direction as that of the so-called insurgents. The difference between moderate and socialist Democrats is less about policy goals and more about path dependency.
  • Path dependency is the concept that where you end up is a function of where you start out. In this context, it means you can only get from the current policy regime to a more progressive one through incremental change. Medicare for More must proceed Medicare for All. Smaller, more customized job creation programs must proceed the guarantee of a good job for everyone who wants one
  • In practice, that means you can’t assume away the power of the health insurance industry in blocking single payer. You can’t assume the federal government can handily employ tens of millions of people in what are now private-sector functions. Instead, you build a public option into the health-care exchanges and you extend Medicare eligibility to slightly younger people. You subsidize private employers to hire targeted workers.
  • At least, that’s where you start. It’s not where you end. Under path dependency, the efficiency of the public option, if it is properly supported, will start to claw back excess profits from the current health-care system.
  • The logic of social justice and the policy agenda it implies is deep and persuasive, especially in a society as diverse as our own
  • The problem is that the intersection of wealth concentration and pay-to-play politics is undermining representative democracy, thereby blocking the electorate from a chance to see real, progressive change in action.
  • The solution is for path-dependent moderates to coexist and work closely with those who would leapfrog the path to more quickly achieve their goals.
  • Neither I nor anyone else can tell you who’s right, i.e., how binding the path is. That is an empirical question to be answered by a very different politics than we have today. To find that answer, we need to get to that new politics, and fast.
Javier E

Opinion | The Real Legacy of the 1970s - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onomy-united-states-1970s.html

economics politics culture inflation 1970s supply-side deregulation taxes

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • In most histories of how Americans became so polarized, the Great Inflation of the 1970s is given short shrift
  • Inflation was as pivotal a factor in our national crackup as Vietnam and Watergate
  • nflation changed how Americans thought about their economic relationships to their fellow citizens — which is to say, inflation and its associated economic traumas changed who we were as a people.
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  • It also called into question the economic assumptions that had guided the country since World War II, opening the door for new assumptions that have governed us ever since.
  • Slowly, though, inflation entered the picture. It hit 5.7 percent in 1970, then 11 percent in 1974. Such sustained inflation was something that had never happened in stable postwar America. And it was punishing. For a family of modest means, a trip to the supermarket was now a walk over hot coals.
  • Total credit card balances began to explode.
  • the average family of 1936 was near poor. Everyone was in it together, and if Bill couldn’t find work, his neighbor would give him a head of cabbage, a slab of pork belly.
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  • But the Great Inflation, as the author Joe Nocera has noted, made most people feel they had to look out for themselves
  • Throw in wage stagnation, which began in the early ’70s, and deindustrialization of the great cities of the North
  • Inflation also produced the manic search for “yield” — it was no longer enough to save money; your money had to make money, turning every wage earner into a player in market rapaciousness
  • Even as Americans scrambled for return, they also sought to spend
  • The Great Inflation was an inflection point that changed us for the worse. This moment can be another such point, but one that will change us for the better.
  • a 2006 Department of Labor study pegged the average household income of 1934-36 at $1,524. Adjust for inflation to 2018, that’s about $28,000, while the official poverty level for a family of four was $25,100
  • Americans became a more acquisitive — bluntly, a more selfish — people. The second change was far more profound.
  • John Maynard Keynes. His “demand side” theories — increase demand via public investment, even if it meant running a short-term deficit — guided the New Deal, the financing of the war and pretty much all policy thinking thereafter. And not just among Democrats: Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were Keynesians.
  • There had been a group of economists, mostly at the University of Chicago and led by Milton Friedman, who dissented from Keynes. They argued against government intervention and for lower taxes and less regulation. As Keynesian principles promoted demand side, their theories promoted the opposite: supply side.
  • Inflation was Keynesianism’s Achilles’ heel, and the supply-siders aimed their arrow right at it. Reagan cut taxes significantly. Inflation ended (which was really the work of Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve). The economy boomed. Economic debate changed; even the way economics was taught changed.
  • And this, more or less, is where we’ve been ever since
  • walk down a street and ask 20 people a few questions about economic policy — I bet most will say that taxes must be kept low, even on rich people, and that we should let the market, not the government, decide on investments. Point to the hospital up the street and tell them that it wouldn’t even be there without the millions in federal dollars of various kinds it takes in every year, and they’ll mumble and shrug.
  • we have a long way to go. Dislodging 40-year-old assumptions is a huge job. The Democrats, for starters, have to develop and defend a plausible alternative theory of growth
  • But others have a responsibility here too — notably, our captains of commerce.
  • They will always be rich. But they have to decide what kind of country they want to be rich i
  • Then along came Ronald Reagan. The great secret to his success was not his uncomplicated optimism or his instinct for seizing a moment. It was that he freed people of the responsibility of introspection, released them from the guilt in which liberalism seemed to want to make them wallow.
  • they can move moderate and maybe even conservative public opinion in a way that Democratic politicians, civic leaders and celebrities cannot.
  • A place of more and more tax cuts for them, where states keep slashing their higher-education spending and tuitions keep skyrocketing; where the best job opportunity in vast stretches of America is selling opioids; where many young people no longer believe in capitalism and record numbers of them would leave this country if they could?
  • Or a country more like the one they and their parents grew up in, where we invested in ourselves and where work produced a fair and livable wage?
Javier E

