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xaviermcelderry

Opinion | Has Trump's Reckoning Come Too Late? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said in a statement, adding, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
  • Trump now becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. Half of all presidential impeachments since the Republic began have been impeachments of Trump. This latest impeachment is different than the first, and not just because it was bipartisan. It culminates a week in which Trump has finally faced the broad social pariahdom he’s always deserved.
  • hen a mob incited by the president ransacked the Capitol, killing one policeman and pummeling others, it also tore down a veil. Suddenly, all but the most fanatical partisans admitted that Trump was exactly who his fiercest critics have always said he was.
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  • Under Trump, political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency was “hamstrung” in trying to investigate white nationalists. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base,” said Gomez.
  • The siege of the Capitol wasn’t a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis. For years, he’s been telling us he wouldn’t accept an election loss. For years, he’s been urging his followers to violence, refusing to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the way. As he told Breitbart in 2019, in one of his characteristic threats, “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
  • “We’ve got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them,” said President Trump. He urged his minions to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the place where Congress was meeting to certify the election he lost: “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
  • It is not yet clear who Raskin will be up against. Prominent law firms have refused to represent Trump in his postelection legal fights, and Bloomberg News reports that lawyers who have defended the president in the past don’t want to do so anymore. For four years, as Trump has brought ever more havoc and hatred to this country, many have wondered what it would take to dent his impunity. The answer appears to be twofold: Committing sedition, and losing power.
  • Trump now becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. Half of all presidential impeachments since the Republic began have been impeachments of Trump. This latest impeachment is different than the first, and not just because it was bipartisan. It culminates a week in which Trump has finally faced the broad social pariahdom he’s always deserved.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      he made history
  • The House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report quotes, at length, the speech that Donald Trump gave to his devotees on Jan. 6 before many of them stormed the Capitol, baying for execution.
  • Banks promised to stop lending to him. Major social media companies banned him. One of the Trump Organization’s law firms dropped it as a client. The coach of the New England Patriots rejected the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the P.G.A. pulled its namesake tournament from a Trump golf course. Universities revoked honorary degrees. Some of the country’s biggest corporations, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pledged to withhold donations from congressional enablers of his voter fraud fantasy. Bill de Blasio announced that New York City would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run two ice rinks and other concessions worth millions annually.
  • Throughout his presidency, Republicans pretended not to hear what the president was saying. For the last few months, Republican election officials in Georgia have spoken with mounting desperation of being barraged with death threats as a result of Trump’s ceaseless lies about the election, but national Republicans did little to restrain him. There was no exodus away from the president and his brand when, during the debates, he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
  • That is part of the work of the second impeachment. This impeachment may be as much a burden for Democrats as for Republicans; a Senate trial would surely postpone some of the urgent business of the Biden administration. It has gone forward because Democrats had no choice if they wanted to defend our increasingly fragile system of government.
kaylynfreeman

