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Javier E

I filed one of the 83 dismissed misconduct complaints against Brett Kavanaugh. Here's w... - 0 views

  • I listened on Sept. 27 while Kavanaugh peppered two hours of Senate testimony with attacks against people and groups he associated with Democrats. Kavanaugh alleged (without factual basis) that he was the victim of a vast, secret, left-wing cabal, masterminded by senators such as Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and motivated by “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” I was shocked to hear a Supreme Court nominee carry on like a crazed conspiracy theorist.
  • Turns out, there’s a rule against federal judges behaving like this. Congress passed the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act in 1980, and the rules under that act state that it’s misconduct for a federal judge to make “inappropriately partisan statements.” I may be retired, but I think I know an inappropriately partisan statement when I hear one.
  • The 10th Circuit Judicial Council finally announced its dismissal of the 83 complaints on Dec. 18, explaining its decision roughly as follows: (1) The 1980 act applies to circuit judges but not Supreme Court justices, (2) Kavanaugh was a D.C. Circuit Court judge during his confirmation hearings and when I filed my complaint, but (3) he’s a Supreme Court justice now. Evidently a circuit judge nominated to the Supreme Court can be held responsible for his partisan misconduct before the Senate, so long as the Senate fails to confirm the nominee. But if the nominee wins the approval of a partisan Senate, then his inappropriate partisanship is excused. This reasoning doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like saying we can prosecute a safecracker only if the safe proved to be empty.
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  • Granted, the 1980 act does not apply to the conduct of Supreme Court justices. But the act fails to say what to do when a judge engages in misconduct before becoming a Supreme Court justice. Here, the Judicial Council argued that Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court was an “intervening event” under the 1980 act and its accompanying rules, and that “a misconduct proceeding can be concluded because of ‘intervening events.’ ”
  • Unfortunately, the Judicial Council truncated the relevant rule, which allows for a complaint to be dismissed if “intervening events render some or all of the allegations moot or make remedial action impossible.” Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court did not render moot the questionable behavior that helped win him that seat. Nor is remedial action impossible now that Judge Kavanaugh is Justice Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh can still issue the kind of full apology he has avoided up until now, and he can recuse himself from highly partisan cases (those with Trump as a party, for example).
  • In order to let Kavanaugh off the hook, the Judicial Council skipped around relevant commentary stating that “as long as the subject of a complaint performs judicial duties, a complaint alleging judicial conduct must be addressed.” Here, the Judicial Council interpreted “judicial duties” to refer only to duties of judges covered under the 1980 act — leading the council to the strained conclusion that a Supreme Court justice does not perform “judicial duties.” Instead of this tortured reasoning, I’d say we’ve appended yet another exception to the adage that no one is above the law.
lmunch

