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Javier E

Could a Republican Health Care Reform Ever Happen? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...health-care-reform-ever-happen

obamacare republicans health health care

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • a lot of Congressional Republicans are resistant to the more plausible conservative proposals  on health care precisely because they don’t want to find the money required to make any of them work — in some cases because they prefer the comforting illusion that the current system represents some sort of free market ideal that would be wrecked if we started providing tax credits to the currently-uninsured, and in other cases because they’re all-too-aware that some of that money would have to come from caps and cuts that affect groups that currently vote Republican.
  • right now, with the new health care law as-yet-unimplemented, we’re still in a world where the G.O.P.’s politicians and activists and interest groups think of themselves as working from a pre-Obamacare policy baseline. And this, in in turn, creates a strong political reluctance to propose alternatives that deviate from that baseline in ways that might negatively impact the groups — including, as Barro says, “the overwhelmingly insured Republican electorate” — that the party has tried to rally against the health care law from the beginning.
  • But the first moment when a Republican Congress might actually be able to pass a health care overhaul won’t arrive until February of 2017, at which point Obamacare will have been the baseline for two years
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • r premiums, the Medicare cuts, the Medicaid expansion, all of it. And at that point, the plausible right-of-center alternatives to Obamacare will no longer look risky and disruptive relative to the status quo, because that status quo will no longer be one that Republican interests and voters are deeply invested in defending. Instead, those interests and voters will be looking for ways to limit the health care law’s impact, and the conservative alternatives will look more like what they actually are — proposals that spend less, regulate less, and reflect a greater confidence in markets than the president’s new law, and that would change the underlying health care system in ways that a sensible G.O.P. should support.
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Letter to My Son' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...397619

race racism American dream American idea youth slavery white supremacy history culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
  • When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
  • you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body
  • There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies
  • It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth
  • ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
  • And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.
  • The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
  • I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood
  • The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
  • But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
  • still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party
  • I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies
  • I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
  • Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed
  • When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.
  • Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
  • the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.
  • erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped
  • this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
  • now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.
  • “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.
  • I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons
  • here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
  • Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.
  • I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.
  • American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.
  • I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
  • Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.
  • It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.
  • “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.
  • There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.
  • I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.
  • I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have
  • I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.
  • “I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
  • the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.
  • You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life
  • I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
  • I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
  • I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
rachelramirez

NASA Says Signs of Liquid Water Flowing on Mars - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mars-life-liquid-water.html

nasa mars new york times history

shared by rachelramirez on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • NASA Says Signs of Liquid Water Flowing on Mars
  • Though young Mars was inundated by rivers, lakes and maybe even an ocean a few billion years ago, the modern moisture is modest. Scientists have long known that large amounts of water remain — but frozen solid in the polar ice caps.
  • They named the streaks recurrent slope linae, or R.S.L.s, and many thousands of them have now been spotted.
Javier E

Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? by Eyal Press | NYRBlog | The New York Review of B... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...young-israelis-turn-right

israel palestine youth attitudes survey research democracy rights

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.
  • In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.
  • One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”
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  • The fact that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip chose in 2006 to elect Hamas, whose Charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and foresees Israel’s eventual destruction, hasn’t helped matters. Neither has the collapse of the peace process. Israelis in their late teens and twenties barely remember the hope that greeted the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They do have strong memories of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when a wave of suicide bombings “managed to obliterate any trust the Israelis had in a political settlement,” as the public opinion analysts Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki observe in their recent study of the violence’s impact. That was followed by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which the Israeli right warned would make the country vulnerable and which indeed brought a barrage of Qassam missiles to the border town of Sderot; and the Israeli war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, in which more than one hundred Israeli soldiers—many of them young—were killed and hundreds more wounded.
  • the popular tabloids and Israel’s leaders converged around the theme of blaming the unraveling of the peace process on Palestinian intransigence.
  • “Older people remember the years when people actually liked Israel. They’re more likely to view criticism from the outside as a possibly legitimate critique of Israel’s policies. Young people are basically being told, over and over again, that criticism of Israel is de-legitimization of Israel, because they’re anti-Semites.”
  • For years Israelis have complained, not without reason, that textbooks used in Palestinian schools have failed to recognize Israel’s existence or to inculcate open-minded attitudes toward Jews among Arab youth
  • To judge by the petition signed by 472 high school teachers and sent to the Ministry of Education in December, however, some civics instructors are having trouble instilling the values of peace and tolerance in Israeli children. The subject of the petition was the growing prevalence of bigotry among students
  • What the instructor has been hearing from his pupils is, of course, something young Israelis have been hearing more and more from their leaders
  • A striking irony apparent in the survey commissioned by the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative is that young Arabs, who are often portrayed in the Israeli press as implacably hostile to the country’s ideals, support principles such as “mutual respect between all sectors” in higher proportions than their Jewish counterparts (84 versus 75 percent). Significantly more (58 versus 25 percent) also “strongly agree” with Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which states: “All citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, will participate in the life of the state, based on the principle of full, equal citizenship, and appropriate representation in all state institutions.” The country’s founders hoped this language would serve as a set of guiding principles for the state.
  • it does seem ironic that in the Jewish State, which insists on defining itself as the Jewish democratic state and the only democracy in the Middle East, the Arabs are our most democratic citizens.”
Javier E

