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The Despair Death of the Middle-Aged American - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Obviously, no one can be blamed for his own addiction or depression. But the causes of death this study highlights are the kinds of things—drinking, doping, suicide—that people who feel good about their lives don’t tend to do.So, what’s eating less-educated Boomers?
  • One persuasive explanation, and one the researchers put forth, is financial strain. Jobs in fields like manufacturing and construction, which were historically filled by people without college degrees, have been evaporating quickly over the past 15 years
  • Nearly half of Americans in their 40s and 50s don’t have enough money saved for retirement to live as they’re accustomed to, even if they work until they’re 65. All of this is crashing down on Boomers, who were raised on the promise of the American Dream.
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  • middle-aged people in other countries also faced dire financial straits, especially during the 2009 recession. Yet they’re not dying like American 50-somethings are. One difference is that in those countries, comfortable pensions for retirees are guarantee
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2 Abortion Foes Behind Planned Parenthood Videos Are Indicted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thood-videos-are-indicted.html abortion activists behind planned parenthood videos new york times texas indictment jury judge court US
shared by katyshannon on 26 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A grand jury here that was investigating accusations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two abortion opponents who made undercover videos of the organization.
  • Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress — an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue — had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.
  • That leader, David R. Daleiden, 27, the director of the center, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his efforts to procure tissue for research. Another center employee, Sandra S. Merritt, 62, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record.
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  • The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver’s licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.
  • Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.
  • In a statement on Monday night, Mr. Daleiden said: “The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”
  • The release of the videos last summer created a furor and gave new strength to the conservative drive to defund Planned Parenthood. The organization was forced to apologize for the casual tone that one of its officials had used to discuss a possible transfer of fetal tissue to what she believed was a legitimate medical company. But Planned Parenthood said the fees being discussed were to cover costs and were legal. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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Killer Meteorite Did Not Hit Indian Man - The Daily Beast - 0 views

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  • Killer Meteorite Did Not Hit Indian Man
  • Though it first appeared as if a bus driver in India was killed by a meteorite this week, scientists and local officials say his death was more likely caused by
  • “a land-based explosion.”
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  • Images depicted a crater measuring five feet deep and two feet wide, and witnesses said they heard an explosion. The object recovered from the site allegedly weighed only a few grams. The event would have been the first case in history of someone dying from a meteorite’s impact.
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Apple Fights Order to Unlock San Bernardino Gunman's iPhone - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html apple fights decryption order san bernardino iphone terrorism constitution privacy government politics history crisis policy obama new york times
shared by katyshannon on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Last month, some of President Obama’s top intelligence advisers met in Silicon Valley with Apple’s chief, Timothy D. Cook, and other technology leaders in what seemed to be a public rapprochement in their long-running dispute over the encryption safeguards built into their devices.
  • But behind the scenes, relations were tense, as lawyers for the Obama administration and Apple held closely guarded discussions for over two months about one particularly urgent case: The F.B.I. wanted Apple to help “unlock” an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, but Apple was resisting.
  • When the talks collapsed, a federal magistrate judge, at the Justice Department’s request, ordered Apple to bypass security functions on the phone.
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  • The order set off a furious public battle on Wednesday between the Obama administration and one of the world’s most valuable companies in a dispute with far-reaching legal implications.
  • This is not the first time a technology company has been ordered to effectively decrypt its own product. But industry experts say it is the most significant because of Apple’s global profile, the invasive steps it says are being demanded and the brutality of the San Bernardino attacks.
  • Law enforcement officials who support the F.B.I.’s position said that the impasse with Apple provided an ideal test case to move from an abstract debate over the balance between national security and privacy to a concrete one
  • The F.B.I. has been unable to get into the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who was killed by the police along with his wife after they attacked Mr. Farook’s co-workers at a holiday gathering.
  • Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California issued her order Tuesday afternoon, after the F.B.I. said it had been unable to get access to the data on its own and needed Apple’s technical assistance.
  • Mr. Cook, the chief executive at Apple, responded Wednesday morning with a blistering, 1,100-word letter to Apple customers, warning of the “chilling” breach of privacy posed by the government’s demands. He maintained that the order would effectively require it to create a “backdoor” to get around its own safeguards, and Apple vowed to appeal the ruling by next week.
  • Apple argues that the software the F.B.I. wants it to create does not exist. But technologists say the company can do it.
  • pple executives had hoped to resolve the impasse without having to rewrite their own encryption software. They were frustrated that the Justice Department had aired its demand in public, according to an industry executive with knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.
  • The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have the White House’s “full support,” the spokesman, Josh Earnest, said on Wednesday.