The IPCC: Who Are They | Union of Concerned Scientists - 0 views

  • The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess climate change based on the latest science.
  • Governments request these reports through the intergovernmental process and the content is deliberately policy-relevant, but steers clear of any policy-prescriptive statements.  Government representatives work with experts to produce the "summary for policymakers"
  • The fifth assessment report, AR5,  is the most comprehensive synthesis to date. Experts from more than 80 countries contributed to this assessment, which represents six years of work. More than 830 lead authors and review editors drew on the work of over 1000 contributors. About 2,000 expert reviewers provided over 140,000 review comments. 
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  • the purpose of assessing “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data. It bases its assessment mainly on published and peer reviewed scientific technical literature.”
  • And the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5, 2013/14) asserted that “[h]uman influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history.” These findings informed the climate negotiations resulting in the Paris Agreement of 2015, in which 197 countries committed to limiting global warming to below 2°C.
  • In the end, it is the authors who bear the sole responsibility for the content of their chapters. Government representatives, however, do participate in the line-by-line review and revision of the much shorter summary for policymakers, or SPM, for each technical report.
  • Each of these working groups has two co-chairs—one from a developed country and one from a developing country. An additional set of governmental representatives (frequently scientists) have been nominated by their countries to serve on the bureau of each working group. Together, the two co-chairs and the bureau members function as an executive committee, while the team of scientists drafting individual chapters of each working group’s assessment is sometimes referred to as the scientific core.
  • The technical support units, co-chairs, and bureaus of each working group together assemble a list of proposed authors for its assessment, but the lead authors are selected by the entire working group. Governments and non-governmental organizations around the world are invited to nominate potential authors. 
  • AR5 WG1 alone generated 54,677 review comments. Many authors attest that this review process ranks among the most extensive for any scientific document.
  • For the AR5, Working Group I  summarized the physical science basis of climate change. Working Group II  addressed the vulnerability of human and natural systems to climate change (i.e., the negative and positive consequences of global warming) and options for adapting to the changes. Working Group III  assessed options for limiting heat-trapping emissions, evaluated methods for removing them from the atmosphere, and examined other means of slowing the warming trend, as well as related economic issues.
  • The word “consensus” is often invoked, and sometimes questioned, when speaking of IPCC reports. In fact, there are two arenas in which a consensus needs to be reached in the production of IPCC assessments. One is the meeting of the entire IPCC, in which unanimity is sought among government representatives. Even though such consensus is not required (countries are free to register their formal dissent), agreement has been reached on all documents and SPMs to date—a particularly impressive fact.
  • Government representatives propose authors and contributors, participate in the review process, and help reach a consensus on the report’s major findings. This can result (especially in the SPMs) in language that is sometimes weaker than it otherwise might be. 
  • The full assessment is a multi-level document for a wide array of audiences ranging from planners investing in protecting their communities to political leaders.
  • But it also means that governments cannot easily criticize or dismiss a report that they themselves have helped shape and approved during political negotiations. As Sir John Houghton, co-chair of TAR Working Group I, once put it: “Any move to reduce political involvement in the IPCC would weaken the panel and deprive it of its political clout. . . . If governments were not involved, then the documents would be treated like any old scientific report. They would end up on the shelf or in the waste bin.” 
  • It is important, however, to reiterate a fundamental point about IPCC assessments: although governments are involved in the process and support it financially, science ultimately predominates. The chapters that underpin all the documents are written by and under the control of scientists, and scientists ensure that all the documents are both consistent with the findings of each chapter and scientifically credible in their own right.
hannahcarter11

Swiss Vote To Ban Wearing Of Burqas In Public : NPR - 0 views

  • Swiss voters approved a proposition Sunday banning facial coverings in public. Niqabs and burqas, worn by almost no one even among the country's Muslim population, will be banned outside of religious institutions. The new law doesn't apply to facial coverings for health reasons.
  • Switzerland will join several European countries that have implemented a ban on facial coverings, including France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria.
  • The new legislation was brought to the ballot through a people's initiative launched by the nation's right-wing Egerkingen Committee, the same group that led the charge to ban minarets over a decade ago
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  • The Swiss government opposed the nationwide initiative as excessive and argued such bans should be decided by individual regions, two of which already have a "burqa ban" in place.
  • The ban barely passed a majority vote, with 51.2% of the Swiss voting in support of the proposal.
  • One of the largest backers of the initiative was the nationalist Swiss People's Party, which applauded the outcome of the vote and called the new measure "A strong symbol in the fight against radical political Islam."
  • Some feminist groups and progressive Muslims reportedly were supporters of the initiative, arguing that full face coverings are oppressive to women.
  • Other groups felt the new restriction was Islamophobic and that women should not be told what to wear.
  • "Today's decision is tearing open old wounds, expanding the principle of legal inequality and sending a clear signal of exclusion to the Muslim minority," the group wrote.
  • Researchers found that at most a few dozen Muslim women wear full face coverings in Switzerland. About 5% of Switzerland's population of 8.6 million is Muslim, the BBC reported.
Javier E

