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Javier E

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

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

resistance trump politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The outlines of a meaningful blueprint for resisting Trump are now taking shape.
  • This applies both to the battle against Trump’s authoritarian impulses and serial shredding of our democratic norms, and to the battle against the various ways in which Trump will work with Republicans to advance a more conventional GOP agenda.
  • 1) Have (guarded) faith in our system.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • this is template for further resistance by states, in the courts and out, that could make a difference in other areas where Trump may unleash regressive and destructive onslaughts, such as Obamacare, climate change and other aspects of his promised immigration crackdown.
  • 2) Keep pressuring Republicans to exercise real oversight on Trump
  • congressional Republicans cannot ignore any and all of the Trump White House’s ethical transgressions forever.
  • A schoolteacher stood up and demanded to know: “Where is your line in the sand?”
  • 3) Fight hard in the Senate with all available procedural weapons.
  • all the procedural tools that Senate Democrats can use to “focus attention on controversial parts of the president’s agenda and force Republicans to cast potentially unpopular votes
  • 4) Keep looking to civil society and try to fortify it where possible.
  • civil society — a loosely knit coalition of legal and political groups, given ammunition by intense scrutiny from watchdogs and media outlets, and backed up by meaningful, sustained public mobilization — can have a real illuminating and constraining impact.
  • 5) Keep Trump distracted and off balance, to minimize the damage he can do.
  • Trump’s cause is also harmed by trivial, petty and burlesque distractions.
malonema1

Trump Unveils a 'Hard Power' Budget - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...519702

US trump economics

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • If Americans were taken aback by the restrained, highly scripted President Trump that addressed Congress last month, they should recognize a lot more of the blustery, law-and-order candidate they elected in the budget blueprint the White House released on Thursday.
  • Trump is asking Congress for a down payment of more than $4 billion to fund his border wall, part of a $30 billion supplemental appropriations request to bolster national security. The Department of Homeland Security would see a 6 percent boost in the president’s first budget, which would also direct more money toward law enforcement and education programs promoting school choice.
  • Beyond the programs targeted for elimination, the Trump budget puts nearly every domestic Cabinet department on the chopping block. In the Department of Education, dozens of school and teacher grant programs would go, and the popular college work-study program would see significant cuts. In the Department of Commerce, NOAA gets slashed by billions, including the complete elimination of $250 million in grants for coastal and marine management. Funding for the National Institutes of Health—an agency with some of the most bipartisan support in Congress—would drop by nearly $6 billion, a cut 18 percent.
millerco

Senate Approves Budget Plan That Smooths Path Toward Tax Cut - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...budget-vote-senate.html

Us history senate budget plan republicans democrats politics Trump

shared by millerco on 20 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Senate took a significant step toward rewriting the tax code on Thursday night with the passage of a budget blueprint that would protect a $1.5 trillion tax cut from a Democratic filibuster.
  • The budget resolution could also pave the way for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration by ensuring that drilling legislation can pass with only Republican votes.
  • Despite having full control of the government, Republicans have so far been unable to produce a marquee legislative achievement in the first year of President Trump’s tenure, putting even more pressure on lawmakers to succeed in passing a tax bill.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The budget’s passage could keep Republicans on track to approve a tax package late this year or early in 2018.
  • As early as next week, the House plans to take up the budget blueprint that the Senate approved on Thursday by a 51 to 49 vote. Doing so would allow for the tax overhaul to move ahead quickly.
  • Speaker Paul D. Ryan will need most House Republicans to back the blueprint without changes; in the Senate, Rand Paul of Kentucky was the lone Republican to vote against the measure on Thursday, in protest of what he deemed excessive spending.
  • If House Republicans were to insist on negotiating a compromise that melds the Senate and House budget plans, tax legislation could be delayed.
  • “This is the last, best chance we will have to cut taxes,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a member of the Budget Committee, who warned that the consequences would be ruinous if the party failed.
  • “That will be the end of us as a party,” he said, “because if you’re a Republican and you don’t want to simplify the tax code and cut taxes, what good are you to anybody?”
rachelramirez