Genoa Bridge Collapse Throws Harsh Light on Benettons' Highway Billions - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...italy-autostrade-benetton.html

corruption italy

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The Benettons made occasional, bipartisan political donations but those did not explain the company’s influence. Autostrade could perform perfectly legal favors for politicians, like modernizing a stretch of local highway.
  • Several scholars say the skewed relationship resulted in a case of “regulatory capture,” the political scientists’ term for the situation when a watchdog bends to the interests of a company it is supposed to supervise.
  • When a center-left government took power in 2006, Autostrade’s contract came under scrutiny. The government blocked the company from selling itself to Abertis, a Spanish toll road operator, then signaled that Autostrade needed to be reined in
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  • “The problem was not the merger itself,” Antonio Di Pietro, then the minister of infrastructure and transport, said in a statement, “but concession rules that are too favorable toward the motorway operator, so much so that they led to the bad habit of automatic tariff hikes.”
  • The government approved a new law to encourage efficiency and lower tolls, except it never took effect. In 2008, the center-left government fell. The new conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, took power and amended the new law to stipulate annual increases in tolls right through to the end of the contract
  • Though it aided all of Italy’s toll road operators, Autostrade, the biggest, was the biggest beneficiary.
  • Beyond fixing blame for the bridge collapse, a central question of the Morandi tragedy is what happened to safety inspections. The answer is that the inspectors worked for Autostrade more than for the state.
  • For decades, Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company, has performed inspections on the bridge. If nominally independent, Spea is owned by Autostrade’s parent company, Atlantia, and Autostrade is also Spea’s largest customer. Spea’s offices in Rome and elsewhere are housed inside Autostrade.
  • One former bridge design engineer for Spea, Giulio Rambelli, described Autostrade’s control over Spea as “absolute.”“They even approve promotions inside of Spea,
  • Such potential conflicts are prohibited in other countries where Autostrade operates. In Chile, for instance, regulations block a private toll operator from hiring a company it owns to conduct inspections, according to Mariana Rocha, a spokeswoman at the country’s Ministry of Public Works.
  • Mr. Fonderico, the administrative law professor from Luiss Guido Carli University, said the ministry actually lacked the expertise to carry out its oversight role, particularly on a bridge as vexing as the Morandi. Over time, he said, the government behaved more like its first priority was cooperating with Autostrade, rather than regulating it.
  • Though the relationship between Autostrade and the government is now defined by pure hostility, a divorce is unlikely.The reason? If the company’s contract were terminated early, the state would need to pay Autostrade the remaining value of the contract, a sum that could exceed $17 billion.“The company would take the state to court,” Mr. Ponti said, “and it would win.”
malonema1

Donald Trump blocks release of Democratic Russia memo - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-43012430