  • His vote of confidence was significant because James Comey, the F.B.I. director, has at times been at odds with the White House over his aggressive advocacy of tougher decryption requirements on technology companies. While Mr. Obama’s national security team was sympathetic to Mr. Comey’s position, others at the White House viewed legislation as potentially perilous. Late last year, Mr. Obama refused to back any legislation requiring decryption, leaving a court fight likely.
  • The dispute could initiate legislation in Congress, with Republicans and Democrats alike criticizing Apple’s stance on Wednesday and calling for tougher decryption requirements.
  • Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential contender, also attacked Apple on Fox News, asking, “Who do they think they are?”
  • But Apple had many defenders of its own among privacy and consumer advocates, who praised Mr. Cook for standing up to what they saw as government overreach.
  • Many of the company’s defenders argued that the types of government surveillance operations exposed in 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, have prompted technology companies to build tougher encryption safeguards in their products because of the privacy demands of their customers.
  • Privacy advocates and others said they worried that if the F.B.I. succeeded in getting access to the software overriding Apple’s encryption, it would create easy access for the government in many future investigations.
  • The Apple order is a flash point in a dispute that has been building for more than a decade. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • The F.B.I. began sounding alarms years ago about technology that allowed people to exchange private messages protected by encryption so strong that government agents could not break it. In fall 2010, at the behest of Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, the Obama administration began work on a law that required technology companies to provide unencrypted data to the government.
  • Lawyers at the F.B.I., Justice Department and Commerce Department drafted bills around the idea that technology companies in the Internet age should be bound by the same rules as phone companies, which were forced during the Clinton administration to build digital networks that government agents could tap.
  • The draft legislation would have covered app developers like WhatsApp and large companies like Google and Apple, according to current and former officials involved in the process.
  • There is no debate that, when armed with a court order, the government can get text messages and other data stored in plain text. Far less certain was whether the government could use a court order to force a company to write software or redesign its system to decode encrypted data. A federal law would make that authority clear, they said.
  • But the disclosures of government surveillance by Mr. Snowden changed the privacy debate, and the Obama administration decided not to move on the proposed legislation. It has not been revived.
  • The legal issues raised by the judge’s order are complicated. They involve statutory interpretation, rather than constitutional rights, and they could end up before the Supreme Court.
  • As Apple noted, the F.B.I., instead of asking Congress to pass legislation resolving the encryption fight, has proposed what appears to be a novel reading of the All Writs Act of 1789.
  • The law lets judges “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”
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This Is Trump Country - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by sgardner35 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • In December, the unemployment rate was 8 percent, among the highest in Massachusetts. Its median income is about half that of the state as a whole. Even its city motto lacks gusto: “We’ll try.”
  • Bruno Teixeira, 68, voted for Mr. Trump on Tuesday. He used to work as a foreman at a factory that dyed and finished cloth. “I was fortunate that I could say I retired,” he said. “I never thought I would, I thought it was going to be pulled out from under me, like it was for a lot of my colleagues.” Mr. Teixeira’s father came to the United States from Portugal, his mother from England. He said he liked Mr. Trump’s views on immigration, as well as his straightforward talk.“He has something to say, he says it,” Mr. Teixeira said. “That’s what I like about the man.”
  • Much of this county northeast of Nashville, along the border with Kentucky, is farmland, though there are also jobs in manufacturing. The county is among the state’s biggest producers of tobacco, and it also produces hardwood lumber. Shelta Shrum, 59, spent two decades working at a boot factory, where she was a clerical worker. Not long after she retired, the factory was shuttered. The jobs, she said, went to Mexico. “We knew it was going to happen,” Ms. Shrum said, “and it was something we dreaded every day.” Ms. Shrum, who edits the newsletter for the local historical society, said Mr. Trump was speaking up about the kinds of things people talk about every day. “We’re rural, and we’re not always politically correct,” she said. “We call it like we see it. And he’s doing that for us, very loudly.”
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Obama's Terrorism Speech: Does the President Take the ISIS Threat Seriously? - The Atla... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419055 obama terrorism ISIS threat policy GOP
shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Unlike Rubio, he considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself.
  • And unlike Bush, he doesn’t consider it a serious ideological competitor.
  • While Republicans think ISIS is strong and growing stronger, Obama thinks it’s weak and growing weaker.
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  • In Obama’s view, I suspect, democratic capitalism’s real ideological adversary is not the “radical Islam” of ISIS. It’s the authoritarian, state-managed capitalism of China.
  • “Terrorists,” he declared on Sunday, now “turn to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society.” In other words, the Islamic State probably can’t do anything to America that we Americans aren’t doing to ourselves all the time, and now largely take for granted.
  • Obama also argued that the Islamic State is losing in the Middle East, where the “strategy that we are using now—air strikes, special forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country” will produce a “sustainable victory.”