House Joins Senate in Approving Groundwork to Revoke Health Care Law - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...le-care-act-senate-budget.html

senate health politics obamacare

shared by rachelramirez on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • House Joins Senate in Approving Groundwork to Revoke Health Care Law
  • The House joined the Senate on Friday in laying the groundwork for speedy action to repeal the Affordable Care Act, approving the budget blueprint passed by the Senate on Thursday that would allow Republicans to tear up the health care law
  • places Republicans squarely in position to fulfill their long-held desire to dismantle President Obama’s signature domestic achievement.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • While pursuing repeal with zeal, Republicans are far from reaching any consensus on how to go about replacing the health care law, under which more than 20 million Americans have gained health insurance.
  • The blueprint directs four House and Senate committees to draw up legislation.
  • “every American will be adversely affected" by the repeal of the health care law.
Javier E

Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cyberattacks-against-iran.html

cybersecurity US foreign policy computer infrastructure

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 12 - Cached
  • It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.
  • If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.
  • Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials.
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  • Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results.
  • The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.
  • The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up.
  • The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success.
  • Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market.
  • “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.
  • It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground. Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within.
  • the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.
  • the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.
  • Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.
  • Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously. “From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.”
  • In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage.
  • An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world.
  • “We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”
  • Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”
  • American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence official said.
  • In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.
Javier E

Taking Oil Industry Cue, Environmentalists Drew Emissions Blueprint - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-obama-emissions-rule.html

activism change environmentalism

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • E.P.A. officials did not start working in earnest on the rule until fall 2013, when they held sessions around the country to hear from regulators, utilities and many others the Natural Resources Defense Council had by then been briefing for months. Many told the E.P.A. that they wanted to see an innovative plan like the one they had heard about from the council, even if they did not specifically name it as the group’s plan.
  • “They were the first out of the gate,” said Adam Kushner, a former top legal official at the E.P.A. “And the first out of the gate frames the debate.”
katyshannon

Obama Sends Plan to Close Guantánamo to Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...obama-guantanamo-bay.html