Opinion | Big Tech Is Bad. Big A.I. Will Be Worse. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet/Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially A.I.-dominated future. This is not good news. History has shown us that when the distribution of information is left in the hands of a few, the result is political and economic oppression. Without intervention, this history will repeat itself.
  • The fact that these companies are attempting to outpace each other, in the absence of externally imposed safeguards, should give the rest of us even more cause for concern, given the potential for A.I. to do great harm to jobs, privacy and cybersecurity. Arms races without restrictions generally do not end well.
  • We believe the A.I. revolution could even usher in the dark prophecies envisioned by Karl Marx over a century ago. The German philosopher was convinced that capitalism naturally led to monopoly ownership over the “means of production” and that oligarchs would use their economic clout to run the political system and keep workers poor.
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  • Literacy rates rose alongside industrialization, although those who decided what the newspapers printed and what people were allowed to say on the radio, and then on television, were hugely powerful. But with the rise of scientific knowledge and the spread of telecommunications came a time of multiple sources of information and many rival ways to process facts and reason out implications.
  • With the emergence of A.I., we are about to regress even further. Some of this has to do with the nature of the technology. Instead of assessing multiple sources, people are increasingly relying on the nascent technology to provide a singular, supposedly definitive answer.
  • This technology is in the hands of two companies that are philosophically rooted in the notion of “machine intelligence,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to outperform humans in specific activities.
  • This philosophy was naturally amplified by a recent (bad) economic idea that the singular objective of corporations should be to maximize short-term shareholder wealth.
  • Combined together, these ideas are cementing the notion that the most productive applications of A.I. replace humankind.
  • Congress needs to assert individual ownership rights over underlying data that is relied on to build A.I. systems
  • Fortunately, Marx was wrong about the 19th-century industrial age that he inhabited. Industries emerged much faster than he expected, and new firms disrupted the economic power structure. Countervailing social powers developed in the form of trade unions and genuine political representation for a broad swath of society.
  • History has repeatedly demonstrated that control over information is central to who has power and what they can do with it.
  • Generative A.I. requires even deeper pockets than textile factories and steel mills. As a result, most of its obvious opportunities have already fallen into the hands of Microsoft, with its market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, and Alphabet, worth $1.6 trillion.
  • At the same time, powers like trade unions have been weakened by 40 years of deregulation ideology (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, two Bushes and even Bill Clinton
  • For the same reason, the U.S. government’s ability to regulate anything larger than a kitten has withered. Extreme polarization and fear of killing the golden (donor) goose or undermining national security mean that most members of Congress would still rather look away.
  • To prevent data monopolies from ruining our lives, we need to mobilize effective countervailing power — and fast.
  • Today, those countervailing forces either don’t exist or are greatly weakened
  • Rather than machine intelligence, what we need is “machine usefulness,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to augment human capabilities. This would be a much more fruitful direction for increasing productivity. By empowering workers and reinforcing human decision making in the production process, it also would strengthen social forces that can stand up to big tech companies
  • We also need regulation that protects privacy and pushes back against surveillance capitalism, or the pervasive use of technology to monitor what we do
  • Finally, we need a graduated system for corporate taxes, so that tax rates are higher for companies when they make more profit in dollar terms
  • Our future should not be left in the hands of two powerful companies that build ever larger global empires based on using our collective data without scruple and without compensation.
Javier E

Robots and Robber Barons - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.
  • Increasingly, profits have been rising at the expense of workers in general, including workers with the skills that were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy.
  • similar stories are playing out in many fields, including services like translation and legal research. What’s striking about their examples is that many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers.
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  • there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other.
  • can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.
  • increasing business concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their employees.
  • that shift is happening — and it has major implications. For example, there is a big, lavishly financed push to reduce corporate tax rates; is this really what we want to be doing at a time when profits are surging at workers’ expense? Or what about the push to reduce or eliminate inheritance taxes; if we’re moving back to a world in which financial capital, not skill or education, determines income, do we really want to make it even easier to inherit wealth?
Javier E