Europe Stifles Drivers in Favor of Mass Transit and Walking - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...27traffic.html

europe car policy urban walking transport

shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work
  • Mr. Fellmann calculated that a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000 cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three. “So it’s not really fair to everyone else if you take the car,”
  • European cities also realized they could not meet increasingly strict World Health Organization guidelines for fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many American cities are likewise in “nonattainment” of their Clean Air Act requirements, but that fact “is just accepted here,”
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  • While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership, American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number.
Maria Delzi

Children 'beheaded and mutilated' in Central African Republic, says Unicef | Global dev... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rican-republic-violence-unicef

shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The UN agency for children says attacks against children have reached new levels of viciousness in the Central African Republic (CAR), where fighting between Muslim Seleka rebels and Christian militias left more than 1,000 people dead and displaced an estimated 400,000 in Bangui, the capital, this month.
  • According to Unicef, at least at least two children have been beheaded, and one of them mutilated, in the violence that has gripped Bangui since early December
  • Unicef and its partners say they have verified the killings of at least 16 children, and injuries among 60, since the outbreak of communal violence in Bangui on 5 December. In November, the UN warned that the number of child soldiers in the former French colony had more than doubled to up to 6,000 as anti-balaka militias have sprung up to counterattacks by the Seleka.
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  • Diabate said armed groups were accountable for taking specific measures to provide protection to children. These include: clear directives by those in positions of authority within armed forces and groups to halt violations against children, meaning that children must not be recruited into the fighting, nor targeted. Unicef also called for the immediate release of children associated with armed forces and groups, and their protection from reprisals. Transit centres set up for the release and reintegration of children must also be protected from attacks.
  • Some 370,000 people – almost half the population of Bangui – have been displaced to dozens of sites across the capital over the past three weeks. About 785,000 people have been internally displaced throughout the country since the outbreak of violence more than a year ago.
  • Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the medical charity, said on Monday that fighting, lynchings and violent attacks remained a daily occurrence in Bangui, and the situation in the city appeared to be out of control, despite the presence of international armed forces in the capital.
  • MSF said health facilities had been affected by the violence, hindering the provision of medical aid. On Sunday, a ministry of health ambulance was stopped and the staff were threatened with violence, preventing them from collecting the wounded. On the same day, armed men entered the Hôpital Communautaire with the intention of lynching patients, while health staff were threatened.
  • The UN launched an appeal for $152m last week to rapidly scale-up humanitarian operations over the next 100 days. The country has been plunged into chaos as its Christian majority seeks revenge against the Muslim rebels who seized power in a coup in March. Many Christian and Muslim civilians are armed, and the foreign troops brought in to try to rein in the violence have been sucked into the conflict and accused of taking sides.
  • The Chadians, part of the African Union force, are Muslim and are seen by the population as backing the Seleka rebels who toppled the president. But 1,600 French troops who were deployed in the first week of December are accused of backing the Christian majority, and their patrols have come under fire in Muslim neighbourhoods. Many say the bloodshed has little to do with religion as Muslims and Christians had long lived in peace. Instead, they blame a political battle for control over resources in one of Africa's most weakly governed states.
gaglianoj

BP's maximum fine for Gulf of Mexico oil spill is cut by billions | Business | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...f-mexico-cut-deepwater-horizon

BP

shared by gaglianoj on 17 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • BP will face a maximum fine of $13.7bn under the Clean Water Act for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, several billion less than feared.
  • Federal magistrate Carl Barbier ruled on Thursday that the size of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the worst offshore spill in US history, was smaller than the government had claimed.
  • A simple negligence ruling, which BP sought, caps the maximum fine at $1,100 per barrel.
qkirkpatrick

Terrorism With a Human Face - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387163