obama plan guantánamo congress new york times politics US history crisis policy

shared by katyshannon on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • President Obama sent Congress a plan on Tuesday to close the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his latest attempt to deliver on an unfulfilled promise of his presidency, which faces near-certain rejection by Congress.
  • The prison has come to symbolize the darker side of the nation’s antiterrorism efforts, but the series of steps that Mr. Obama outlined at the White House were as much an acknowledgment of the constraints binding him during his final year in office as they were a practical blueprint for transferring prisoners.
  • n presenting them, the president made little secret of his frustration that his quest to close Guantánamo, once regarded as a bipartisan moral imperative, had become a divisive political issue.
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  • I am very cleareyed about the hurdles to finally closing Guantánamo: The politics of this are tough,” Mr. Obama said during a 17-minute address. “I don’t want to pass this problem on to the next president, whoever it is. And if, as a nation, we don’t deal with this now, when will we deal with it?”
  • He said the issue had cost him “countless hours” of consternation as he toiled to craft a workable solution to a problem that he inherited from his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and that forced him to apologize on the world stage for an approach to terrorism he never supported.
  • Reprising arguments he has made since he first campaigned for president, Mr. Obama said the prison had fueled the recruitment efforts of terrorists, harmed American alliances and been a drain on taxpayer dollars.
  • It was also a final bid to erase what has become a painful and persistent blot on his tenure: his inability to tackle an issue that animated his campaign in 2008 and in many ways encapsulates his approach to national security.
  • The White House refused on Tuesday, as Mr. Obama’s advisers have done consistently, to rule out the prospect that he would use his constitutional powers as commander in chief, if Congress refuses to act, to close the prison unilaterally before leaving office.
  • The nine-page plan was immediately rejected by Republican presidential candidates and members of Congress.
  • “Not only are we not going to close Guantánamo, when I am president, if we capture a terrorist alive, they are not getting a court hearing in Manhattan. They are not going to be sent to Nevada,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a presidential candidate, said at a campaign rally in Las Vegas before the state’s Republican caucus. “They are going to Guantánamo, and we are going to find out everything they know.”
  • The president’s plan faces steep obstacles, however. Congress has enacted a law banning the military from transferring detainees from Guantánamo onto domestic soil, and lawmakers have shown little interest in lifting that restriction.
  • The blueprint offered few specifics, refraining from mentioning any of the potential replacement facilities the Pentagon had visited in preparing it, including military prisons in Leavenworth, Kan., and Charleston, S.C., as well as several civilian prisons in Colorado.
  • At the start of his administration, Mr. Obama noted, Republicans — including his predecessor, George W. Bush, and his rival for the White House, Senator John McCain of Arizona — backed the idea of closing the prison. “This was not some radical, far-left view,” Mr. Obama said. But “the public was scared into thinking that, well, if we close it, somehow we’ll be less safe.”
  • The Pentagon argued in its proposal that replacing Guantánamo would cost less than keeping detainees at the naval base in Cuba. Upgrading an existing prison could cost as much as $475 million, but would save the government as much as $85 million annually in operational costs compared with Guantánamo, it found.
  • Democrats, too, were skeptical of the strategy, which centers on bringing to a prison on domestic soil 30 to 60 detainees who are deemed too dangerous to release, while transferring the remaining detainees to other countries.
  • Human rights groups and lawyers for detainees were divided. Some oppose bringing detainees who are being detained indefinitely without trial onto domestic soil, saying that would simply relocate the problem without solving it.
  • The Bush administration opened the prison in January 2002 and sent detainees from the Afghanistan war there. It declared that the detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions and that courts had no authority to oversee what the government did to prisoners at the base. In the prison’s early years, interrogators frequently used coercive techniques on detainees.
  • In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Obama issued an executive order instructing the government to shut the prison down within a year. But that proved easier said than done, and as the administration studied how to go about achieving that goal, political support for it melted away.
  • Mr. Obama has refused to add any more detainees to the 242 he inherited, instead working to chip away at the population. Of the 91 who remain, 35 are recommended for transfer if security conditions can be met, 10 have been charged or convicted before the military commissions system, and 46 have neither been charged with a crime nor approved for transfer.
  • A parolelike periodic review board is slowly working its way through their numbers and moving some to the transfer list. It was meeting even on Tuesday, senior administration officials said, as Mr. Obama strode into the Roosevelt Room to say, “Let us go ahead and close this chapter.”
nolan_delaney

The Saudi blueprint | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...and-modernise-its-economy-same

saudi blueprint politics policy

shared by nolan_delaney on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • nolan_delaney on 18 Jan 16
     
    The controversial and change-initiating plan for the new leadership of Saudi Arabia 
Javier E

How false hope spread about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 - and the consequences... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...xychloroquine-its-consequences