  • The leading GOP presidential candidates reject that. They believe defeating the Islamic State requires some dramatic, if vaguely defined, new military and ideological exertion. Obama, by contrast, thinks America simply needs to not screw up. That means not being “drawn once more” into an effort to “occupy foreign lands,” thus allowing the Islamic State to use “our presence to draw new recruits.
  • While Obama doesn’t say it outright, he appears to be subtly referencing Robert Pape’s influential argument that the great driver of suicide terrorism is not jihadist ideology but occupation
  • Because Obama, unlike Bush and Rubio, believes the Islamic State is ideologically weak, he thinks America’s current strategy will eventually defeat it unless America commits a large occupying force, which would give the jihadists a massive shot in the arm.
  • The other unforced error America must avoid, according to Obama, is “letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want.
  • Because the GOP candidates see violent jihadism as a powerful, seductive ideology, they think that many American Muslims are at risk of becoming terrorists, and thus that the United States must monitor them more aggressively.
  • Because Obama sees violent jihadism as ideologically weak and unattractive, he thinks that few American Muslims will embrace it unless the United States makes them feel like enemies in their own country—which is exactly what Donald Trump risks doing.
  • Like Francis Fukuyama, the author of the famed 1989 essay “The End of History,” he believes that powerful, structural forces will lead liberal democracies to triumph over their foes—so long as these democracies don’t do stupid things like persecuting Muslims at home or invading Muslim lands abroad.
  • His Republican opponents, by contrast, believe that powerful and sinister enemies are overwhelming America, either overseas (the Rubio version) or domestically (the Trump version).
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Whose Fascism Is This, Anyway? - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “Trump is a fascist,”
  • “We are here faced by fascists,” Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman, declares to the House of Commons,
  • That was George Orwell, in 1944. He had heard the epithet “fascist” applied, he said, to fox-hunting, Kipling, Gandhi, homosexuality, “astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
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  • “And what we know about fascists,” he went on, “is that they need to be defeated.”
  • “the word ‘fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” So has it acquired any more useful meaning in the 70 years since? The latest
  • with a rather confused etymology, from armed gangs in Sicily called fasci, but also invoking “fasces,”
  • As the symbol of Mussolini’s regime, it was emblazoned on flags and military aircraft, although its recognizable silhouette
  • When the word was first coined, fascism was a rather incoherent ideology, a response to — though bred out of
  • Hitler called himself a National Socialist, and Mussolini had in fact been a socialist of the extreme left.
  • by 1945 the ideology lay shredded on the battlefield, apart from a few holdovers in Spain and Latin America.
  • ut is your fascism my fascism, or his or her fascism?
  • ome years ago he was writing with perplexity about the political situation he found in his native England, where “dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries” were warning against American hubris,
  • anti-fascist tradition.”
  • Since then we have been warned about “Islamofascism,” and Al Qaeda and ISIS are denounced by Western politicians and commentators as “fascists.”
  • but something pan-Islamic, entirely unlike the central European definition of fascism as ultranationalism.
  • from France to Poland and Hungary, where far-right governments tinged with xenophobia are already in power.
  • they only want Christian refugees, not Muslims.
  • But the whole Islamic world is in the throes of a vast crisis quite unlike anything Europe underwent in the past century.
  • American tradition of know-nothing bigotry and nativism that Mr. Trump adorns
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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Syria will join peace talks, but wants to know what 'terrorists' will be there - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...eace-talks-20160109-story.html
shared by alexdeltufo on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • he Syrian government declared Saturday it is ready to attend peace talks scheduled in Geneva later this month
  • “terrorist groups” will be participating in the meetings, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.
  • The Geneva negotiations are the first step in a road map laid out last year by the international community to end the Syrian civil war. The
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  • credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance,” constitutional reform and U.N.-supervised elections within 18 months
  • parties will participate in the conference, while excluding those deemed as terrorist organizations 
  • “terrorists” and “mercenaries,” as well as the sectarian nature of many rebel factions on the ground.
  • use of shelling and aerial bombardment against civilians, safe and voluntary refugee transfer, and unfettered access for humanitarian agencies to besieged areas of Syria.
  • “useful” and that he is “looking forward to the active participation of relevant parties in the Geneva talks.”
  • “From the government’s point of view, they’re not keen on negotiations anyway,” Rabbani said.
  • The talks face another stumbling block in soaring tensions between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia,
  • Iran’s Shiite leadership has backed Assad, a member of the Alawite sect that is related to Shia Islam.
  • Last week, Saudi Arabia executed an influential Shiite cleric, enraging Iran and leading to a cutoff of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
  • an has similarly called for calm, while diplomatic efforts from Iraq and Oman continue to encourage a reconciliation between the two countries
  • Previous attempts at jump-starting peace talks have failed because of what was viewed as the government's intransigence regarding rebel participation.