Why Remove Trump Now? A Guide to Trump's Impeachment - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The House on Wednesday impeached President Trump for a second time, a first in American history, charging him with “incitement of insurrection” one week after he egged on a mob of supporters that stormed the Capitol while Congress met to formalize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
  • At least five people, including a Capitol Police officer, died during the siege and in the immediate aftermath.
  • The process is taking place with extraordinary speed and will test the bounds of the impeachment process, raising questions never contemplated before.
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  • The House vote requires only a simple majority of lawmakers to agree that the president has, in fact, committed high crimes and misdemeanors; the Senate vote requires a two-thirds majority.
  • The test, as set by the Constitution, is whether the president has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
  • Impeachment is one of the weightiest tools the Constitution gives Congress to hold government officials, including the president, accountable for misconduct and abuse of power.
  • The article, drafted by Representatives David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Ted Lieu of California, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jerrold Nadler of New York, charges Mr. Trump with “incitement of insurrection,” saying he is guilty of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.”
  • The article cites Mr. Trump’s weekslong campaign to falsely discredit the results of the November election, and it quotes directly from the speech he gave on the day of the siege in which he told his supporters to go to the Capitol. “If you don’t fight like hell,” he said, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
  • While the House moved with remarkable speed to impeach Mr. Trump, the Senate trial to determine whether to remove him cannot begin until Jan. 19, his final full day in office.
  • Democrats have argued that Mr. Trump’s offense — using his power as the nation’s leader and commander in chief to incite an insurrection against the legislative branch — is so grave that it must be addressed, even with just a few days remaining in his term.
  • Conviction in an impeachment trial would not automatically disqualify Mr. Trump from future public office. But if the Senate were to convict him, the Constitution allows a subsequent vote to bar an official from holding “any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”
  • There is no precedent, however, for disqualifying a president from future office, and the issue could end up before the Supreme Court.
  • Democrats who control the House can choose when to send their article of impeachment to the Senate, at which point that chamber would have to immediately move to begin the trial. But because the Senate is not scheduled to hold a regular session until Jan. 19, even if the House immediately transmitted the charge to the other side of the Capitol, an agreement between Senate Republican and Democratic leaders would be needed to take it up before then.
  • Once the Senate receives the impeachment charge, it must immediately take up the issue, as articles of impeachment carry the highest privilege.
  • The Senate could hold a trial for Mr. Trump even after he has left office, though there is no precedent for it. Only two presidents other than Mr. Trump have been impeached — Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 — and both were ultimately acquitted and completed their terms in office.
  • With only a week left in his term, the House impeached President Trump, but he will leave office before he stands trial in the Senate. Here’s how the process works.
  • The charge against Trump is ‘incitement of insurrection.’
  • That vote would require only a simple majority of senators. Such a step could be an appealing prospect not just to Democrats, but also to many Republicans who either have set their sights on the presidency themselves or are convinced that it is the only thing that will purge Mr. Trump from their party. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, is said to hold the latter view.
saberal

Immigration law: Biden wants to remove this controversial word from US laws - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Biden's proposed bill, if passed, would remove the word "alien" from US immigration laws, replacing it with the term "noncitizen." It's a deliberate step intended to recognize America as "a nation of immigrants," according to a summary of the bill released by the new administration.
  • "illegal alien," long decried as a dehumanizing slur by immigrant rights advocates, became even more of a lightning rod during the Trump era -- with some top federal officials encouraging its use and several states and local governments taking up measures to ban it.
  • "We were in the Trump administration the perennial boogeyman," Vargas said. "Whenever Trump was in trouble, he started talking about the 'illegals' and talking about the border."But not everyone in the Trump administration was a fan of the language.
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  • US code currently defines "alien" as "any person not a citizen or national of the United States."Officials in the past have pointed to the term's prevalence in US laws to defend their word choices.
  • In guidelines issued in 2019, New York City banned the term "illegal alien" when used "with intent to demean, humiliate or harass a person." Violations, the city warned, could result in fines up to $250,000.
  • 2017 after officials publicized a hotline for victims of "crimes committed by removable aliens."
  • "Language has power. And I think we saw that in the Trump administration, how it used dehumanizing terms and how it debased language and in turn debased people,"
Javier E

Opinion | We were right to worry about the nation's fiscal future. But I know when to f... - 0 views

  • I’m throwing in the towel: Regarding our national fiscal future, as the man said, you’ve got to know when to fold ’em.
  • it’s time to face the unpleasant facts. The past decade demonstrates amply that our political process is not capable of the kind of decisions that are necessary
  • The temptation to savage anyone proposing safety-net reform (the sine qua non of any serious fiscal rescue, really the only issue that matters) remains electorally irresistible and invariably effective.
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  • the inexorable arithmetic of dollars times demography has taken us past the point of no return. It’s no longer possible to say that, by starting now, we can avert massive, and massively unfair, changes in the promises we have made, or that current beneficiaries have nothing to worry about.
  • There are parallels with other long-term, nation-threatening challenges of our time
  • there is zero chance of delivering on the promises already in place, let alone the fresh, astonishing proposals in Washington to make these commitments even larger.
  • If the climate change computer models prove accurate, it is already too late to prevent the world’s thermometer from rising to levels deemed unacceptable.
  • While calling on us to take what preventive measures we can, the more serious leaders on these topics are hard at work on the goals of mitigation and adaptation.
  • owever likely the climate problem or next pandemic is, the unraveling of the safety net is far more so.
  • We should have seen the pandemic coming and prepared for it.
  • A start on mitigation would be for the Social Security Administration to begin including in beneficiary bulletins a disclosure that, starting soon, the system cannot fulfill all of its commitments
  • Something similar could be done for doctors and medical students, projecting the deep cuts in reimbursement rates to which Medicare will resort.
  • Allowing the fiction of full-payment-for-all to persist will only add the rage of betrayal to the hardships imposed by the now-inevitable sudden cuts in benefits and huge tax increases.
Javier E