US crisis trump

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • US President Donald Trump has blocked the release of a Democratic rebuttal of a Republican memo alleging the FBI's Russia inquiry is biased against him.In a tweet, he said he had told the Democrats "to re-do and send back in proper form!"The White House said Mr Trump could not declassify the Democrats' memo because of "sensitive passages" that created "concerns for national security".A congressional panel had voted unanimously to make it public. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi accused Mr Trump of trying to hide the truth about "the Trump-Russia scandal".
  • White House Counsel Don McGahn said the president was "inclined" to approve the memorandum's release but was "unable to do so at this time" because it contained "numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages".
  • Democrats argue the Nunes memo is an attempt to undermine the federal inquiry into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.The president has said he is willing to be interviewed under oath by the FBI.
malonema1

Supreme Court won't hear Trump bid to end DACA program - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

US crisis culture

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court said on Monday that it will stay out of the dispute concerning the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for now, meaning participants will still be able to renew their status.
  • The move will also lessen pressure on Congress to act on a permanent solution for DACA and its roughly 700,000 participants -- undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children.
  • Originally, President Donald Trump had terminated DACA but allowed a six-month grace period for anyone with status expiring in that window to renew. After that date, March 5, any DACA recipient whose status expired would no longer be able to receive protections.
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  • "You know, we tried to get it moved quickly 'cause we'd like to help DACA. I think everybody in this room wants to help with DACA, but the Supreme Court just ruled that it has to go through the normal channels, so it's going back in," Trump told a group of state governors at the White House. "There won't be any surprise. I mean, it's really sad when every single case filed against us -- this is in the 9th Circuit -- we lose, we lose, we lose, and then we do fine in the Supreme Court. But what does that tell you about our court system? It's a very, very sad thing. So DACA's going back, and we'll see what happens from there."<img alt="Sen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim " class="media__image" src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180214095613-dick-durbin-2-13-large-169.jpg">JUST WATCHEDSen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCHtheoplayer-texttra
  • "While we were hopeful for a different outcome, the Supreme Court very rarely grants certiorari before judgment, though in our view, it was warranted for the extraordinary injunction requiring the Department of Homeland Security to maintain DACA," O'Malley said. "We will continue to defend DHS's lawful authority to wind down DACA in an orderly manner."
jayhandwerk

Trump tariffs create uncertainty for Pentagon | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...reate-uncertainty-for-pentagon

Politics US trump economics policy

shared by jayhandwerk on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Military officials are still grappling with President TrumpDonald John TrumpAccuser says Trump should be afraid of the truth Woman behind pro-Trump Facebook page denies being influenced by Russians Shulkin says he has White House approval to root out 'subversion' at VA MORE’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum, uncertain as to how they might affect the Defense Department.
  • But he added that the Pentagon was concerned “about negative impact on our key allies” from the tariffs.
  • Lawmakers and industry executives are also warning Trump’s tariffs could result in higher costs for weapons systems and infrastructure projects.
knudsenlu

Twitter is the modern public square. So can the president block you? | Katie Fallow | O... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ern-public-square-donald-trump

modern politics twitter free speech trump

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • On Thursday, a federal court in New York will consider whether President Trump has the right to block certain individuals from interacting with him
  • he central institution of the first democracy was the Athenian assembly, where all important civic decisions were put to a vote. And the central tradition of the assembly was that every citizen could speak freely on all such matters. The ancient Greeks even had a word for one who did not participate – an “idiot” – the root of our modern insult.
  • Consider a typical day in political life circa 2018. The president tweets something significant, such as the transgender military ban, the appointment of a new FBI director, or his view on something Congress has done or will do. This information appears instantaneously to his roughly 40 million Twitter followers. Millions of these followers – supporters and opponents – begin to write 280-character reactions at internet speed.
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  • Though our current president is a uniquely polarizing figure, the principle at stake has nothing to do with political ideology. The impact of this ruling will apply to all government officials – Democratic, Republican and otherwise – who have chosen to use social media as an instrument of governing.
  • Other politicians also understand that, absent a legal prohibition, they can manipulate social media to make themselves seem more popular by quietly suppressing the speech of their critics
  • These words resonate even today. He of course knew a world of men orating to a few thousand fellow Greeks. He could never have imagined that same person in front of a screen, logged in to social media, but wrestling with the very same ideas of justice and fairness, war and peace, right and wrong with more than 200 million fellow citizens in a country nearly 3,000 miles wide.
  • But suppose he were asked to decide tomorrow’s case – is there any doubt whether he would grant them the very same right to speak and be heard on the most important issues of the day?
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy

democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
Javier E

White House blocked intelligence agency's written testimony saying human-caused climate... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...could-be-possibly-catastrophic

climate change intelligence agency trump

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • “I believe that there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways,” he said. “Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming. That wasn’t working. Then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather, you can’t miss.
  • During the interview he blamed China, India and Russia for polluting the environment and insisted the United States has “among the cleanest climates,” and noted that the United States had suffered extreme weather in the past. “Forty years ago, we had the worst tornado binge we’ve ever had. In the 1890s, we had our worst hurricanes."
  • “The president questions our change in jargon from warming to climate change to extremes as uncertainty on our side, but in reality we have come to learn that the impacts of greenhouse gases are much broader than we originally thought. By increasing atmospheric temperature, greenhouse gases can also cause drought and heat waves, ripening conditions for wildfires. In humid places, heat causes constant soil water evaporation leading to extreme precipitation, which falls on saturated soils and thus you commonly also get floods.”
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  • “The Earth’s climate is unequivocally undergoing a long-term warming trend, as established by decades of scientific measurements and multiple, independent lines of evidence,”
  • “Climate change effects could undermine important international systems on which the U.S. is critically dependent, such as trade routes, food and energy supplies, the global economy and domestic stability abroad.”
oliviaodon

Why Trump's Attack on the Time Warner Merger Is Dangerous for the Press - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...546623

russia press

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • There are several reasons the Trump administration move to block a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner raised eyebrows. It was without recent precedent, and was contradicted, within just a day, by the cancellation of so-called net-neutrality regulations, undermining the administration’s argument about protecting the little guy.
  • The relatives merits of allowing the merger—and of blocking it—have been argued extensively by better-versed minds.
  • This has gotten some worried attention, but not nearly enough. This should be a wake-up call for American journalists.
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  • I have seen this play out so many times before—in Russia, that scary place portrayed as one with no press freedom and dead journalists stacked like cords of wood. I have spent most of my professional life writing about Russia, and whenever I have lived there or travel there, Americans ask me, “Aren’t you afraid to report there?” Whenever my Russian journalist friends meet Americans, they get asked the same thing, “Aren’t you afraid for your life?”
  • No one died, no one was arrested, but the channel, suddenly strapped for cash, had to fire half its staff.
  • Or take the example of RBC, Russia’s rough equivalent of Bloomberg. It is owned by Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who also owns part of the Brooklyn Nets.
  • There are too many other examples to enumerate, but the death of independent Russian media—and it is in its death throes—did not come about through mass murder.
  • Russian journalists are watching us right now, and they’re mystified. After Trump shut down CNN’s Jim Acosta at his first press conference as president, the Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev offered Putin’s press conferences as a warning.
Javier E

Can Social Networks Do Better? We Don't Know Because They Haven't Tried - Talking Point... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...know-because-they-havent-tried