  • don’t at all see that the proposed date is a realistic one, especially since on the ground there were no confidence-building measures,”
  • He cited the situation in Madaya, a town with an estimated population of 40,000 located 25 miles northwest of Damascus that has been besieged by pro-government forces since July.
  • “The issue of Madaya has become a key point. The Syrian cannot go to negotiations while Syrians are dying of hunger and cold,”
  • the Syrian government said it would allow aid to enter Madaya in the coming week.
  • In recent days, Madaya has become a media battleground for the warring parties in Syria.
  • he furor also has affected the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, an ally of the Assad government, which is accused of perpetrating what Madaya residents have described as a nightmare
  • Hateet also accused rebel fighters bunkered inside Madaya of holding civilians hostage, barring their exit from the town.
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Zika Warning Spotlights Latin America's Fight Against Mosquito-Borne Diseases - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...il-zika-warning-rio-games.html new york times
shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The warning by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has intensified a debate across Latin America over the hemisphere’s growing vulnerability to mosquito-borne diseases. These concerns are especially acute in Brazil, the region’s largest country, where officials hope that tourism can help revive a beleaguered economy as they prepare to host the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
  • Mr. Alves added that he expected the Zika outbreak to ease to the point that the Olympics here in August would not be affected.Yet others in Brazil applauded the C.D.C.’s alert, pointing to the country’s struggle not just with Zika, a virus with origins in Uganda that is thought to have made the leap to Brazil in 2014, but also with two other mosquito-borne viruses, dengue and chikungunya. Last year, Brazil registered more than 1.6 million cases of dengue, a virus causing fever and joint pain, with 863 people dying from the disease.
  • Dr. Kuri said the C.D.C. was “within its rights” to issue the travel warning, but he argued that the blanket admonition did not make sense when th
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  • El Salvador’s Health Ministry is particularly concerned about the rise of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which leads to paralysis, usually temporary; researchers are exploring a possible link between Guillain-Barré and Zika. Forty-six suspected cases of the syndrome had been reported as of last week, Violeta Menjívar, the health minister, said in a radio interview.
  • virus has appeared in only three Mexican states. The mosquitoes that carry the virus, he said, could not survive in the high altitudes of the central plateau, including Mexico City.“I think it’s good to have these warnings,” he said, “but these things should be explained to people.”
  • Their model for Zika’s possible spread, using worldwide temperature profiles and air travel routes, also determined that more than 60 percent of the population in the United States lives in areas conducive to seasonal Zika transmission. And about 23 million people in the United States live in places with climates like Florida and parts of Texas where Zika can be transmitted by mosquitoes year-round, the researchers said.The authorities in Brazil insist that they are taking steps to fight Zika, including vaccine research.
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America Soured on My Multiracial Family - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567994 adoption racism
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • There are three fundamental, complicating truths about adoption. First, every single adoption begins with profound loss. Through death, abandonment, or even loving surrender, a child suffers the loss of his or her mother and father. Second, the demographics of those in need of loving homes do not precisely match the demographics of those seeking a new child. Adoptive parents are disproportionately white. Adopted children are not. Thus, multiracial families are a natural and inevitable consequence of the adoption process. Third, American culture has long been obsessed with questions of race and identity
  • I’m an evangelical Christian, and ever since I was a young man, two Bible verses have tugged at my soul.
  • The first comes from the Book of James, and defines “pure” religious practice in part as looking after “widows and orphans in their distress.
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  • The second, from the Book of Galatians, declares an eternal truth: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
  • As a result, my wife and I not only felt called to adopt, but we believed that race was no barrier to unity for a family of genuine faith.
  • From the instant we saw her, we loved her with our whole hearts, but any adoptive family can tell you (indeed, any family at all can tell you) that love does not heal all hurts. There is pain that can last a lifetime.
  • overing just outside the frame—and sometimes intruding directly into our lives—is a disturbing reality. There are people who hate that our family exists. Actual racists loathe the idea of white parents raising a black child, and ideological arguments about identity raise questions about whether a white family’s love can harm a child of a different race. And, sometimes, people even question whether adoptive parents truly love their children, claiming that parents adopt to “virtue signal” or simply to ostentatiously demonstrate their open-mindedness.
  • In 2010, the year we adopted, The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson wrote an article that reflected the heartfelt views of countless adoptive families. It was the “noblest thing about America,” he said, that “we care for children of other lands who have been cast aside.” And what of multiracial families? His answer was our answer: “Instead of undermining any culture, international adoption instructs our own. Unlike the thin, quarrelsome multiculturalism of the campus, multiethnic families demonstrate the power of affection over difference.” There was a spirit of optimism, of hope that we could actually live the promise from Galatians, and in living that promise help change the nation we loved.