Covid-19 treatment response trump

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump has repeatedly touted the anti-malarial medications hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as that much-needed solution.
  • Scientists have since pointed to major flaws in those original studies and say there is a lack of reliable data on the drugs. Experts warn about the dangerous consequences of over-promoting a drug with unknown efficacy: Shortages of hydroxychloroquine have already occurred, depriving lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients of access to it. Doctors say some patients could die of side effects. Other potential treatments for covid-19 could get overlooked with so much concentration on one option.
  • Raoult’s findings helped bring the theory to the United States. However, scientists have since discredited the trial, pointing to major flaws in the way it was conducted. The journal that published the study announced on April 3 that it did not meet its standards.
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  • A large portion of activity online at the end of February and early March appeared in French and centered on a study published by French researcher and doctor Didier Raoult.
  • Yet before the record could be set straight, the hypothesis spread widely on U.S. social media.
  • The faulty research then appeared in the Gateway Pundit, Breitbart and the Blaze. It ultimately made its way to Fox News, first appearing on Laura Ingraham’s program on March 16. Fox News shows hosted by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson went on to promote the drugs and continue to do so.
  • On March 19, Trump first mentioned hydroxychloroquine at a White House news briefing. DiResta’s analysis showed that the following week, the claim started to spike in the United States, with 101,844 posts on Facebook. Starbird reports Trump’s first mention set off a surge in attention, seeing tens of thousands of tweets per hour in late March.
  • Trump again spoke about the drugs at news conferences on April 3, 4 and 5. Mentions on Twitter skyrocketed on April 6.
  • scientists say there is only “anecdotal evidence” on the drugs. To a layperson, that may not sound bad, but it’s actually an insult in the scientific community.
  • Anecdotal evidence refers to people’s personal stories about taking the drugs and has no basis in scientific data. It’s akin to a Yelp review.
  • t there’s very little evidence that we actually have that this has a clinical benefit, which is kind of bad for something that’s being very heavily promoted. We should probably have some data and some science behind it.”
  • Asked whether chloroquine was a possible cure for covid-19, Janet Diaz of WHO told reporters on Feb. 20 that the organization was prioritizing other therapeutics: “For chloroquine, there is no proof that that is an effective treatment at this time. We recommend that therapeutics be tested under ethically approved clinical trials to show efficacy and safety.” A few weeks later, both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were included in a mega-trial WHO launched.
  • The Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use approval to distribute millions of doses of the drugs to hospitals across the country on March 29.
  • Luciana Borio, the former head of medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, criticized the FDA’s EUA announcement and has called for a randomized clinical trial of the drugs.
  • “I think that it was a misuse of emergency authorizations of the authority that the FDA has. Because it gives this credence that the government is actually backing, and it’s so common for people to equate that with an approval,” Borio said.
  • When asked whether any of the completed studies have provided substantial evidence that the benefits of the drugs outweigh the risks, Borio responded, “Not at all. No study was done in a way that would allow that conclusion.”
  • Over the course of only a few weeks, posts online, the media and politicians turned chloroquine from an unknown drug to a “100% coronavirus cure,” misleading the public on its effectiveness and engendering unintended but negative consequences.
  • Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as treatments for covid-19 are not yet backed by reliable scientific evidence. In a pandemic, it’s important for everyone to follow the lead of scientists. Rumors on the Internet are the least reliable source of information. And politicians are not qualified to provide scientific advice, despite even the best intentions.
  • In particular, Trump’s incorrect comments on the drugs and his role in advocating for their use, based on minimal and flimsy evidence, sets a bad example. His advocacy for this unproven treatment provides potentially false hope and has led to shortages for people who rely on the drugs. The president earns Four Pinocchios.
saberal

Stimulus Update: Democrats Press Ahead as Biden Signals Openness to Changes - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...1400-stimulus-check.html

US Politics economics

shared by saberal on 04 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The House passed a budget blueprint to allow the president’s $1.9 trillion plan to speed through Congress without Republican backing. But President Biden said he was open to negotiating the details.
  • Voting mostly along party lines, the House adopted a budget blueprint that included President Biden’s sweeping pandemic aid plan, laying the groundwork for Democrats to push it through, if necessary, on a simple majority vote, without Republican support.
  • “We need to act fast,” Mr. Biden told House Democrats on a private conference call, according to two people who attended. “It’s about who the hell we are as a country.”But Republicans expressed increasing skepticism that they could support the measure unless Mr. Biden significantly scaled back his proposal.
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  • “there’s a real sense that there’s real consequences of going small, there’s real consequences of allowing stalling”
  • As for the $15 minimum wage included in Mr. Biden’s plan, Mr. Romney said flatly, “That’s not going to get passed.”
  • the president met for an hour and a half at the White House with leading Senate Democrats. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, emerged from the meeting, saying there was “universal agreement we must go big and bold.”
  • The president’s signal that he was open to compromise on the matter came a couple of days after he met at the White House with 10 Republican senators who are seeking a $618 billion package they said could win bipartisan backing. Their proposal calls for checks of up to $1,000 that would go only to individuals earning less than $50,000 a year, with the full payment limited to those whose annual income was $40,000 or below.
  • “We can’t walk away from an additional $1,400 in direct checks, because people need it,” Mr. Biden told the House Democrats,
  • Democrats engaged in the discussions said there was some pressure from Republicans and more conservative Democrats to scale back other parts of the package, possibly including money for state and local governments and supplemental benefits for the unemployed. Mr. Wyden said he was fighting to maintain the additional $400-per-week benefit that Mr. Biden has proposed offering to unemployed workers through the end of September, up from $300 now but down from $600 at the start of the crisis.
Javier E