ISIS Evil crisis politics Middle-East

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • It’s all in the face, apparently. Just check out that terrifying mug shot of Mohammad Atta, the so-called “ringleader” of the 19 hijackers who staged the 9/11 attacks. His face, wrote the novelist Martin Amis in a short story about Atta, was “gangrenous” and “almost comically malevolent.”
  • The idea that human evil is inscribed into the body and face of the criminal offender has deep rootsThe idea that human evil is inscribed into the body and face of the criminal offender has deep roots, and is in fact the animating throb behind modern scientific criminology and its founding document, Cesare Lombroso’s The Criminal Man, published in 1876
  • It is also an underlying assumption in much of the news coverage of the Kuwaiti-born Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, who was exposed recently as the ISIS executioner “Jihadi John.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Emwazi challenges the social and moral order. To put it mildly. Far more than, say, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reportedly Iraqi-born ISIS leader challenges the social and moral order.
  • This is because Emwazi spent most of his life in Britain, in the secular West. Despite his Kuwaiti background and heritage, he was socialized or “acculturated” here, not over there. He went to school here, played football here, went to university here, talked London-street tough here, and wore baseball caps here.
  • Killers, too, can act in decent and humane ways. It is just that we rarely like to admit it—unless of course they kill in defense of the good, as we subjectively define it.
Javier E

The Legacy of Malcolm X - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...308438

black pride racism role model culture history obama

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.
  • For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.
  • I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?
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  • As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.
  • Marable’s biography judiciously sifts fact from myth. Marable’s Malcolm is trapped in an unhappy marriage, cuckolded by his wife and one of his lieutenants. His indignation at Elijah Muhammad’s womanizing is fueled by his morals, and by his resentment that one of the women involved is an old flame. He can be impatient and petulant. And his behavior, in his last days, casts a shadow over his reputation as an ascetic. He is at times anti-Semitic, sexist, and, without the structure of the Nation, inefficient.
  • Marable reveals Malcolm to be, in many ways, an awkward fit for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad’s Nation combined the black separatism of Marcus Garvey with Booker T. Washington’s disdain for protest. In practice, its members were conservative, stressing moral reform, individual uplift, and entrepreneurship. Malcolm was equally devoted to reform, but he believed that true reform ultimately had radical implications.
  • His energy left him with a sprawling web of ties, ranging from the deeply personal (Louis Farrakhan) to the deeply cynical (George Lincoln Rockwell). He allied with A. Philip Randolph and Fannie Lou Hamer, romanced the Saudi royal family, and effectively transformed himself into black America’s ambassador to the developing world.
  • To Marable’s credit, he does not judge Malcolm’s significance by his seeming failure to forge a coherent philosophy. As Malcolm traveled to Africa and the Middle East, as he debated at Oxford and Harvard, he encountered a torrent of new ideas, new ways of thinking that batted him back and forth. He never fully gave up his cynical take on white Americans, but he did broaden his views, endorsing interracial marriage and ruing the personal coldness he’d shown toward whites. Yet Malcolm’s political vision was never complete like that of Martin Luther King, who hewed faithfully to his central principle, the one he is known for today—his commitment to nonviolence.
  • For all of Malcolm’s prodigious intellect, he was ultimately more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain.
  • The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute—the civil-rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. “I committed to nonviolence,” Marable quotes him as saying. “But I’m sort of embarrassed by it.”
  • Like Malcolm, Obama was a wanderer who found himself in the politics of the black community, who was rooted in a nationalist church that he ultimately outgrew. Like Malcolm’s, his speeches to black audiences are filled with exhortations to self-creation, and draw deeply from his own biography
  • perhaps most significantly, it rejected the beauty standard of others and erected a new one. In a 1962 rally, Malcolm said: Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?
  • Virtually all of black America has been, in some shape or form, touched by that rebirth. Before Malcolm X, the very handle we now embrace—black—was an insult. We were coloreds or Negroes, and to call someone “black” was to invite a fistfight. But Malcolm remade the menace inherent in that name into something mystical—Black Power; Black Is Beautiful; It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.
  • For all of Malcolm’s invective, his most seductive notion was that of collective self-creation: the idea that black people could, through force of will, remake themselves
  • Marable details how Malcolm was, by the end of his life, perhaps evolving away from his hyper-moral persona. He drinks a rum and Coke and allows himself a second meal a day. Marable suspects he carried out an affair or two, one with an 18-year-old convert to the Nation. But in the public mind, Malcolm rebirthed himself as a paragon of righteousness, and even in Marable’s retelling he is obsessed with the pursuit of self-creation. That pursuit ended when Malcolm was killed by the very Muslims from whom he once demanded fealty.
  • Some of its most prominent public faces—Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, O. J. Simpson—have in varying degrees proved themselves all too human. Against that backdrop, there is Malcolm. Tall, gaunt, and handsome, clear and direct, Malcolm was who you wanted your son to be. Malcolm was, as Joe Biden would say, clean, and he took it as his solemn, unspoken duty never to embarrass you.
  • It’s his abiding advocacy for blackness, not as a reason for failure, but as a mandate for personal, and ultimately collective, improvement that makes him compelling. Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—“You’re better than you think you are,” he seemed to say to us. “Now act like it.”
  • Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our living, black manhood” and “our own black shining prince.” Only one man today could bear those twin honorifics: Barack Obama
  • But the enduring appeal of Malcolm’s message, the portion that reaches out from the Audubon Ballroom to the South Lawn, asserts the right of a people to protect and improve themselves by their own hand. In Malcolm’s time, that message rejected the surrender of the right to secure your own body.
  • What animated Malcolm’s rage was that for all his intellect, and all his ability, and all his reinventions, as a black man in America, he found his ambitions ultimately capped. The right of self-creation had its limits then. But not anymore. Obama became a lawyer, and created himself as president, out of a single-parent home and illicit drug use.
Javier E