  • then came a backlash. Claims of cultural imperialism, wounded national pride, and rare, sad horror stories of exploitation or abuse soured foreign nations against American families. And at home, identity politics and even outright hostility against the Christian adoption movement triggered attacks from some on the left—attacks that were soon to be matched and exceeded by attacks from a racist right.
  • We quickly discovered that if you’re the white parents of an adopted black child, and you’re in the public eye at all, men and women will viciously criticize you for having the audacity to believe that you can raise your kid. At times, the criticism was direct and personal—most of it directed at my wife
  • Then, sometime around the summer of 2015, we began to notice a shift. The attacks on our family came less and less from the left, and increasingly from the so-called alt-right—a vicious movement of Trump-supporting white nationalists who loathe multiracial families. They despise international adoption. They call it “race-cucking your family” or “raising the enemy.”
  • They lifted pictures of my then-7-year-old daughter from social media and Photoshopped her into a gas chamber, with Donald Trump pressing the button to kill her. They put her image in slave fields. They found my wife’s blog and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead or dying African Americans. They made me wish for the days when the left came after us; at least progressive critics didn’t want my daughter to die.
  • White parents see racism directed at their black kids. Cruel people use social media to accuse parents of raising kids as fashion statements. Others lecture them on their inherent inability to meet the needs of children of color. The hate our family received may have been more prolific because of who we are, but that hate is real, it is part of American life, and it will find its way to all too many families that looks like ours.
  • In the years since we brought our daughter home, overseas adoption has plummeted—down 72 percent since 2005—and it’s not hard to see one of the reasons. A broken American culture inflicts itself on nations abroad and families at home, and attitudes shift
  • the idealism of 2010 is gone. Then, we thought our family reflected the future. Now we know that was naive. Now we know that while the promise of Galatians—the promise that we are “all one”—is true in the Kingdom of Heaven, in America it does not yet apply.
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The Tories once had a radical fringe. Now it is the whole party | Aditya Chakrabortty |... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • hey have shrunk into being the party of southern England. And even there, the hold is slipping. This January, a senior government minister told the Sun of a new rule, coined while out canvassing, that “If you knock on a door and they have books on their shelves, you can be pretty sure these days they’re not voting Tory.
  • Voting Tory is for one’s dotage, as health secretary Matt Hancock remarked this week, voting Tory is now “something people start to do when they get their winter fuel allowance”
  • May’s would-be replacements know that to stand a chance, they must sound as extreme as possible. Liz Truss was a remainer; now she garbles speeches about the supermarkets’ unpatriotic dearth of British cheese. Fellow former remainer Jeremy Hunt warned only last summer that leaving Europe without a deal would be “a mistake that we would regret for generations”;; today he jabs at Brussels like a mini-Francois
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  • A three-time Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, defined his party’s purpose as “hostility to radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility … The fear that radicalism may triumph is the only final cause that the Conservative party can plead for its own existence”
  • his party has today been hijacked by the radicals. It no longer has space for the Keynesianism of Rab Butler or the liberalism of Francis Pym. It is the home of the radical right. That defines the Brexit project; it is also the dying embers of Thatcherism.
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The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-business-climate-change.html climate change tech
shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • The scientist and historian Vaclav Smil called Haber-Bosch “the most important technical invention of the 20th century.” Bosch had effectively removed the historical bounds on crop yields, so much so that he was widely credited with making “bread from air.” By some estimates, Bosch’s work made possible the lives of more than two billion human beings over the last 100 years.
  • They depend on electric fans to pull air into the ducts and over a special material, known as a sorbent, laced with granules that chemically bind with CO₂; periodic blasts of heat then release the captured gas from the sorbent, with customized software managing the whole catch-and-release cycle.
  • “The first thing they said was: ‘This will never work technically.’ And finally in 2017 we convinced them it works technically, since we built the big plant in Hinwil. But once we convinced them that it works technically, they would say, ‘Well, it will never work economically.’ ”For the moment, skeptics of Climeworks’s business plan are correct: The company is not turning a profit.
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  • it faces the same daunting task that confronted Carl Bosch a century ago: How much can it bring costs down? And how fast can it scale up
  • They believe that over the next seven years they can bring expenses down to a level that would enable them to sell CO₂ into more lucrative markets. Air-captured CO₂ can be combined with hydrogen and then fashioned into any kind of fossil-fuel substitute you want. Instead of making bread from air, you can make fuels from air.