Why parents need to stop pushing happiness on their kids - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • As a psychologist, I can’t help but wonder: Who in this world has ever gotten happy because someone else told them they have to be?
  • And worse, what if our culture’s incessant demands to be happy are actually making our kids miserable?
  • It seems counterintuitive, of course, but to be happy in the long run, we should more fully embrace the times when we’re not.
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  • this approach to emotional development neglects the full, complicated range of unhappy feelings that are just as valid a part of human life as happiness is — from sadness to frustration, from anger to fear, from guilt to disappointment, boredom or disgust.
  • Much research on well-being makes clear that Americans’ typical approaches to the pursuit of happiness is far from helpful to our kids. Anxiety and mental health problems in children and teens have been steadily increasing
  • In fact, the more we teach our kids to stay positive, at the expense of helping them accept occasional difficult feelings, the less we equip them with tools to manage such feelings when life inevitably gets hard
  • We tend to have a similar disdain for negative thoughts. Americans like to believe that our thoughts define us: that we need to control that running commentary, shape it and aggressively avoid the “bad” thoughts that supposedly doom us to unhappiness
  • Research into mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy reveals that it’s not negative thoughts that cause depression, anxiety, amotivation or any other mental rut we’re afraid of. It is when negative thoughts become sticky that we are more prone to those problems.
  • The more we fight with our thoughts, the more we give them the power to stick.
  • Being fixated on having only the “right” kind of thoughts breeds the cognitive rigidity that creates tunnel vision, locks us into unhelpful patterns, increases our risk of rumination, obsessions and compulsions, and decreases our ability to adapt to setbacks.
  • Commit to teaching and practicing the pause.
  • forced happiness, happiness as a sole goal without a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, or the pretense of happiness that stems from the expectation that anything less is toxic, can turn such “happiness” harmful in its own right.
  • If you can help your child develop meta-cognition — the ability to think about their thoughts and keep from getting stuck within them — and mindfulness, which helps them become a gentle, nonjudgmental observer of their thoughts and feelings, attuned in the moment to their experience, then you are giving them psychological tools to help them for a lifetime.
  • ADEncourage turning anxious thought patterns into characters.
  • Teach your kids that their thoughts don’t define them. Encourage your children to observe their thoughts with curiosity rather than fear, in a nonjudgmental way rather than with shame.
  • Encourage labeling distressing thoughts like “I’m having the thought no one likes me” rather than “No one likes me,” which helps your child separate from them.
  • a child with social anxiety may call their negative self-talk “The Stage-Fright Bully” and decide that it has nothing important to say — and that the show can go on.
  • Take the stance that feelings, even big ones, are always okay.
  • Emphasize that it’s how we handle emotions that matters most, and we can choose those actions mindfully
  • What better time to begin teaching our kids that unhappiness has a rightful place in a full and — yes — truly happy life? It is often the difficult emotions that have the most to teach us about ourselves, and that give us the opportunity to find meaning and connect with others.
  • teach them that the anger is okay, but we must think through our actions carefully, noticing our thoughts and bodily sensations without launching into autopilot.
  • Every time they fully engage with a feeling and choose functional behavior, they strengthen their emotional intelligence and make it more likely that that feeling won’t impel them toward unhealthy habits in the future.
  • Enlarge your vocabulary about emotions
  • From “I” statements (“I was sad when you said that to me” rather than “You are being mean!”) to encouraging your kids to write or draw their feelings in a journal, research shows that the mere act of labeling a feeling can help us feel more in control and allow it to pass more quickly.
  • Observe and adjust your own habits of talking about feelings.
  • Pay particular attention to the times you invalidate your child’s emotions or try to force a different internal reaction: “You’re okay,”
  • Instead, choose empathy: “Sounds like that’s really upsetting; let’s think about how we can work through this.”
  • Talk about true happiness as more than just pleasure or ease.
  • We all want our kids to be happy. But what they absorb about what that means is crucial. By opening them up to the idea of a sense of purpose, finding meaning in their life, or defining the values important to them, they will have a better understanding of how even challenging, difficult times can cultivate happiness.
johnsonel7