No matter who wins the presidential election, Nate Silver was right - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • I don’t fault Silver for his caution. It’s honest. What it really says is he doesn’t know with much confidence what’s going to happen
  • That’s because there’s a lot of human caprice and whim in electoral behavior that can’t always be explained or predicted with scientific precision. Politics ain’t moneyball. Good-quality polls give an accurate sense of where a political race is at a point in time, but they don’t predict the future.
  • Predictive models, generally based on historical patterns, work until they don’t.
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  • In his hedged forecasts this time, Silver appears to be acknowledging that polling and historical patterns don’t always capture what John Maynard Keynes, in his classic 1936 economic General Theory, described as “animal spirits.”
  • There is, Keynes wrote, “the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits — of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”
Javier E

Slacktivism for everyone: How keyboard activism is affecting social movements - Salon.com - 1 views

  • Social movement scholars have known for decades that most people, even if they agree with an idea, don’t take action to support it. For most people upset by a policy decision or a disturbing news event, the default is not to protest in the streets, but rather to watch others as they do. Getting to the point where someone acts as part of a group is a milestone in itself.
  • Decades of research show that people will be more willing to engage in activism that is easy, and less costly – emotionally, physically, or financially. For example, more than a million people used social media to “check in” at the Standing Rock Reservation, center of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Far fewer people – just a few thousand – have traveled to the North Dakota camps to brave the arriving winter weather and risk arrest.
  • Once people are primed to act, it’s important not to discourage them from taking that step, however small. Preliminary findings from my team’s current research suggest that people just beginning to explore activism can be disheartened by bring criticized for doing something wrong.
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  • Shaming them for making “small change” is a way to reduce numbers of protesters, not to increase them. Shaming can also create a legacy of political inactivity: Turning kids off from involvement now could encourage decades of disengagement.
  • “Flash activism,” the label I prefer for online protest forms such as online petition, can be effective at influencing targets in specific circumstances
  • Numbers matter. Whether you are a high school coach, Bank of America, the Obama administration or a local council member, an overwhelming flood of signatures, emails and phone calls can be quite persuasive
  • Online protest is easy, nearly cost-free in democratic nations, and can help drive positive social change. In addition, flash activism can help build stronger movements in the future. If current activists view online support as an asset, rather than with resentment because it is different from “traditional” methods, they can mobilize vast numbers of people.
  • People who participate in one online action may join future efforts, or even broaden their involvement in activism. For example, kids who engage in politics online often do other political activities as well.
  • Critics often worry that valuing flash activism will “water down” the meaning of activism. But that misses the point and is counterproductive. The goal of activism is social change, not nostalgia or activism for activism’s sake. Most people who participate in flash activism would not have done more – rather, they would have done nothing at all.
  • Scholars and advocates alike should stop asking if flash activism matters. We should also stop assuming that offline protest always succeeds. Instead, we should seek out the best ways to achieve specific goals. Sometimes the answer will be an online petition, sometimes it will be civil disobedience and sometimes it will be both – or something else entirely.
  • The real key for grassroots social change is to engage as many people as possible. That will require flexibility on how engagement occurs. If people want larger and more effective social movements, they should be working to find ways to include everyone who will do anything, not upholding an artificial standard of who is a “real activist” and who is not.
jlessner

Who Qualifies for 'Asylum'? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Greeks allowed slaves who ran away from abusive masters and even some criminals to seek sanctuary in certain temples; ‘‘asylum’’ comes from their word for inviolable.
  • The right of asylum might seem as culturally embedded as the ruins of one of the old temples.
  • Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain invoked insects when he warned of a ‘‘swarm’’ of ‘‘illegal migrants.’
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  • The modern right to asylum has roots in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
jordancart33