How One Lawyer's Crusade Could Change Football Forever - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-change-football-forever.html

sports football crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Every addition to the increasing number of ways that Americans amuse themselves — D.V.R.s, streaming content on computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon our watches — benefits the lords of professional football. Their game only becomes more valuable as the number of people watching TV programs in real time shrinks
  • The sole non-N.F.L. event on the 2013 list of the Top 10 most-watched television programs was the Academy Awards broadcast, at No. 7, between two postseason playoff games. The Oscars had 40 million viewers, the Super Bowl 108 million. N.F.L. revenue last year was about $9 billion, but the stated goal of its commissioner, Roger Goodell, in 2010 was to increase that to $25 billion by 2027.
  • And yet, past the halfway point of the season, the game is as popular as ever. Ratings are up. The N.F.L.'s associated spinoffs, like the sale of licensed merchandise and participation in the fantasy-football phenomenon, continue to grow. The Buffalo Bills, one of the league’s least valuable franchises, recently changed hands for more than $1 billion. The Dallas Cowboys are worth an estimated $3.2 billion.
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  • what if the template for football’s future is not the fate of boxing but rather that of the tobacco industry?
  • About 18 percent of American adults now smoke — fewer than one in five. Tobacco’s shift from integral part of American life to its fringes took about half a century.
  • The proposed settlement has been almost universally perceived as a victory for the league. With it, the N.F.L. bought itself — cheaply, considering its $9 billion in annual revenue — a degree of short-term business certainty. It initially agreed to set aside $765 million for brain-injured players or, in the case of those who died, their heirs. After Brody, who presides over the suit, said the fund might not cover payments to all those who qualified, the league agreed to a deal with no upper limit on its liability. But because of how the settlement delineates which afflictions qualify for financial compensation and caps the awards on what can go out to individuals, the N.F.L.'s total liability, paid out over decades, may not rise much beyond $1 billion
  • That’s nothing for an entity as rich as the N.F.L. Goodell, the league’s commissioner, made $44 million last year — or nearly nine times the maximum payment for the most severely brain-damaged N.F.L. retiree.
  • But the settlement does get money into the hands of some players who need it desperately, perhaps soon. It also sets aside $112 million for lawyers, who, if the case had gone to trial, might have waited years to be paid.
  • It is shortsighted, however, to assume that the N.F.L. and its owners will emerge from the settlement unscathed or that the league’s economic and cultural status are not under threat. Now that the N.F.L. has acknowledged that its product comes with dire health consequences, the sport, below the professional level, faces legal and regulatory challenges that will most likely intensify in the coming years.
  • It’s possible that the very thing meant to protect players — new protocols that define how they should be evaluated for a possible brain injury, and how long they should be kept out of play if one is diagnosed or suspected — will actually put school districts, administrators and coaches at more legal risk. Now that they have, in a sense, been forewarned, what happens if they don’t follow the protocols or don’t have certified athletic trainers on staff or coaches smart enough to deal with possible concussions while they are also deciding on the right third-down play?
  • What’s more, insurers may in time deem the sport too risky. Health insurers might treat it as a costly risk factor like smoking or a bad driving record. As football becomes more and more regulated, many districts may reasonably conclude that it’s more than they can handle.
  • “but you have to ask how the concussions issue changes the landscape from a law-enforcement perspective. I think it has to over time, because we now know that players are suffering repeated insults to the parts of the brain that cause changes in behavior.” Rates of smoking plunged and the industry declined because tobacco use could not be made safe. The N.F.L. may be at a similar juncture now. It has instituted rules changes to make its own games less violent and is funding and promulgating supposedly less dangerous ways to play at the youth level. But there is no assurance that any of it will make football any more healthful than low-tar cigarettes made smoking. The burden will fall on the N.F.L. to litigate the concussion issue in public and prove that its sport does not rob participants of their consciousness.
  • Between 2010 and 2012, Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth-football program, experienced a 10 percent drop in participation after years of steady growth. It attributed the decline to concerns over concussions. There’s no reason to think its numbers won’t continue to fall.
rachelramirez