U.S. Spies: Turkish-Backed Militias Killing Syria Civilians | Time - 0 views

  • Turkish-backed militias, armed by Ankara, have killed civilians in areas abandoned by the U.S., four U.S. military and intelligence officials tell TIME. The officials say they fear that the militias committing those potential war crimes may be using weapons that the U.S. sold to Turkey.
  • Turkey and its allies may be preparing to clear civilian populations from the area, which has largely been controlled by the Kurds, Ankara’s long-time enemies in the region. Turkish President Recep Erdogan told the United Nations on Sept. 24 that he planned to establish a safe zone across the border in Syria, and to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently sheltered in Turkey.
  • This intelligence is emerging as the U.S. struggles to manage the fallout from its precipitous retreat from Syria, which was announced Oct. 13, after Erdogan told Trump that Turkey was about to attack territory in northern Syria where U.S. troops were deployed. Trump gave the Pentagon and State Department no warning of his decision to pull the U.S. out of the area, and no time to plan an organized retreat or to negotiate a handover of territory. That has left U.S. military officials and diplomats scrambling to deal with the situation.
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  • The scope of U.S. intelligence activity in the region has drawn renewed interest in recent days, in the wake of a U.S. raid on Saturday that killed ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The CIA, as well as Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officers, tracked the ISIS chief by interviewing the wife of an al-Baghdadi aide and one of his couriers, and by recruiting local spies along the Syrian-Iraqi border.
  • “The oil fields are small, we blasted them after Daesh [ISIS] seized them, and they will take years to rebuild,” said one official. So why leave forces there to protect them? “Talking about oil was the only way we could talk the President into keeping any U.S. military force in the area,” the official says. On Friday, after the plan to protect the oilfields was unveiled, Trump tweeted, “Oil is secured.”
  • U.S. officials are worried that a humanitarian crisis and renewed fighting in the region will invite a resurgence of ISIS, which operates best in chaotic situations. Many captured ISIS fighters remain in Kurdish custody in northern Syria. Trump appeared to dismiss the danger of a renewed terrorist threat Friday, when he tweeted, “ISIS SECURED”. Esper told reporters at NATO that the U.S. mission remains preventing a resurgence of ISIS.
  • U.S. intelligence officials aren’t the only ones seeing evidence of war crimes. The human rights group Amnesty International reported on Friday that Turkish-backed Syrian forces have committed war crimes, including executions of Kurdish civilians.
bluekoenig

An apocalyptic cult, 900 dead: remembering the Jonestown massacre, 40 years on | World ... - 0 views

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    Today marks the day of the Jonestown massacre where more than 900 people commited murder-suicide under the instruction of their cult leader Jim Jones
annabelteague02

Supreme Court declines to review murder case chronicled in 'Serial' podcast - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The petition, filed by lawyers C. Justin Brown and Catherine Stetson along with other lawyers at the Washington law firm Hogan Lovells, stated that that basis for the Supreme Court to take up the case rested on the "straightforward legal issue" of ineffective counsel provided by Syed's trial attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, who is deceased.
    • annabelteague02
       
      are they trying to say that he did not commit the crime or just did not have adequate representation but DID commit the crime?
  • Gutierrez's failure to call an alibi witness.
  • Gutierrez's failure to call an alibi witness.
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  • During the trial one of his friends, Jay Wilds, testified that he helped Syed dig a hole for Lee's body.
    • annabelteague02
       
      that's pretty damning evidence against Syed, statement against the interest of his friend
brickol