Rare Swatch watches to be auctioned in Geneva - The Local - 0 views

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    The collection, which will go under the hammer on November 10th, comprises around a thousand watches, among them 380 prototypes with an estimated value of over a million Swiss francs ($1 million).
jordancart33

Swiss bishops: we are open to gay people - The Local - 0 views

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    The Catholic church is open to all, regardless of sexuality, the Swiss Conference of Bishops has said in its first official statement since the controversial comments of Bishop Vitus Huonder at the end of July.
jordancart33

Switzerland set to test world's longest tunnel - The Local - 0 views

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    Testing of the new Gotthard base tunnel, set to become the world's longest tunnel when it opens next year, will start in October, the construction firm has confirmed.
jordancart33

Fifa bans former VP Jack Warner for life - The Local - 0 views

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    "He was a key player in schemes involving the offer, acceptance, and receipt of undisclosed and illegal payments," a committee statement said of the 72-year-old Warner, who previously led Concacaf, the confederation of North and Central America and the Caribbean.
jordancart33

Three arrested for human cell extract medicine - The Local - 0 views

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    The agency noted that medical products made from human or animal tissue, and containing no living cells, are subject to Switzerland's Therapeutic Products Act and require the approval of Swissmedic. The manufacture and distribution of such preparations, as well as their import, wholesale trading or export must be approved by the agency, it added.
jordancart33

UK suicide tourist: 'Ideal shelf life for people is 70' - The Local - 0 views

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    The death of a healthy British former nurse at a suicide clinic in Basel is igniting controversy in the UK at a time when the number of foreigners coming to end their lives in Switzerland is rising sharply.
jordancart33

Anti-immigrant party draws in more support - The Local - 0 views

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    A new poll showed that Swiss voters are shifting more in favour of the right-wing anti-immigration Swiss People's Party (SVP) while support for more centrist groups started to weaken ahead of elections next month.
Javier E

Sucking carbon out of the air is no magic fix for the climate emergency | Simon Lewis |... - 0 views

  • To have just a 50% chance of meeting the 1.5C means halving global emissions over the next decade and hitting “net zero” emissions by about 2050
  • That means every sector of every country in the world needs to be, on average, zero emissions. That’s electricity, transport, industry, farming, the lot.
  • there are some areas where zero emissions by 2050 is impossible. There will, for example, always be some emissions from the farming needed to feed more than 10 billion people this century
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  • there is no sign of flying long-haul on an electric plane any time soon.
  • The answer to this is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using “negative emissions technologies”
  • How can it be done? The UK is betting on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, BECCS, where carbon is removed from the atmosphere by crops or trees as they grow. This biomass is then burned in a power station to generate electricity, and the waste carbon dioxide is pumped far underground
  • A second approach is to restore or enhance processes that naturally remove carbon dioxide from the atmospher
  • orest restoration removes carbon by storing it in trees, and soils can also take up carbon, for example, if crushed silicate rocks are spread on to them, enhancing a natural chemical process
  • Politicians and their advisers love them, because they can announce a target such as 1.5C while planning to exceed it, with temperatures hopefully clawed back later in the century through negative emissions.
  • The greater the negative emissions, the less decarbonisation is needed. Negative emissions technologies are deployed as a weapon to avoid taking serious action on climate.
  • Most scenarios have more than 730bn tonnes of carbon dioxide sequestered as negative emissions this century. That is equivalent to all the carbon dioxide emitted since the industrial revolution by the US, the UK, Germany and China combined. There just isn’t enough land to suck up that much carbon into new forests
  • using BECCS to remove this much carbon, as most scenarios assume, would require an area of new cropland larger than India, plus building a facility to store 1m tonnes of carbon a year every single day from 2025 until 2050. Negative emissions at this scale are the stuff of fantasy.
Javier E