The Coming Fight Over Oil Drilling in the Great Australian Bight | VICE | United States - 0 views

www.vice.com/...-in-the-great-australian-bight

Australia oil vice culture policy politics

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The Coming Fight Over Oil Drilling in the Great Australian Bight
  • An Australian Senate committee announced Monday it will consider BP's proposal to drill in search of oil reserves off the country's southern coast.
  • "If this project goes ahead, we really are gambling with the future of the Great Australian Bight," Greens Senator Robert Simms said told the ABC.
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  • would see four exploration wells drilled 1–2.5 kilometers [0.6–1.6 miles] into the Great Australian Bight, a large body of water to the country's southwest.
  • Last year, BP agreed to pay $24.5 billion [$17.7 billion USD] to settle claims against the company around the disaster.
  • It's attention that would be attractive to South Australia, which faces the prospect of becoming Australia's worst-performing state economy.
  • As the Wilderness Society points out, 85 percent of the species found in the bight cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
  • with the spill having an "optimistic" flow rate and being capped within 35 days, the modeling predicts that 175,000 barrels of oil would be released into the bight. Worst-case scenario looks more like 50,000 barrels a day for 87 days (the same as Deepwater Horizon)—close to 4.35 million barrels.
sarahbalick

COP21: Obama praises Paris climate change agreement - CNN.com - 0 views

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

obama paris climate change

shared by sarahbalick on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • , the agreement would set an ambitious goal of halting average warming at no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures -- and of striving for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible.
  • "This didn't save the planet," Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said of the agreement. "But it may have saved the chance of saving the planet."
  • If this [the Paris Agreement] is adopted as this currently stands then countries have united around a historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis."
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  • Scientists and policy experts say that would require the world to move off fossil fuels between about 2050 and the end of the century. To reach the more ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius goal, some researchers say the world will need to reach zero net carbon emissions sometime between about 2030 and 2050.
  • That level of warming is measured as the average temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.
  • Failure to set a cap could result in superdroughts, deadlier heat waves, mass extinctions of plants and animals, megafloods and rising seas that could wipe some island countries off the map. The only way to reach the goal, scientists say, is to eliminate fossil fuels.
  • The entire agreement enters into force once 55 countries (who must account for 55% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions) have ratified it.
  • The agreement calls for developed countries to raise at least $100 billion annually in order to assist developing countries.
  • China and the United States, respectively, account for about 24% and 14% of total greenhouse gas emissions
  • The agreement doesn't mandate exactly how much each country must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Rather, it sets up a bottom-up system in which each country sets its own goal -- which the agreement calls a "nationally determined contribution" -- and then must explain how it plans to reach that objective. Those pledges must be increased over time, and starting in 2018 each country will have to submit new plans every five years.
  • Many countries actually submitted their new plans before COP21 started last month -- but those pledges aren't enough to keep warming below the 2 degrees target
  • Another issue, according to observers, was whether there would be reparations paid to countries that will see irreparable damage from climate change but have done almost nothing to cause it.
  • That means if the world's biggest polluters don't sign off on the agreement, enacting it could prove challenging.
  • resident Barack Obama praised a landmark climate change agreement approved Saturday in Paris, saying it could be "a turning point for the world."
  • "The Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis,"
  • "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
  • "I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world," Obama said, calling the agreement "the best chance we have to save the one planet that we've got."
  • The accord achieved one major goal. It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures and strives for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) if possible.
qkirkpatrick

British first world war soldier laid to rest almost 100 years after death | World news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...t-almost-100-years-after-death

soldier war history politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • A decorated British soldier killed in the first world war has finally been laid to rest with full military honours almost 100 years after he died.
  • Sgt David Harkness Blakey, of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, was killed aged 26 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. His remains were found in November 2013 – 97 years after he died – during roadworks near the Connaught cemetery in Thiepval, northern France.
  • Identifying fallen first world war soldiers is difficult as tags were commonly made from paper or compressed fibres, which rapidly decomposed. But a home-made metal identity tag believed to have been created by his wife with “18634 Sgt David Harkness Blakey MM of the R Innis Fus” etched on it helped to confirm his identity, along with the discovery of an “R Innis Fus” cap badge.
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  • On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the battalion formed part of the 109 Brigade of the 36th Ulster Division and assembled at the edge of Thiepval Wood. Blakey was among scores who died that day. And in subsequent letters to his wife, it emerged he had last been seen seriously wounded in No Man’s Land
sgardner35