Trump 'Stands With Xi' (and With Hong Kong's Protesters) - The New York Times - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON — President Trump would not commit Friday to signing legislation overwhelmingly passed by Congress to support pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong in an interview on Fox News.
  • he spoke warmly about China’s president, Xi Jinping, whom he is trying to coax into striking a trade deal that has become one of the central goals of his presidency.
  • But he added: “I stand with Hong Kong. I stand with freedom. I stand with all of the things we want to do. But we’re also in the process of making the largest trade deal in history.”
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  • The legislation approved by Congress this week would impose sanctions on Chinese officials who commit human rights abuses in the semiautonomous island territory and place Hong Kong’s special economic status under greater scrutiny.
  • Security forces in Hong Kong have escalated their crackdown on pro-democracy protesters this month, prompting Congress to approve a Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act it had been considering for months.
  • Mr. Trump said that the protests were a complicating factor in his trade negotiations with Beijing, which have stalled ahead of an important Dec. 15 deadline, when Mr. Trump must decide whether to issue yet more tariffs on Chinese goods.
  • he also took credit for the fact that China had not extinguished the protests with a sweeping and violent crackdown.
  • Mr. Trump and other administration officials have warned that an overwhelming Chinese response would have wider repercussions in the relationship between China and Beijing, including in the trade talks.But analysts say there are many reasons China’s government has refrained from an all-out violent crackdown like the one that snuffed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. They include the risk of an enormous international backlash and lasting damage to Hong Kong’s powerhouse economy.
  • Congress passed its Hong Kong bill with an overwhelming majority, meaning that it could probably override a presidential veto easily, the first override of his presidency. Mr. Trump could also choose not to sign the bill without vetoing it, in which case it would also become law.
brickol

Iran ends nuclear deal commitments as fallout from Suleimani killing spreads | World ne... - 0 views

  • Iran has announced that it will no longer abide by any of the limits imposed by the unravelling 2015 nuclear deal, and Iraq’s parliament urged its leaders to expel troops from the US-led coalition, as the aftershocks of the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani reverberated through the Middle East.
  • the Iranian government said the country would no longer observe limitations on uranium enrichment, stockpiles of enriched uranium or nuclear research and development. But the statement noted that the steps could be reversed if Washington lifted its sanctions on Tehran.
  • The Iraqi parliament’s call to expel US troops was another clear sign of blowback from the assassination – and was quickly hailed by Suleimani’s supporters as a major step towards one of his main goals.
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  • Though the Iraqi debate that called for the US exit is not binding, and would require a one-year notice period, the fact that the move was led by a prime minister regarded as a US ally showed just how divisive the killing has become, and how quickly US interests in the region could unravel as a result.
  • Shortly after Abdul Mahdi’s statement, the US announced that it was suspending operations against the Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and a five-year-old training mission to equip local forces. A US statement claimed the suspension was a reaction to rocket attacks on US bases, carried out in recent weeks by Shia militia members.
  • Suleimani was the second most powerful person in Iran and the most influential Iranian outside the country, travelling the region like a Persian viceroy as he directed conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and as far away as Yemen. The extraordinary scenes of mourners thronging Iranian cities were a powerful testament to his popularity at home and the anger directed at the US for his killing a figure so central to Iran’s presence on the regional stage.
  • “The US army has killed these people,” Nasrallah said, referring to Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an ally of Suleimani also hit in the airstrike in Baghdad in the early hours of Friday. “We do not at all mean the American people and citizens across our region … It is up to anyone from the axis of resistance to deliver a fair punishment after Soleimani’s assassination.”
  • Withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be damaging to Washington’s interests in a region still recovering from the invasion of Iraq 17 years ago and the rampage of Isis, which forced millions of people from their homes and led to widespread destruction across the country. While Isis has been defeated on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, it remains a residual insurgent threat and there are growing signs that the terror group is reorganising, despite being on its knees in its former heartland.
  • In Iraq’s parliament, the resolution urging a US exit was passed by 170 votes to nil.
nrashkind

Pete Buttigieg now attending South Carolina MLK Day events after criticism from Democra... - 0 views

shared by nrashkind on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg will now attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations in Columbia, South Carolina
  • Buttigieg had originally planned to attend events in South Bend, Indiana, -- Buttigieg's hometown and where he formerly served as mayor
  • But South Carolina Democrats criticized the former mayor after the South Carolina NAACP released this year's schedule for the annual King Day at the Dome in South Carolina and Buttigieg's name was not on it.
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  • "But he also wants to make clear his commitment to earning the support and trust of every voter in South Carolina
  • Buttigieg has struggled in the polls in South Carolina, especially with African American voters, despite polling at or near the top in several early primary states.
  • Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar were among just a few candidates not slated to attend the South Carolina event -- though Klobuchar communications director Tim Hogan said in a tweet that Klobuchar will attend the prayer service in Columbia ahead of an early speaking slot in Iowa at the Brown and Black forum.
  • "Amy is attending the prayer service on Monday in South Carolina and the Iowa Brown and Black Presidential Forum on the same day.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, businessman Tom Steyer and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren were all committed to the event when the South Carolina NAACP released the schedule of events last week. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's campaign sent out a statement on Saturday saying Patrick would participate as well.
  • Asked if he'd be disappointed if Klobuchar didn't attend the march to the state house after attending the prayer breakfast, Sellers said it'd be a partial effort.
  • Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina Democratic strategist who had also voiced frustration last week over the small field of candidates attending the King Day at the Dome events, said he was "very pleased" with Buttigieg's decision.
  • look forward to hearing from him like so many others in South Carolina," Seawright told CNN
chrispink7