  • What Gebald and Wurzbacher really want to do is to pull vast amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bury it, forever, deep underground, and sell that service as an offset
  • companies like Climeworks face a quandary: How do you sell something that never existed before, something that may never be cheap, into a market that is not yet real?
  • It’s arguably the case, in fact, that when it comes to reducing our carbon emissions, direct air capture will be seen as an option that’s too expensive and too modest in impact. “The only way that direct air capture becomes meaningful is if we do all the other things we need to do promptly,” Hal Harvey, a California energy analyst who studies climate-friendly technologies and policies, told me
  • In short, the best way to start making progress toward a decarbonized world is not to rev up millions of air capture machines right now. It’s to stop putting CO₂ in the atmosphere in the first place.
  • If the nations of the world were to continue on the current track, it would be impossible to meet the objectives of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which set a goal limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius or, ideally, 1.5 degrees. And it would usher in a world of misery and economic hardship. Already, temperatures in some regions have climbed more than 1 degree Celsius, as a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted last October. These temperature increases have led to an increase in droughts, heat waves, floods and biodiversity losses and make the chaos of 2 or 3 degrees’ additional warming seem inconceivable
  • A further problem is that maintaining today’s emissions path for too long runs the risk of doing irreparable damage to the earth’s ecosystems — causing harm that no amount of technological innovation can make right. “There is no reverse gear for natural systems,” Harvey says. “If they go, they go. If we defrost the tundra, it’s game over.” The same might be said for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, or our coral reefs. Such resources have an asymmetry in their natural architectures: They can take thousands or millions of years to form, but could reach conditions of catastrophic decline in just a few decades.
  • To have a shot at maintaining a climate suitable for humans, the world’s nations most likely have to reduce CO₂ emissions drastically from the current level — to perhaps 15 billion or 20 billion metric tons per year by 2030; then, through some kind of unprecedented political and industrial effort, we need to bring carbon emissions to zero by around 2050
  • To preserve a livable environment we may also need to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. As Wurzbacher put it, “if you take all these numbers from the I.P.C.C., you end up with something like eight to 10 billion tons — gigatons — of CO₂ that need to be removed from the air every year, if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees.
  • Through photosynthesis, our forests take extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and if we were to magnify efforts to reforest clear-cut areas — or plant new groves, a process known as afforestation — we could absorb billions more metric tons of carbon in future years.
  • we could grow crops specifically to absorb CO₂ and then burn them for power generation, with the intention of capturing the power-plant emissions and pumping them underground, a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS
  • Ever since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have produced an excess of CO₂, by taking carbon stores from deep inside the earth — in the form of coal, oil and gas — and from stores aboveground (mostly wood), then putting it into the atmosphere by burning it. It has become imperative to reverse the process — that is, take CO₂ out of the air and either restore it deep inside the earth or contain it within new surface ecosystems.
  • “It’s not about saying, ‘I want to plant a tree.’ It’s about saying, ‘We want to plant a billion trees.’
  • “We have to come to grips with the fact that we waited too long and that we took some options off the table,” Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton scientist who studies climate and policy, told me. As a result, NETs no longer seem to be just interesting ideas; they look like necessities. And as it happens, the Climeworks machines on the rooftop do the work each year of about 36,000 trees.
  • air capture could likewise help counter the impact of several vital industries. “There are process emissions that come from producing iron and steel, cement and glass,” she says, “and any time you make these materials, there’s a chemical reaction that emits CO₂.” Direct air capture could even lessen the impacts of the Haber-Bosch processes for making fertilizer; by some estimates, that industry now accounts for 3 percent of all CO₂ emissions.
  • Wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy in the right locations,” Pacala says. “The return on those investments, if you calculated it, would blow the doors off anything in your portfolio. It’s like investing in early Apple. So it’s a spectacular story of success. And direct air capture is precisely the same kind of problem, in which the only barrier is that it’s too costly.”
  • what all the founders have in common is a belief that the cost of capturing a ton of carbon will soon drop sharply.
  • M.I.T.’s Howard Herzog, for instance, an engineer who has spent years looking at the potential for these machines, told me that he thinks the costs will remain between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton
  • He points out that because direct-air-capture machines have to move tremendous amounts of air through a filter or solution to glean a ton of CO₂ — the gas, for all its global impact, makes up only about 0.04 percent of our atmosphere — the process necessitates large expenditures for energy and big equipment. What he has likewise observed, in analyzing similar industries that separate gases, suggests that translating spreadsheet projections for capturing CO₂ into real-world applications will reveal hidden costs. “I think there has been a lot of hype about this, and it’s not going to revolutionize anything,
  • Climeworks’s current goal is to remove 1 percent of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions by the mid 2020s.