Desert Monoliths Reveal Stone Age Architectural Blueprints - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...architecture-desert-kites.html

history culture desert blueprint archaeology

shared by Javier E on 20 May 23 - No Cached
  • Massive prehistoric stone structures found in desert landscapes from Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan have baffled archaeologists for decades. Each can stretch for up to a few miles, and resembles a kite with tail strings in overall shape.Recent studies have built a consensus that the so-called desert kites were used to trap and kill wild animal herds. But how ancient hunters conceived — and perceived — these grandiose structures has remained a mystery. The kites, in their entirety, are “only visible from the air,” said Rémy Crassard, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “Even with our modern ways of envisaging our landscape, it’s still difficult for us archaeologists, scientists, scholars to make a proper map.”
  • Dr. Crassard and his colleagues were overjoyed in 2015 when they found two stone monoliths with precise depictions of nearby desert kites in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Engraved between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, these representations are by far the oldest known to-scale architectural plans recorded in human history, the team reported on Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. They also highlight how carefully planned the desert kites may have been by the ancient peoples who relied on them.
Javier E

A Conservative Blueprint for Universal Healthcare | MedPage Today - 0 views

www.medpagetoday.com/...103677

universal health care conservative blueprint

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In 1989, a policy analyst at a leading conservative Washington, D.C. think tank described a workable planopens in a new tab or window in which private insurers, just as in Germany, provide universal coverage. This plan would:Change the current tax treatment of health insurance (which largely benefits people with employer-based coverage at the expense of lower income Americans)Declare that families face the responsibility of having adequate insuranceOffer government assistance to families unable to afford health coverage on their ownReform the Medicare program
  • The middle planks of this conservative plan ultimately became the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Marketplacesopens in a new tab or window, where families could purchase health insurance in a new, nationally regulated market with financial subsidies to cover costs for those with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty level (about $92,120opens in a new tab or window for a family of three).
  • President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law 13 years ago today, transforming a patchwork system of individual health insurance markets into one that today could form a national framework for universal healthcare
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  • an "ACA for All" system would prevent government from operating health insurance while allowing it to regulate and finance health insurance for most Americans. The ACA for All would not be "socialized medicine" -- where government not only finances healthcare but supplies it through public hospitals, clinics, and the direct employment of clinicians. ACA for All would continue to rely on private industry (private doctors and private hospitals) and personal responsibility, and would limit the government's role in healthcare delivery.
  • A Republican plan for universal healthcare would offer those with non-employer-based coverage an adequately sized tax deduction, big enough to cover the cost of a family health insurance plan. And, for the first time since the 1940s, individuals would pay taxes on the value of employer-based health insurance above a certain threshold (based on the average costopens in a new tab or window of a family health insurance plan).
Javier E

Planck Satellite Shows Image of Infant Universe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-image-of-infant-universe.html