Global warming: severe consequences for Africa | Africa Renewal - 0 views

  • Record global greenhouse gas emissions are putting the world on a path toward unacceptable warming, with serious implications for development prospects in Africa.
  • But IPCC, the world’s foremost authority for assessing the science of climate change, says it is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5° C—if, and only if, there are “rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities.” For sub-Saharan Africa, which has experienced more frequent and more intense climate extremes over the past decades, the ramifications of the world’s warming by more than 1.5° C would be profound. Temperature increases in the region are projected to be higher than the global mean temperature increase; regions in Africa within 15 degrees of the equator are projected to experience an increase in hot nights as well as longer and more frequent heat waves.
  • As part of the Paris Agreement, countries made national commitments to take steps to reduce emissions and build resilience. The treaty also called for increased financial support from developed countries to assist the climate action efforts of developing countries. But even at the time that the Paris Agreement was adopted, it was recognized that the commitments on the table would not be enough. Even if the countries did everything they promised, global temperatures would rise by 3° C this century. According to the IPCC, projections show that the western Sahel region will experience the strongest drying, with a significant increase in the maximum length of dry spells. The IPCC expects Central Africa to see a decrease in the length of wet spells and a slight increase in heavy rainfall.
yehbru

Opinion: How to distribute Covid-19 vaccines fairly around the world - CNN - 0 views

  • According to Dr. Mike Ryan, director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, one in ten people around the world may have been infected with the novel coronavirus.
  • A Gates Foundation report reveals this deadly disease to have devastated the global economy and set back the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by an estimated 20 years.
  • Without collaboration, the rollout of vaccines will be uneven and risks exacerbating inequalities and global tensions
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  • the World Health Organization and international health partners have created the "Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator" (ACT-Accelerator) to distribute 2 billion doses of a vaccine, as well as 245 million treatments and 500 million tests by the end of 2021.
  • We need to share our funds, resources and expertise to increase production of lifesaving vaccines and train healthcare workers, while bringing costs down in a way that ensures no country is left behind.
  • It has so far pledged over half a billion dollars to the initiative, with the bulk of this going to COVAX's Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) to help developing countries access approved vaccines.
  • the UK has led a match-funding initiative to the COVAX AMC --pledging £1 for every $4 invested up to £250 million -- that successfully incentivized other countries to join in this global effort.
  • We also know that of the roughly 200 candidate vaccines in development, the vast majority could fail, based on what has been learned from previous vaccine clinical trials
  • We know from previous efforts that distributing lifesaving treatments can highlight inequality built into the international system -- just recall the experience of antiretroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. After some wealthier countries did not take the threat seriously enough or make equitable access a priority, an epidemic surged across sub-Saharan Africa, which killed over 2 million adults and children in a single year at its peak.
Javier E

Opinion | President Trump has committed treason - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Trump fomented a deadly insurrection against the U.S. Congress to prevent a duly-elected president from taking office. Treason is not a word to be used lightly, but that is its textbook definition.
  • “We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,” he told a sea of MAGA fans and Proud Boys on the Ellipse outside the White House at noon. From behind bulletproof glass, he told them: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
  • Earlier, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had proposed, to the same crowd, a “trial by combat” to resolve Trump’s election complaints. And Donald Trump Jr. delivered a political threat to lawmakers who don’t vote to reject the election results: “We’re coming for you.”
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  • Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol — “and I’ll be there with you” — to “demand that Congress do the right thing” and not count the electoral votes of swing states he lost. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he admonished them, with CYA instructions to make themselves heard “peacefully and patriotically.”
Javier E