social media networks internet media externality economic

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it’s not fair to say it’s Facebook or a Facebook problem. Facebook is just the latest media and communications medium. We hardly blame the technology of the book for spreading anti-Semitism via the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • But of course, it’s not that simple. Social media platforms have distinct features that earlier communications media did not. The interactive nature of the media, the collection of data which is then run through algorithms and artificial intelligence creates something different.
  • All social media platforms are engineered with two basic goals: maximize the time you spend on the platform and make advertising as effective and thus as lucrative as possible. This means that social media can never be simply a common carrier, a distribution technology that has no substantial influence over the nature of the communication that travels over it.
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  • it’s a substantial difference which deprives social media platforms of the kind of hands-off logic that would make it ridiculous to say phones are bad or the phone company is responsible if planning for a mass murder was carried out over the phone.
  • the Internet doesn’t ‘do’ anything more than make the distribution of information more efficient and radically lower the formal, informal and financial barriers to entry that used to stand in the way of various marginalized ideas.
  • Social media can never plead innocence like this because the platforms are designed to addict you and convince you of things.
  • If the question is: what can social media platforms do to protect against government-backed subversion campaigns like the one we saw in the 2016 campaign the best answer is, we don’t know. And we don’t know for a simple reason: they haven’t tried.
  • The point is straightforward: the mass collection of data, harnessed to modern computing power and the chance to amass unimaginable wealth has spurred vast technological innovation.
Javier E

Washington Monthly | How to Fix Facebook-Before It Fixes Us - 0 views

washingtonmonthly.com/...ix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us

fb google propaganda social media disinformation monopoly regulation crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.
  • And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?
  • Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.
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  • They do this by sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.
  • Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy
  • The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
  • for mass media, this was constrained by one-size-fits-all content and by the limitations of delivery platforms. Not so for internet platforms on smartphones. They have created billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members
  • On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results. The result is that everyone sees a different version of the internet tailored to create the illusion that everyone else agrees with them.
  • It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t. The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.
  • Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.
  • Tristan Harris, formerly the design ethicist at Google. Tristan had just appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the public health threat from social networks like Facebook. An expert in persuasive technology, he described the techniques that tech platforms use to create addiction and the ways they exploit that addiction to increase profits. He called it “brain hacking.”
  • The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs
  • Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts
  • No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil.
  • Facebook takes the concept one step further with its “groups” feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.
  • We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues. Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.
  • The ads were less important, though, than what came next: once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized “bots” to share incendiary messages and organize events.
  • Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed.
  • Real users “like” posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.
  • A similar strategy prevailed on other platforms, including Twitter. Both techniques, bots and trolls, take time and money to develop—but the payoff would have been huge.
  • 2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections.
  • Renee DiResta, an expert in how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Renee described how bad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
  • It was sophisticated hacker technique, but not expensive. We hypothesized that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.
  • Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.
  • Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.
  • To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.
  • No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.
  • Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective.
  • The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.
  • It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.
  • We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost
  • Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.
  • Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.
  • Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.
  • Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.
  • This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.
  • decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.
  • Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session
  • This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.
  • We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.
  • First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed.
  • At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.
  • Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
  • An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.
  • This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants.
  • There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.
  • Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
  • Transparency with respect to those who sponsor political advertising of all kinds is a step toward rebuilding trust in our political institutions.
  • Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic
  • Allowing third parties to audit the algorithms would go even further toward maintaining transparency. Facebook and Google make millions of editorial choices every hour and must accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.
  • Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs), the contracts that specify the relationship between platform and user.
  • All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.
  • “Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others. It would limit the risk that platforms would run massive social experiments on millions—or billions—of users without appropriate prior notification. Maintaining more than one version of their services would be expensive for Facebook, Google, and the rest, but in software that has always been one of the costs of success. Why should this generation get a pass?
  • Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.
  • Not only do the platforms use your data on their own sites, but they also lease it to third parties to use all over the internet. And they will use that data forever, unless someone tells them to stop.
  • There should be a statute of limitations on the use of consumer data by a platform and its customers. Perhaps that limit should be ninety days, perhaps a year. But at some point, users must have the right to renegotiate the terms of how their data is used.
  • Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph. Users created this data, so they should have the right to export it to other social networks.
  • It would be analogous to the regulation of the AT&T monopoly’s long-distance business, which led to lower prices and better service for consumers.
  • Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers.
  • Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram.
  • While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.
g-dragon