Why Students Should Care About the Wars America Fights - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The more I asked my students about their thoughts on the Middle East, the more I realized that it was not simply a matter of disinterest (although that is certainly a factor among some), but rather that the subject only existed to them in an abstract manner.
  • My high-school experience was shaped by 9/11, and I enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after the towers fell. It wasn’t until after I returned from deployment to Iraq and entering college that I began to think more about what this war meant and how it has fundamentally changed American society. But for my students, this was a war that had existed for almost their entire lives: In fact, from the moment many of them were born, the U.S. has been engaged in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to mention the indelible mark that terrorism has left on Europe in recent years, or the very visible specter of ISIS operating within the Middle East and Africa today. How could there be no questions?
  • I wanted students to actively seek understanding of the region and the war that shaped a new generation of vets, including myself. I wanted to know that this history would not be lost, that a war costly in blood and treasure would not be forgotten; student detachment now would mean their detachment as they entered college and, ultimately, the “real world.” The consequences of a disinterested society are severe when considering the inevitability of future American military mobilization.
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  • I began to wonder if the disconnect is generational, whether today’s children are uniquely disconnected from the war that has shaped their lives
  • Consider the Vietnam War: The number of U.S. households owning a television increased by 75 percent between 1950 and 1960. By the time the Tet Offensive took place in 1968—a major turning point in the war—nearly 95 percent of households owned a TV. Images of the war were directly broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans via the big three networks
  • the fact that it was America’s first truly televised war speaks to its magnitude as a media event. Personal connections also rendered teenagers hyper-exposed to the war. Even though a minority of those who served in Vietnam were conscripted, the draft was still a salient aspect of the war, one of which families were all too aware
  • By contrast, in 2010, when the war in Iraq reached its seven-year mark, just 1 percent of news coverage was dedicated to the conflict. And currently, the proportion of Americans having served in the U.S.’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at less than 1 percent
  • With no relatives or family friends having served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and with such little media exposure to the conflicts, many young people do not have any reference point for understanding the impact of war.
  • Fewer families maintain connections to the military today than in previous eras, and this fact is especially pronounced among younger Americans; the younger you are, the less likely you are to know anyone who served in the armed forces.
  • Experts argue history education—let alone nuanced history education that encourages critical thinking—is a low priority for America’s public schools, and if that’s the case this flaw only exacerbates the problem. As does the reality, according to some critics, that many modern-day textbooks teach a highly biased account of the “War on Terror.”
  • What does this mean? America’s youth aren’t apathetic—rather, they’ve grown up during a war obscured by modern American culture. If one doesn’t care to look at the war, then he doesn’t have to
  • . It’s not indifference per se, but instead lack of context.
  • If education is truly an investment in the future, then that education must involve addressing consequences of prolonged war.
  • It is today’s students who will foot the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan when they become taxpayers. It is today’s students who are now—and will continue to be—exposed to an entirely new set of policies and institutions have been developed in the name of the “War on Terror.” Today’s students, for instance, will continue to grow up in an era of both ever-increasing electronic surveillance and reduction of privacy.
  • Students’ silence speaks to the need for American schools to address a growing divide between the military and the American public—to include as a core part of the curriculum lessons on this ill-defined war that has left societies in ruin and changed American politics. At some point, students must learn that it is their civic responsibility to understand and assess violence being waged in their name.
krystalxu