How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988
  • It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
  • His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”
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  • He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall
  • societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.
  • Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk
  • even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.
  • Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.
  • that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems
  • All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”
  • Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
  • Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”
  • Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.
  • Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.
  • This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”
  • haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
  • Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.
  • Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.
  • A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.
  • The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?
  • Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations
  • The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study
  • Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.
  • We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”
  • In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,
  • Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd
  • Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”
  • Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.
  • Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
  • In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
  • If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”
  • The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
  • A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
  • If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”
  • Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit
  • The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
  • He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.
  • It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
  • The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.
  • And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.
  • “As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”
  • The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping
  • Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.
  • Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two
  • if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.
  • Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals
  • Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?
  • If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.
  • Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.
  • The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems
  • the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.
  • If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
  • When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
clairemann

How the Trump Campaign is Trying to Suppress the Black Vote | Time - 0 views

  • The outrage and condemnation came fast in September when President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to commit voter fraud. “Let them send [a mail-in ballot] in, and let them go vote,” Trump said in Wilmington, N.C., urging backers to test the mechanics of North Carolina’s system by voting twice.
  • A U.S. President encouraging citizens to commit a felony is alarming enough, but in the next breath, Trump acknowledged intentions that were arguably more pernicious: he said Republicans in the state would also fight in court to halt “unsolicited votes.”
  • This election cycle, Trump allies have gone to court to defend a restrictive voter-ID law and to make it more difficult for voters to correct mistakes on mail-in ballots. Those measures have been shown to disproportionately affect Black voters.
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  • However appalling, this shouldn’t come as a great surprise. After Black people were brought to the New World as slaves, Black disenfranchisement was overt and uncontroversial.
  • The past decade has brought a resurgence of the practice, fueled by a Supreme Court decision and a President who thrives on racial division. And so today, amid a national reckoning about racial injustice, Trump’s re-election may hinge on the success of his efforts to suppress the voices of Black voters.
  • Predominantly Black neighborhoods are more likely to face long lines on Election Day. Republican-aligned groups have spread misinformation to discourage Black voters, like the claim that early-voting data would be used for debt collection. The list goes on.
  • Within hours, North Carolina GOP officials touted plans for a new law to curtail early voting, require ID at polling places and end same-day voter registration–all policies they understood would impact Black voters.
  • Over the past four years, such measures have become central tactics for Trump allies in the strategically critical state.
  • Maneuvers like these could be key to a Trump victory across the country, voting-rights advocates say. Black Americans are less likely to have the identification required by the wave of voter-ID laws enacted by Republican legislatures in the past decade.
  • In June 2013, the Supreme Court overturned key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, declaring that measures in question were meant to address “decades-old problems” and that the Constitution was “not designed to punish for the past.”
  • There’s more at stake in this election than whether this regression helps deliver a win to Trump. Racial voter suppression, once primarily a regional blight, has “metastasized across the country,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “On the table will be whether this is in fact a sound democracy.”
mattrenz16

Supreme Court rules in favor of Black Lives Matter organizer McKesson - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The Supreme Court wiped away a lower court opinion related to Black Lives Matter protests that critics argued would chill the speech rights of demonstrators and dismantle civil rights era precedent that safeguards the First Amendments' right to protest.
  • In an unsigned order, the justices sent the case back down to the lower courts to further review Louisiana law holding that before getting to important constitutional questions, more guidance from state courts is necessary.
  • Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate in the decision, the Supreme Court's public information officer said, because she was busy preparing for oral arguments. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.
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  • The officer suffered from a brain injury, loss of teeth, and a head injury.
  • A federal appeals court allowed the suit to go forward in a decision that stunned civil liberties communities who argued that if the opinion is left on the books it would chill the speech rights of protesters and dismantle civil rights era precedent that safeguard's the First Amendment's right to protest. The Supreme Court has held that lawful protestors cannot be held liable when someone within their ranks commits unlawful activity.
  • "The Supreme Court has long recognized that peaceful protesters cannot be held liable for the unintended, unlawful actions of others," said American Civil Liberties Union National Legal Director David Cole, who is representing McKesson. "If the law had allowed anyone to sue leaders of social justice movements over the violent actions of others, there would have been no Civil Rights Movement. The lower court's ruling is a threat to the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans."
  • "The First Amendment does not condone physical violence," a group of First Amendment lawyers represented by Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger told the court in support of McKesson. Dellinger argued that while the Constitution does not excuse the attacker's "criminal, tortious and morally indefensible conduct," it does protect the organizer who "neither committed nor incited" the illegal activity.
mattrenz16