  • “Basically, we have a road map — $600, down to $400, down to $300 and $200 a ton,” Wurzbacher said. “This is over the next five years. Down to $200 we know quite well what we’re doing.” And beyond $200, Wurzbacher suggested, things get murkier.
  • To actually capture 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025 would, by Gebald’s calculations, require that Climeworks build 250,000 carbon-capture plants like the ones on the roof at Hinwil. That adds up to about 4.5 million carbon collectors
  • The Climeworks founders therefore try to think of their product as the automotive industry might — a piece of mass-produced technology and metal, not the carbon they hope to sequester.
  • “Every CO₂ collector has about the same weight and dimensions of a car — roughly two tons, and roughly 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters,” Gebald said. “And all the methods used to produce the CO₂ collectors could be well automated. So we have the automotive industry as a model for how to produce things in large quantities for low cost.
  • n 1954, the economist Paul Samuelson put forward a theory that made a distinction between “private-consumption goods” — bread, cars, houses and the like — and commodities that existed apart from the usual laws of supply and demand.
  • the other type of commodity Samuelson was describing is something now known as a “public good,” which benefits everyone but is not bought, sold or consumed the same way
  • direct air capture’s success would be limited to the size of the market for private goods — soda fizz, greenhouse gas — unless governments decided to intervene and help fund the equivalent of several million (or more) lighthouses.
  • An intervention could take a variety of forms. It could be large grants for research to find better sorbent materials, for instance, which would be similar to government investments that long ago helped nurture the solar- and wind-power industries. But help could also come by expanding regulations that already exist.
  • The Climeworks founders told me they don’t believe their company will succeed on what they call “climate impact” scales unless the world puts significant prices on emissions, in the form of a carbon tax or carbon fee.
  • “Our goal is to make it possible to capture CO₂ from the air for below $100 per ton,” Wurzbacher says. “No one owns a crystal ball, but we think — and we’re quite confident — that by something like 2030 we’ll have a global average price on carbon in the range of $100 to $150 a ton.” There is optimism in this thinking
  • A company that sells a product or uses a process that creates high emissions — an airline, for instance, or a steel maker — could be required to pay carbon-removal companies $100 per metric ton or more to offset their CO₂ output. Or a government might use carbon-tax proceeds to directly pay businesses to collect and bury CO₂.
  • “It doesn’t cost too much to pump CO₂ underground,” Stanford’s Sally Benson says. Companies already sequester about 34 million metric tons of CO₂ in the ground every year, at a number of sites around the world, usually to enhance the oil-drilling process. “The costs range from $2 to $15 per ton. So the bigger cost in all of this is the cost of carbon capture.”
  • The weekend before, Gutknecht told me, he received 900 unsolicited inquiries by email. Many were from potential customers who wanted to know how soon Climeworks could bury their CO₂ emissions, or how much a machine might cost them.
  • A Climeworks app could be installed on my smartphone, he explained. It could then be activated by my handset’s location services. “You fly over here to Europe,” he explained, “and the app tells you that you have just burned 1.7 tons of CO₂. Do you want to remove that? Well, Climeworks can remove it for you. Click here. We’ll charge your credit card.
  • The vast and constant market demand for fuel is why Carbon Engineering has staked its future on synthetics. The world currently burns about 100 million barrels of oil a day.
  • “So let’s say you’d have to supply something like 50 million barrels a day in 2050 of fuels,” he said. “That’s still a monster market.”
  • Carbon Engineering’s chief executive, added that direct-air-capture synthetics have an advantage over traditional fossil fuels: They won’t have to spend a dime on exploration
  • our plants, you can build it right in the middle of California, wherever you have air and water.” He told me that the company’s first large-scale facility should be up and running by 2022, and will turn out at least 500 barrels a day of fuel feedstock — the raw material sent to refineries.
  • Climeworks recently joined a consortium of European countries to produce synthetic methane that will be used by a local trucking fleet. With different tweaks and refinements, the process could be adapted for diesel, gasoline, jet fuel — or it could be piped directly to local neighborhoods as fuel for home furnaces.
  • the new fuels are not necessarily cheaper. Carbon Engineering aspires to deliver its product at an ultimate retail price of about $1 per liter, or $3.75 per gallon. What would make the product competitive are regulations in California that now require fuel sellers to produce fuels of lower “carbon intensity.” To date this has meant blending gas and diesel with biofuels like ethanol, but it could soon mean carbon-capture synthetics too.
  • Since they’re made from airborne CO₂ and hydrogen and could be manufactured just about anywhere, they could rearrange the geopolitical order — tempering the power of a handful of countries that now control natural-gas and oil markets.