cosmology universe origins inflation

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Recorded by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, the image is a heat map of the cosmos as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, showing space speckled with faint spots from which galaxies would grow over billions of years.
  • is in stunning agreement with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years, of a cosmos dominated by mysterious dark energy that seems to be pushing space apart and the almost-as-mysterious dark matter that is pulling galaxies together. It also shows a universe that seems to have endured an explosive burp known as inflation, which was the dynamite in the Big Bang.
  • “The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete.”
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  • Within the standard cosmological framework, however, the new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board. The universe appears to be slightly lumpier, with bigger and more hot and cold spots in the northern half of the sky as seen from Earth than toward the south, for example. And there is a large, unexplained cool spot in the northern hemisphere.
  • “Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that’s exciting.”
  • The microwaves detected by the Planck date from 370,000 years after the Big Bang, which is as far back as optical or radio telescopes will ever be able to see, cosmologists say. But the patterns within them date from less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe is said to have undergone a violent burst of expansion known as inflation that set cosmic history on the course it has followed ever since. Those patterns are Planck’s prize.
  • Analyzing the relative sizes and frequencies of spots and ripples over the years has allowed astronomers to describe the birth of the universe to a precision that would make the philosophers weep. The new data have allowed astronomers to tweak their model a bit. It now seems the universe is 13.8 billion years old, instead of 13.7 billion, and consists by mass of 4.9 percent ordinary matter like atoms, 27 percent dark matter and 68 percent dark energy.
  • The biggest surprise here, astronomers said, is that the universe is expanding slightly more slowly than previous measurements had indicated. The Hubble constant, which characterizes the expansion rate, is 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec — in the units astronomers use — according to Planck. Recent ground-based measurements combined with the WMAP data gave a value of 69, offering enough of a discrepancy to make cosmologists rerun their computer simulations of cosmic history.
  • a Planck team member from the University of California, Berkeley, said it represents a mismatch between measurements made of the beginning of time and those made more recently, and that it could mean that dark energy, which is speeding up the expansion of the universe, is more complicated than cosmologists thought. He termed the possibility “pretty radical,” adding, “That would be pretty exciting.”
  • The data also offered striking support for the notion of inflation, which has been the backbone of Big Bang theorizing for 30 years. Under the influence of a mysterious force field during the first trillionth of a fraction of a second, what would become the observable universe ballooned by 100 trillion trillion times in size from a subatomic pinprick to a grapefruit in less than a violent eye-blink, so the story first enunciated by Alan Guth of M.I.T. goes.
  • Submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in this force field are what would produce the hot spots in the cosmic microwaves, which in turn would grow into galaxies. According to Planck’s measurements, those fluctuations so far fit the predictions of the simplest model of inflation, invented by Andrei Linde of Stanford, to a T. Dr. Tegmark of M.I.T. said, “We’re homing in on the simplest model.”
  • Cosmologists still do not know what might have caused inflation, but the recent discovery of the Higgs boson has provided evidence that the kinds of fields that can provoke such behavior really exist.
  • another clue to the nature of inflation could come from the anomalies in the microwave data — the lopsided bumpiness, for example — that tend to happen on the largest scales in the universe. By the logic of quantum cosmology, they were the first patterns to be laid down on the emerging cosmos; that is to say, when inflation was just starting.
Javier E

Life After Oil and Gas - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...life-after-oil-and-gas.html

energy renewable gas policy environment fossil

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • To what extent will we really “need” fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?
  • Thirteen countries got more than 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy in 2011, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, and many are aiming still higher.
  • Could we? Should we?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the United States could halve by 2030 the oil used in cars and trucks compared with 2005 levels by improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles and by relying more on cars that use alternative power sources, like electric batteries and biofuels.
  • New York State — not windy like the Great Plains, nor sunny like Arizona — could easily produce the power it needs from wind, solar and water power by 2030
  • “You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it.”
  • “There is plenty of room for wind and solar to grow and they are becoming more competitive, but these are still variable resources — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” said Alex Klein, the research director of IHS Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm on renewable energy. “An industrial economy needs a reliable power source, so we think fossil fuel will be an important foundation of our energy mix for the next few decades.”
  • improving the energy efficiency of homes, vehicles and industry was an easier short-term strategy. He noted that the 19.5 million residents of New York State consume as much energy as the 800 million in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa)
  • a rapid expansion of renewable power would be complicated and costly. Using large amounts of renewable energy often requires modifying national power grids, and renewable energy is still generally more expensive than using fossil fuels
  • Promoting wind and solar would mean higher electricity costs for consumers and industry.
  • many of the European countries that have led the way in adopting renewables had little fossil fuel of their own, so electricity costs were already high. Others had strong environmental movements that made it politically acceptable to endure higher prices
  • countries could often get 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar without much modification to their grids. A few states, like Iowa and South Dakota, get nearly that much of their electricity from renewable power (in both states, wind), while others use little at all.
  • America is rich in renewable resources and (unlike Europe) has the empty space to create wind and solar plants. New York State has plenty of wind and sun to do the job, they found. Their blueprint for powering the state with clean energy calls for 10 percent land-based wind, 40 percent offshore wind, 20 percent solar power plants and 18 percent solar panels on rooftops
  • the substantial costs of enacting the scheme could be recouped in under two decades, particularly if the societal cost of pollution and carbon emissions were factored in
Javier E