Election Live Updates: Trump's Refusal to Commit to a Peaceful Transfer of Power Underm... - 0 views

  • But they carefully avoided any direct criticism of the president.
  • No president in modern memory has said what he said.
  • “Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus. Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable,”
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  • “The peaceful transfer of power is enshrined in our Constitution and fundamental to the survival of our Republic. America’s leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. We will uphold that oath.”
  • President Trump’s refusal on Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transfer of power enraged Democrats and again put Republicans in a difficult position as their party leader continued to make remarks aimed at delegitimizing the election.
  • Earlier Wednesday, he flatly predicted that the presidential election would end up in the Supreme Court and said that was why he wanted a full slate of justices, barely concealing his hope for a friendly majority on the court.
kaylynfreeman

Trump Says He'll Declare Victory 'Only When There's Victory' | HuffPost - 0 views

  • The president previously refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election and whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
  • President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would only declare victory in his reelection bid “if there’s victory,
  • he plans to declare himself the winner on election night even if it only looks like he’s ahead.
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  • When asked in September if he would “commit to a peaceful transferal of power” if he loses, Trump again said: “Well, we’re gonna have to see what happens.”
  • In July, he also said, “I have to see” when asked whether he would accept the results of the general election.
  • Trump has attempted to try to prevent some mail-in ballots from being counted and has also ignited concerns about whether he would concede defeat if he loses.
  • Trump in August said that if he loses it would be because the election was rigged and stolen from him. He has specifically targeted mail-in ballots as a method of cheating, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter frau
katherineharron

As Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transition, Pentagon stresses it will play no ... - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump this week refused to commit to a peaceful transition should he lose the November election, leading some to speculate that he might seek to use the tools of presidential power including his role as commander in chief of the armed forces to prolong his time in office.
  • "The Constitution and laws of the US and the states establish procedures for carrying out elections, and for resolving disputes over the outcome of elections ... I do not see the US military as part of this process," Milley said in the letter to two members of the House Armed Services Committee.
  • "The Department of Defense does not play a role in the transition of power after an election,"
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  • Pentagon leaders have been concerned Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty troops as well as civilian law enforcement to quell protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in June.
  • "Those who suggest that the military would have any role in transition, they are being equally irresponsible," he added, saying "the military should have nothing to do with partisan politics and nothing to do even with any talk of a transition between administrations."
  • While Trump has not suggested he'd call on the military to decide the election, his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has publicly floated the idea of top military leaders playing a role in ousting Trump should he refuse to leave office following an electoral defeat, a suggestion that drew pushback from Pentagon officials and experts on civilian military relations.
  • While the Insurrection Act does empower a president to deploy armed forces in certain situations to restore law and order, some experts believe doing so would be problematic in the event of an electoral dispute.
  • Defense Secretary Mark Esper made the Pentagon's position on the Insurrection Act clear in a June press conference. "The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act," he told reporters.
  • "While the President could invoke the Act on his own relating to an election dispute, that invocation would be immediately subject to legal challenge and, barring drastic and completely unforeseen circumstances, would be struck down in the courts," Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst, said.
  • "All this bulls--- about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I've never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I'm the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it," Barr told the Chicago Tribune earlier this month.
  • "Our laws and history make clear that the military has no formal role in resolving electoral disputes; that job falls in various manifestations to voters, the states, Congress, and the courts, and if there is any need for enforcement of electoral procedures or security, that is the job of civilian law enforcement in the first place, not the military," Honig said.
  • "It is not entirely certain that the president holds power to declare martial law -- particularly relating to his own election -- and any such attempt by a president almost certainly would be challenged in court and deemed illegal hence, not recognized by the military," Honing said.
  • "There is the mechanism of governing, I have spoken to our defense leaders about this issue," the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat Rep. Adam Smith, told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday.
  • "No matter what, President Trump is going to be President until January 20.
  • In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall Thursday, Milley encouraged US troops to remain apolitical.
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