Iran prisoner swap: How 14 months of secret diplomacy ended in a deal - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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

shared by sgardner35 on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Iran capped 14 months of secret diplomacy and talks between Washington and Tehran as the U.S. and world powers negotiated the pact to curb Iran's nuclear program
  • The secret talks were led by Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy tapped by President Barack Obama to coordinate the global fight against ISIS, the officials said.
  • The names of the Iranians have not yet been released, the officials said, adding that the four Americans had not left Iran as of late Saturday morning.
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  • "This is a unique arrangement," one U.S. official said. "This is a humanitarian gesture."
  • The Obama administration has been criticized by several Republican presidential candidates, including GOP front-runner Donald Trump, for reaching the nuclear deal with Iran while the Americans remained imprisoned.
  • When news first broke of the incident involving the sailors, tensions were high, the official said. But the way it was quickly resolved allowed the parties to return to wrapping up negotiations on the prisoners.
  • Iran had initially insisted Jason Rezaian's fate could only be decided by Tehran's judicial system rather than through political accommodation with the U.S. But the nuclear deal, reached last year, held out hope for increased dialogue about Rezaian and the other Americans.
  • "There are a number of Iranians in the United States who are imprisoned, who went to prison as a result of activities related to the nuclear industry in Iran," he said through an interpreter.
  • "I have raised them in all of our sessions. We've had a lot of conversations. We are continuing those conversations now. And I am hopeful that the day will come soon, obviously sooner rather than later, but soon, when all of our citizens can come home," Kerry said.
Javier E

Will Self-Driving Cars Ruin the American City? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...569518

cars city urban self-driving

shared by Javier E on 07 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Autonomous cars aren’t just cars. They’re infrastructure. If the U.S. wants to avoid its past mistakes, American cities have to start thinking about how to use autonomous cars to make their downtown areas more efficient for humans, not just for machines. That could mean aggressive congestion pricing, limiting the number of AVs in an area, prohibiting certain companies from operating such cars, or even capping ownership. Today these may seem like radical steps. But compared to a future where every family and company tries to operate an autonomous car in the same metro area, it may feel like pure old-fashioned conservatism.
  • There is a future where a handful of efficient, self-driving cars operated by a responsible fleet manager could return American cities to a superior age, where people mixed promiscuously around the streets, rather than be confined to narrow sidewalks to maximize space for cars.
Javier E

Spartans don't hug it out. Except for Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker | Marina Hyde | O... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...b-rees-mogg-steve-baker-brexit

brexit

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Since it’s rather difficult to know where to start on what happened on Wednesday, let’s begin in the future. I want to assure you that when the apocalypse has come, and you’re living in the bombed-out remnants of civilisation, clad in rags and distilling drinking water from your own urine, the one crackling radio in your resistance bunker will still be bringing news of Conservative party leadership contests.
  • Still, back to the present day, where it’s arguably not all good news
  • In the House of Commons, though, control of the legislative agenda had been handed to the cry-laugh emoji
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Yes – huge soz to the Israelite slaves, obviously, but it turns out Moses is going to try his luck on the Egyptian career ladder after all. Bum around court a bit, knock up a couple of the Pharaoh’s daughters, tell a few hundred off-colour jokes. But you guys go ahead and he’ll totally catch you up. Save him a place in the middle of the sea. If it helps, he’s written two opposing versions of the Ten Commandments
  • As one noted American TV news presenter inquired as the indicative vote results came in: “Is there a word for something that has passed through farce and tragedy like nine times already?” Well. None of us wishes to call this one too soon, but it is, perhaps, just beginning to feel like that word might be “Brexit”.
anonymous

US refugees: Stricter screening as 120-day ban expires - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-41729584

US Refugee immigration trump travelban Culture

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • US President Donald Trump is to allow refugees to begin entering to the US again, with stricter rules for applicants from 11 "high risk" nations.The decision came as a 120-day ban on refugees expired on Tuesday - a part of Mr Trump's executive orders that came to be known as the "travel ban".Applicants from the 11 nations will be restricted for a 90-day review period.
  • The White House announced on 29 September that it had set a cap on refugees at 45,000 - the lowest since the refugee admissions programme began in 1975.In President Barack Obama's last year in office, the US accepted 85,000 refugees.Pro-immigrant group Human Rights First noted in a statement how US "refugee vetting procedures - which include extensive and comprehensive interviews as well as multiple rounds of security vetting with an array of US and international intelligence and law enforcement agencies - are widely recognised as the most stringent in the world".
Javier E