Gender Equality and Women's Development in China - 0 views

  • Of its total population of 1.3 billion, women account for about half.
  • women are being given more guarantees of enjoyment of equal rights and opportunities with men and the development of women is being given unprecedented opportunities.
  • The state has continuously intensified its efforts in the formulation, revision and enforcement of relevant laws and regulations to protect the legitimate rights and interests of women in earnest.
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  • The new document outlines 34 major goals and 100 policies and measures in six fields: women and the economy; women's participation in decision-making and administration; women and education; women and health; women and the law; and women and the environment.
  • Giving full play to women's role in the rural economy. China is basically an agricultural country, and women account for more than 60 percent of the rural labor force and are a major force in farming activities.
  • Over the past decade, materials on gender statistics have been compiled and published by the state departments of statistics.
  • By the end of 2004, the number of both urban and rural women workers reached 337 million nationwide, accounting for 44.8 percent of the total employed;
  • Their expenditures are covered in the financial budgets of the governments at the corresponding level.
  • reducing the extent of poverty among and the number of poor women, and calls for more support for poverty-stricken women in the country's western development strategy,
  • the "Poverty-Reduction Action for Women"
  • the proportions of full-time women teachers in secondary vocational schools and institutions of higher learning was 46.5 percent and 42.5 percent, respectively.
  • From 2001 to 2004, the central government earmarked 9.7 billion yuan to solve the problem of drinking water for rural residents, providing safe drinking water for an average of 6.9 million rural women a year.
  • The upgrading of public toilets and sewage facilities has eased the heavy burden of many rural women to carry water, and reduced health hazards for them and their family members, thus effectively improving their living and development conditions.
  • Some courts have established specialized tribunals to accept and adjudicate civil cases involving the protection of women's rights and interests,
krystalxu

BBC - Future - The hidden crisis shaping life on Earth - 0 views

  • this North African resident became the latest victim of the ‘sixth great wave’ of mass extinction.
  • including the one that ended the dinosaurs’ reign 65 million years ago, and the one that we’re on the brink of today
  • scientists estimate that there’ll be between 269-350 further extinctions of birds and mammals by 2100.
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  • Biodiversity is defined as the variety of living organisms,
  • The biologist EO Wilson once described this loss as a “hidden and immense” tragedy, overshadowed by the threat of climate change.
  • decimates habitats through drainage and pollution.
  • Native island populations are particularly susceptible, with the dodo in Mauritius and the flying fox on Guam, poignant examples.
  • likely to climb the ranks as a driver of extinction.
  • nailed-on candidates for extinction.
  • as seen with some of the world’s fisheries.
  • humans driving species to extinction for the last 60,000 years
  • Aichi Biodiversity Targets and Sustainable Development Goals.
  • wasps in New Zealand and cane toads in Australia.
rerobinson03

The U.S. Has a New Climate Goal. How Does It Stack Up Globally? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Biden announced Thursday that America would aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
  • The later baseline makes the United States target look a bit better, because it omits a period when emissions were rising. An earlier baseline makes Europe look more ambitious, since it has been cutting for longer.
  • To avoid many of the most catastrophic risks of climate change, such the collapse of polar ice sheets or widespread crop failures, scientists have said that the world likely needs to zero out emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation by around mid-century. “
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  • China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has pledged that its emissions will peak by around 2030. From that point, the country will then aim to get down to net zero emissions by 2060.
  • Partly for that reason, some environmentalists have argued that the United States should have picked an even more ambitious target for reducing emissions.
  • Many Republicans in Congress have argued that the Biden administration is acting too aggressively on climate change when countries like China and India have yet to commit to absolute emissions cuts. Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said that the president was “unilaterally committing America to a drastic and damaging emissions pledge” that would punish the U.S. economy while “America’s adversaries like China and Russia continue to increase emissions at will.”
  • So far, the results have been mixed. Japan and Canada both agreed to strengthen their 2030 targets. The British government said Tuesday that it would step up action with a new target, cutting emissions 78 percent below 1990 levels by 2035. But other major emitters such as China, India and Russia have yet to offer significant new pledges.
  • To get at least a 50 percent cut by 2030, a variety of studies have found, the United States would need to adopt sweeping new policies and slash emissions each year at an unprecedented rate. Possible strategies include requiring utilities to install vastly more wind and solar power, persuading Americans to buy many more electric cars, and forcing oil and gas companies to slash emissions of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas. States like California and New York could help, too, by following through on their plans to clean up their power plants and vehicle fleets.
  • “In countries where a change in government can derail the whole thing,” said Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, “it’s a lot harder to be sure that these goals are here to stay.”
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