Obama's Best-Kept Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-obamas-best-kept-secrets.html

energy auto standards efficiency education program

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • While I don’t know how Obamacare will turn out, I’m certain that my two favorite Obama initiatives will be transformative.
  • His Race to the Top program in education has already set off a nationwide wave of school reform, and his Race to the Top in vehicles — raising the mileage standards for American-made car and truck fleets from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 m.p.g. between now and 2025 — is already spurring a wave of innovation in auto materials, engines and software.
  • they are the future of progressive politics in this age of austerity: government using its limited funds and steadily rising performance standards to stimulate states and businesses to innovate better economic, educational and environmental practices.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • his races to the top in schools and cars are both based on one brutal fact: “The high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” as Stefanie Sanford, a senior education expert at the Gates Foundation, puts it. The only high-wage jobs, whether in manufacturing or services, will be high-skilled ones, requiring more and better education, and Obama’s two races to the top aim to produce both more high-skill jobs and more high-skilled workers.
  • Though never perfect, No Child Left Behind was still a game-changer for education reform because it gave us the data to see not only how individual schools were doing but how the most at-risk students were doing within those schools. Without that, educational reform based on accountability of teachers and principals could never start.
  • 46 states submitted reform blueprints — and only the 12 best won grants from $70 million to $700 million, depending on the size of their student populations — even states that did not win have been implementing their proposals anyway.
  • because 45 states and the District of Columbia adopted similar higher academic standards (known as the “common core”) for reading and math, “for the first time in our history a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi are now being measured by the same yardstick,” said Duncan
  • Obama’s doubling of vehicle mileage by 2025, led by his Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, it’s already driving more innovation in Detroit, as each car company figures out how it will improve mileage by 5 percent every year.
  • Yes, the costs for cars with higher miles per gallon will rise a touch, but the savings will be manyfold that amount. The Environmental Protection Agency projects families will save $1.8 trillion in fuel costs and reduce oil consumption by 2.1 million barrels per day by 2025, which is equivalent to one-half of the oil that we currently import from OPEC countries every day
Javier E

Donald Trump was asked to name one of his heroes. His answer was very, very strange. - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...s-answer-was-very-very-strange

trump hero history

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Trump views himself as totally sui generis. He owes no one for his successes. He models himself after no one. There is no blueprint for Donald Trump except the one he writes for himself
  • Viewed through that lens, Trump's odd transition from a dismissal of heroes to a discussion of how he beat so many candidates in the Republican primary actually makes sense.
  • The truth is Trump views himself as a prime mover of history, someone who makes new paths rather than following old ones. What Trump was really saying then was that he doesn't believe in heroes only singular men in history — of which he considers himself one.
Javier E

The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for Journalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...517113