The Bulwark's Quest to Shame High-Profile Trump Backers - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583354

conservatism gop media

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • “The analogy [I’m] really afraid of,” he confesses, “is that we’re the Japanese soldiers who don’t know the war is over, and we’re still hiding out in the cave.”
  • A certain quixotic quality pervades The Bulwark. Launched last month by former staffers of the defunct Weekly Standard magazine, the site is headquartered in a rented cluster of cubicles in downtown Washington, D.C. To keep overhead low, the team is small—fewer than 10 full-time writers and editors
  • In the site’s founding manifesto, Sykes wrote that The Bulwark would stand in defiant opposition to President Trump, and “push back against the moral and intellectual corruption that now poses an existential threat to conservatism as a viable political force
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  • in the coming months, he tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls”—those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers
  • a consensus in the center-right media: For a conservative outlet to hang onto its audience—let alone any influence in Republican politics—it must plant itself firmly in Trump’s camp.
  • Rather than crafting coverage that aims to turn rank-and-file Trump voters against the president—an effort that would almost certainly fail—it wants to shame and stigmatize the “bad actors” in the conservative elite
  • you’ll find one lively polemic after another calling out Trump-friendly politicos by name—often in witheringly personal terms
  • Glenn Beck dropped his long-held opposition and donned a red MAGA cap on his radio show last May. National Review, which crusaded against Trump’s nomination, now routinely publishes pro-Trump writers. Most recently, Erick Erickson, the conservative blogger who helped popularize the #NeverTrump hashtag, announced that he would vote for the president in 2020.
  • “A lot of folks have had a free shot to get in bed with some of the most disreputable [people] out there, and they still have a veneer of respectability,” Sykes says. “We want to raise the opportunity cost.”
  • a list of high-status commentators (Marc Thiessen, Hugh Hewitt), think tankers (Henry Olsen, Victor Davis Hanson), and politicos (Bill Bennett).
  • “This sounds naive, but I quite frankly feel they know better,” he tells me. “And at certain points of moral clarity, I could see them coming back to the faith of their fathers.”
  • With no plans to sell advertising, Longwell says it has already raised enough money to keep the shoestring operation funded for more than a year
  • One thing The Bulwark doesn’t have is a coherent vision for what conservatism should look like after Trump
  • I asked him if he worried that he was limiting his future job prospects in the conservative press, but he seemed confused by the question: “Where is someone like me going to go?”
Javier E

U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...gh-skilled-workers-11548879868

visa US immigration trump policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON—The Trump administration unveiled changes to how the coveted visas for high-skilled foreign workers are allocated starting this April, in an effort to boost the number awarded to people with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.
  • The change would result in up to 5,340 more immigrants with a master’s degree or higher getting selected for the visa, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which published the new rules.
  • “If a lawsuit is filed, and an injunction is entered, it does have the risk of throwing the whole thing up in the air. That would be my greatest fear,” he said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • He added that any court issuing a restraining order against the rules taking effect April 1 “could potentially throw the whole H-1B system into chaos.”
  • The number of visas allocated in any one year is capped, and for years, demand by employers has far outstripped that. USCIS selects applications based on a lottery, though applicants must meet qualification criteria.
  • Under the adjusted system, workers with advanced degrees seeking H-1B visas will first be entered into a general lottery that will allocate 65,000 visas. If they aren’t selected, the more-educated applicants will have another chance through a second lottery for 20,000 visas, for which entry is restricted to advanced-degree holders. In the current system, the order of the two lotteries is reversed.
Javier E

The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops | Busin... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...arket-changed-britain-shopping