A Short History of Violent Buddhism - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/ory-of-violent-buddhism-195794

buddhism history Violence

shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Buddhism is probably the most pacifistic of the major world religions.
  • His teachings stand in stark contrast to those of the other major religions, which advocate execution and warfare against people who fail to adhere to the religions' tenets.
  • To an outsider with a perhaps stereotypical view of Buddhism as introspective and serene, it is more surprising to learn that Buddhist monks have also participated in and even instigated violence over the years.
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  • For most of their history, the monks who invented kung fu (wushu) used their martial skills mainly in self-defense; however, at certain points, they actively sought out warfare, as in the mid-16th century when they answered the central government's call for aid in the fight against Japanese pirates.
  • Speaking of Japan, the Japanese also have a long tradition of "warrior-monks" or yamabushi.
  • In 1932, for example, an unordained Buddhist preacher called Nissho Inoue hatched a plot to assassinate major liberal or westernizing political and business figures in Japan so as to restore full political power to Emperor Hirohito.
  • Called the "League of Blood Incident," this scheme targeted 20 people and managed to assassinate two of them before the League's members were arrested.
  • various Zen Buddhist organizations in Japan carried out funding drives to buy war material and even weapons.
  • One example is in Sri Lanka, where radical Buddhist monks formed a group called the Buddhist Power Force, or B.B.S., which provoked violence against the Hindu Tamil population of northern Sri Lanka, against Muslim immigrants, and also against moderate Buddhists who spoke up about the violence
  • Another very disturbing example of Buddhist monks inciting and committing violence is the situation in Myanmar (Burma), where hard-line monks have been leading the persecution of a Muslim minority group called the Rohingya.
  • Perhaps, if Prince Siddhartha was alive today, he would remind them that they should not nurture such an attachment to the idea of the nation.
zareefkhan

Committee Votes to Release Democratic Rebuttal to G.O.P. Russia Memo - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ic-memo-adam-schiff-trump.html

politics US trump russia memo votes

shared by zareefkhan on 06 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Monday to make public a classified Democratic memorandum rebutting Republican claims that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had abused their powers to wiretap a former Trump campaign official, setting up a possible clash with President Trump.
  • The vote gives Mr. Trump five days to review the Democratic memo and determine whether he will try to block its release
  • Democrats have said the memo corrects mischaracterizations by the Republicans and adds crucial context to actions by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department in obtaining a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order to wiretap the former Trump aide, Carter Page, in October 2016.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Despite Mr. Trump’s claims, the Republican memo did nothing to clear him of either collaborating with the Russians or obstructing justice — the two lines of inquiry being pursued by Mr. Mueller.
  • Mr. Trump signaled earlier on Monday that he had little good will toward the committee’s Democrats, launching a broadside at Mr. Schiff. Mr. Trump accused Mr. Schiff on Twitter of illegally leaking confidential information from the committee, called the congressman “Little Adam Schiff” and ominously said that he “must be stopped.”
  • If Mr. Trump tries to block the Democratic memo’s release, House rules allow Democrats to seek a closed-door vote of the full House of Representatives to override the president.
  • Nevertheless, Democrats have denounced the document as a tactic to undermine the investigation and to protect Mr. Trump, and they have said it is riddled with errors and omissions.
  • In initiating the release of the Democratic memo, the committee is relying on the same obscure House rule it invoked last week. The rule allows the Intelligence Committee to sidestep the usual back-and-forth between lawmakers and the executive branch over the government’s most closely held secrets if the committee deems release to be in the public interest.
g-dragon

The short life and tragic death of the 6th Dalai Lama - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/the-sixth-dalai-lama-450197