journalism fb zuckerberg news culture economics

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • 85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.
  • Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.
  • Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In the past, the deaths of news organizations have jeopardized the prospect of a safe, well-informed, civically-engaged community
  • One 2014 paper found a substantial drop-off in civic engagement in both Seattle and Denver from 2008 to 2009, after both cities saw the closure of longstanding daily newspapers
  • The problem is that Zuckerberg lays out concrete ideas about how to build community on Facebook, how to encourage civic engagement, and how to improve the quality and inclusiveness of discourse—but he bakes in an assumption that news, which has always been subsidized by the advertising dollars his company now commands, will continue to feed into Facebook’s system at little to no cost to Facebook
  • In some ways, Zuckerberg is building a news organization without journalists. The uncomfortable truth for journalists, though, is that Facebook is much better at community building in the digital age than news organizations are.
  • Facebook is asking its users to act as unpaid publishers and curators of content
  • for context: The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun claims that its  circulation of 9 million copies daily makes it the largest in the world
  • In the United States, the combined daily prime time average viewership for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC was 3.1 million people in 2015,
  • The New York Times had about 1.6 million digital subscribers as of last fall.
  • you can see how Zuckerberg is continuing to push Facebook’s hands-off approach to editorial responsibility. Facebook is outsourcing its decision-making power about what’s in your News Feed. Instead of the way a newspaper editor decides what’s on the front page, the user will decide.
  • “For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum,” Zuckerberg wrote. Which makes some sense. There are all kinds of issues with an American company imposing its cultural values uniformly on 1.9 billion individuals all over the world.
  • Last quarter, Facebook counted nearly 1.9 billion monthly active users.
  • and now also to act as unpaid editors, volunteering to teach Facebook’s algorithmic editors how and when to surface the content Facebook does not pay for.
  • In other words, Facebook is building a global newsroom run by robot editors and its own readers.
  • he must also realize that what he’s building is a grave threat to journalism
  • Lip service to the crucial function of the Fourth Estate is not enough to sustain it. All of this is the news industry’s problem; not Zuckerberg’s. But it’s also a problem for anyone who believes in and relies on quality journalism to make sense of the world.
  • Zuckerberg doesn’t want Facebook to kill journalism as we know it. He really, really doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean he won’t.
malonema1

Trump lays out hike in military spending - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-39108194

trump politics us

shared by malonema1 on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The blueprint also calls for deep cuts elsewhere, including to foreign assistance and environmental budgets.
  • Mr Trump's proposal would return the US closer to wartime spending.
  • If he wants to boost the defence budget by $54bn without adding to the deficit, that money will have to come from somewhere - and mandatory spending on welfare and debt interest takes nearly 70% of the budget off the table. Early reports are that the Environmental Protection Agency is facing sharp cuts, but its total annual budget is just over $8bn -a drop in the bucket.The State Department has also been singled out as a source for the needed funds, and its $50bn annually (including $22bn in direct aid) makes it a fatter target.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Democrats will make crystal clear the misplaced priorities of the Administration and the Republican majority, and we will fight tooth and nail to protect services and investments that are critical to hardworking American families and communities across the country," she said.
  • malonema1 on 27 Feb 17
     
    "Trump lays out hike in military spending"
malonema1

The Limits of American Realism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...imits-of-american-realism.html

us politics Russia Putin

shared by malonema1 on 11 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The Limits of American Realism
  • Realists had a field day with that carnage, beginning with former Secretary of State James Baker’s early assessment that, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” This view was echoed by various self-serving assessments from the Clinton White House that justified inaction through the portrayal of the Balkans as the locus of millennial feuds neither comprehensible nor resolvable.
  • The moral case was, however, overwhelming, beginning with the Serbian use in 1992 of concentration camps to kill Bosnian Muslim men deemed threatening, and expel Muslim women and children.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Realists tend to dismiss human suffering; it’s just the way of the world.
  • utin has created havoc precisely in the no man’s lands — Georgia and Ukraine — rather than in the NATO lands. Russia’s interest, post-1990, was in the dismemberment of the European-American bond, most potently expressed in NATO. That was the real problem
  • Syria has illustrated the limits of White House realism. Realism has dictated nonintervention as hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced, and Islamic State emerged. Realism has been behind acquiescence to Assad’s barrel-bomb brutality. If Iraq illustrated disastrous American pursuit of an “ideological blueprint,” Syria has demonstrated a disastrous vacuum of American ideas.
  • But this is more a time to acknowledge the limits of realism — as a means to deal with the evil of ISIS, the debacle of Syria, or the desperate European refugee crisis — than to cry out for more, or suggest that it is underrepresented in American discourse.
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