discount supermarket uk

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • For Aldi, the panic and rush is an integral part of the shopping experience for two reasons. The first is the happy realisation once you have left the store, and your heartbeat has settled, that you have spent less time shopping than you would have in a typical supermarket. The second, and most important, is what Aldi managers describe, straight-faced, as “the thrill at the till”: your trolley full of goods has cost less than you thought it would. The rushed, no-frills experience isn’t something you merely endure for the sake of saving money; the awareness of your savings makes that experience a pleasure in itself.
  • Aldi is still relatively low-tech: without a loyalty programme, it knows little about individual customer preferences and you can’t buy its groceries online. What it has done is disrupt a mindset: the settled wisdom about how we think of ourselves as shoppers, and the basis by which we identify with a particular supermarket. Aldi’s victory was to show that there was no shame – and in fact there was satisfaction – in shopping at a discount supermarket
  • “Aldi’s customer profile is now classless,” said Hyman. “The supermarket is as strong with affluent people as it is with people on low incomes.”
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  • Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more.
  • Lacking capital, they stocked only a tight range of staples, such as pasta and soap, planning to widen the offering later. But they soon realised that offering a limited selection of cheap, fast-selling goods kept their costs down and the cash flowing, which they could use to invest in new stores. As the former Aldi executive Dieter Brandes and his son Nils wrote in “Bare Essentials”, their book about the company: “Basically, a completely new business model was created along the lines of a discovery in the natural sciences: by accident.”
  • in 1961, when they had 300 stores, they chose to split Aldi, short for Albrecht Discount, into two parts. The “Aldi equator” ran through Essen, with Theo taking the part of Germany to the north, and Karl the south. Aldi North and Aldi South shared all information, except profits, and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, but were otherwise run separately, with their stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently coloured floors – one yellow and one grey.
  • Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”
  • In their book “Bare Essentials”, Dieter and Nils Brandes argued that Aldi’s embrace of kaizen, its lean management structure and just-in-time approach to inventory – taking delivery of stock only when needed, to cut holding costs – made it the “most Japanese” company in Germany.
  • 1976, Aldi South, Karl’s company, opened the first Aldi store on the east coast of the US. Three years later, in 1979, Theo’s Aldi North purchased Trader Joe’s, a California chain that sells cheap gourmet foods and enjoys a cult-like following. (The US is still the only foreign market where both Aldis operate.)
  • Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies
  • Fourth, and most importantly, the UK is, by global standards, a high-wage economy. This means that labour costs make up a big part of a supermarket’s operating expenses. Here, discounters have a major competitive advantage, because their business model – stocking a small range of products, eschewing delicatessens and promotions, and so on – allows them to operate with fewer, more productive, staff. (The most important performance measure in any Aldi branch is revenue divided by employee hours.)
  • arl Albrecht, who was famously secretive, only spoke publicly about Aldi’s business model on one occasion – in 1953. Its fundamental principles, he said, were “narrow product range and low price, [which] cannot be separated
  • As a private company, with no shareholders other than Karl Albrecht’s family to answer to, it could afford to be patient. “Aldi is very attuned to going into a country, making the investment, and building slowly and steadily,” said Richard Hyman, the retail expert. “Most other companies don’t have a 30-year view – or even a five-year view.”
  • By the time the supermarkets awoke to the structural shift that had occurred in the industry, the damage was done. “The big four bosses were not just sleeping at the wheel,” said Black. “They were comatose.”
  • “Ten years ago we had 900 lines, now we have 1,800,” said Neale. “That’s not because we are trying to become a big-four retailer, it’s because consumer tastes have evolved. We are managing the equilibrium between what customers want and costs.”
  • As the large supermarkets have realised, it is very hard to make money from internet sales because the profit margin on groceries is small and the delivery costs are so high – but now they can’t reverse course without losing customers. Andy Clarke, the former boss of Asda, told the Sunday Times last year that if the big four supermarkets had their time again “they wouldn’t have offered home deliveries, full stop”. “Online groceries are a cost drain,” Neale said. “Why should 90% of customers subsidise the 10% who get free home delivery?”
  • All supermarkets have their own private labels: made not by them, but for them, by manufacturers who agree to put their merchandise in a bag or box with the grocer’s logo on it. But Aldi takes this to extremes: more than 90% of the products it sells, from shaving cream to dark chocolate and frozen pizza, are private labels
  • Stocking mostly own-label goods allows the company to order huge quantities of a single item, to its own specifications, at a low unit cost.
  • Aldi’s entire ketchup order comes from one manufacturer that can operate the same, unchanging product run, all the time, and has no marketing costs to build into the price. “For many SKUs we are the biggest buyer by a country mile,” Neale said.
  • Among UK suppliers, who have often been treated badly by the big supermarkets, with their pressure for back margin fees and slow payment terms, Aldi has a good reputation
  • in 2010, following the death of Theo, which it said brought to an end “the story of the most eccentric, secretive and mysterious pair of siblings in Germany’s post-war economic history”. Karl died four years later, the richest man in Germany with a net worth of $25bn. (Second on the list was Dieter Schwarz, the Lidl owner, followed by Theo’s heirs.)
  • In 2017, Aldi South’s revenues reached €52bn, with about 20% of that from the UK and Ireland. In Ireland, Aldi has 12% of the market, and in Australia 13%, behind Woolworths and Coles. Its share in the US is only 2% – but Aldi plans to raise its number of outlets from 1,800 to 2,500 by 2022, which would make it the third-biggest chain in the US by store count, after Walmart and Kroger
  • In the UK there is still plenty of room to grow. Aldi hopes to have 1,000 shops in three years, up from just over 800 today. Dave McCarthy, a retail analyst at HSBC, said that given Aldi and Lidl’s expansion plans, their share of the market could peak at more than 20%.
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