6th dalai lama short life death

shared by g-dragon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • He received ordination as the most powerful lama in Tibet only to turn his back on monastic life. As a young adult he spent evenings in taverns with his friends and enjoyed sexual relations with women. He is sometimes called the "playboy" Dalai Lama.
  • a young man who was sensitive and intelligent, even if undisciplined.
  • After a childhood locked away in a country monastery with hand-picked tutors, his assertion of independence is understandable. The violent end of his life makes his story a tragedy, not a joke.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The "Great Fifth" lived in a time of volatile political upheaval. He persevered through adversity and unified Tibet under his rule as the first of the Dalai Lamas to be political and spiritual leaders of Tibet.
  • Sangye Gyatso and a few co-conspirators kept the 5th Dalai Lama's death a secret for 15 years.
  • the deception averted possible power struggles and allowed for a peaceful transition to the rule of the 6th Dalai Lama.
  • The boy identified as the Great Fifth's rebirth was Sanje Tenzin, born in 1683 to noble family that lived in the border lands near Bhutan.
  • The search for him had been carried out in secret.
  • In 1697 the death of the Great Fifth finally was announced, and 14-year-old Sanje Tenzin was brought in great fanfare to Lhasa to be enthroned as His Holiness the 6th Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, meaning "Ocean of Divine Song." He moved into the just-completed Potala Palace to begin his new life.
  • The teenager's studies continued, but as time passed he showed less and less interest in them. As the day approached for his full monk's ordination he balked, then renounced his novice ordination. He began to visit taverns at night and was seen staggering drunkenly through the streets of Lhasa with his friends. He dressed in the silk clothes of a nobleman. He kept a tent outside Potala Palace where he would bring young women.
  • The Great Fifth's chief military ally had been a Mongol tribal chief named Gushi Khan. Now a grandson of Gushi Khan decided it was time to take affairs in Lhasa in hand and claim his grandfather's title, king of Tibet. The grandson, Lhasang Khan, eventually gathered an army and took Lhasa by force. Sangye Gyatso went into exile, but Lhasang Khan arranged his assassination, in 1701.
  • To soften this alliance, the Emperor sent word to Tibet's Mongol allies that Sangye Gyatso's concealment of the Great Fifth's death was an act of betrayal. The Desi was trying to rule Tibet himself, the Emperor said.Indeed, Sangye Gyatso had become accustomed to managing Tibet's affairs on his own, and he was having a hard time letting go, especially when the Dalai Lama was mostly interested in wine, women and song.
  • At this time China was ruled by the Kangxi Emperor, one of the most formidable rulers of China's long history. Tibet, through its alliance with fierce Mongol warriors, posed a potential military threat to China.
  • Now Lhasang Khan turned his attention to the dissolute Dalai Lama. In spite of his outrageous behavior he was a charming young man, popular with Tibetans. The would-be king of Tibet began to see the Dalai Lama as a threat to his authority.
  • Lhasang Khan sent a letter to the Kangxi Emperor asking if the Emperor would support deposing the Dalai Lama. The Emperor instructed the Mongol to bring the young lama to Beijing; then a decision would be made what to do about him.
  • Then the warlord found Gelugpa lamas willing to sign an agreement that the Dalai Lama was not fulfilling his spiritual responsibilities.
  • Remarkably, monks were able to overwhelm the guards and take the Dalai Lama back to Lhasa, to Drepung Monastery.
  • He left the monastery with some devoted friends who insisted on coming with him. Lhasang Khan accepted the Dalai Lama's surrender and then had his friends slaughtered.
  • There is no record of exactly what caused the 6th Dalai Lama's death, only that he died in November 1706 as the traveling party approached China's central plain. He was 24 years old
  • The 6th Dalai Lama's chief legacy are his poems, said to be among the loveliest in Tibetan literature. Many are about love, longing, and heartbreak. Some are erotic. And some reveal a bit of his feelings about his position and his life, such as this one:
jayhandwerk

We shouldn't allow politics to impede disaster relief | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...tics-to-impede-disaster-relief

politics US disaster relief

shared by jayhandwerk on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Communities across the country are grappling with a new paradigm for both intensity and recovery from weather activity. Yet even as the storms change, the politics around disaster recovery remain entirely predictable.
  • As evidence of this issue, look no further than the recent letter penned by California Governor Jerry Brown to President TrumpDonald John TrumpHouse Democrat slams Donald Trump Jr. for ‘serious case of amnesia’ after testimony Skier Lindsey Vonn: I don’t want to represent Trump at Olympics Poll: 4 in 10 Republicans think senior Trump advisers had improper dealings with Russia MORE asking for federal funds to help those affected by recent wildfires
  • Instead of engaging in familiar yet predictable rhetoric, it’s time for lawmakers to take a hard look at the current system and ensure response capabilities match the new weather reality.
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