  • From an environmental standpoint, air-capture fuels are not a utopian solution. Such fuels are carbon neutral, not carbon negative. They can’t take CO₂ from our industrial past and put it back into the earth
  • Even so, these fuels could present an enormous improvement. Transportation — currently the most significant source of emissions by sector in the United States — could cease to be a net emitter of CO₂
  • “If you can do one carbon-capture facility, where Carbon Engineering or Climeworks can build a big plant, great. You need to do that 5,000 times. And to capture a million tons of CO₂ with direct air capture, you need a small power plant just to run that facility. So if you’re going to build one direct-air-capture facility every day for the next 30 years to get to some of these scenarios, then in addition, we have to build a new mini power plant every day as well.
  • It’s also the case that you have to address two extraordinary problems at the same time, Peters added. “To reach 1.5 degrees, we need to halve emissions every decade,” he said. That would mean persuading entire nations, like China and the United States, to switch from burning coal to using renewables at precisely the same time that we make immense investments in negative-emission technologies.
  • this would need to be done even as governments choose among competing priorities:
  • “The idea of bringing direct air capture up to 10 billion tons by the middle or later part of the century is such a herculean task it would require an industrial scale-up the likes of which the world has never seen,”
  • Pacala wasn’t pessimistic about making a start. He seemed to think it was necessary for the federal government to begin with significant research and investments in the technology — to see how far and fast it could move forward, so that it’s ready as soon as possible
  • Gebald and Wurzbacher seemed to regard the climate challenge in mathematical terms. How many gigatons needed to be removed? How much would it cost per ton? How many Climeworks machines were required? Even if the figures were enormous, even if they appeared impossible, to see the future their way was to redefine the problem, to move away from the narrative of loss, to forget the multiplying stories of dying reefs and threatened coastlines — and to begin to imagine other possibilities.
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Trump's tweets on children dying in U.S. custody are a new low - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...with-trump-there-is-no-bottom trump children
shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • we have a president who is willing to politicize the deaths of two young children to score points against the opposition party. And the most shocking thing about seeing him scrape along a new moral bottom is this: It is no longer shocking at all.
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The Untold Story of Japan's First People - SAPIENS - 0 views

www.sapiens.org/...ainu-prejudice-pride japan history origins
shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • For much of the 20th century, Japanese government officials and academics tried to hide the Ainu. They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was steadfastly creating a national myth of homogeneity.
  • So officials tucked the Ainu into files marked “human migration mysteries,” or “aberrant hunter-gatherers of the modern age,” or “lost Caucasoid race,” or “enigma,” or “dying race,” or even “extinct.”
  • But in 2006, under international pressure, the government finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous population.
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  • In the prefecture of Hokkaido, the traditional territory of the Ainu, government administrators now answer the phone, “Irankarapte,” an Ainu greeting. The government is planning a new Ainu museum, meant to open in time for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. In a country known for its almost suffocating homogeneity—to outsiders anyway, and not always fairly—embracing the Ainu is an extraordinary lurch into diversity.
  • Humans first landed on Hokkaido at least 20,000 years ago, probably arriving from Siberia via a land bridge in search of a less frigid environment. By the end of the last ice age, their descendants had developed a culture of hunting, foraging, and fishing.
  • The northerners’ ancient culture persisted largely unchanged until the seventh century
  • it appears that ancient islanders, bereft of any ursine population, must have imported their bears from the Hokkaido mainland. Did they struggle to bring live bears to the island, via canoe?
  • I was born in Hokkaido, 60 kilometers east of Sapporo,” he says. Yet he never learned the history of Hokkaido. Schools across the nation used a common history textbook, and when Kato was young, he only learned the story of Japan’s main island, Honshu.
  • On the surface, there is nothing about Hokkaido that is not Japanese. But dig down—metaphorically and physically, as Kato is doing—and you’ll find layers of another class, culture, religion, and ethnicity.
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Terminal illness led to Australia's first same-sex marriage - BBC News - 0 views

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  • A dying woman and her partner were the first same-sex couple to legally marry in Australia, it has been revealed.
  • Ms Grant died from cancer on 30 January, less than seven weeks after marrying Ms Kindt. They had been together for eight years.
  • Laws allowing same-sex couples to register for marriage had come into effect six days earlier, following a decisive public vote and approval by parliament.Some other same-sex couples, including others where one partner had a terminal illness, were also allowed to skip the waiting period and a handful of well-reported midnight celebrations took place.
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  • "We considered ourselves married [in 2013], but in a legal sense we weren't," said Ms Kindt, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
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Trump stumps for struggling GOP candidate, talks up death penalty for drug dealers in w... - 0 views

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  • President Donald Trump arrived in western Pennsylvania on Saturday night with a message for the Republican running there: Don't embarrass me.Trump rallied outside Pittsburgh for state Rep. Rick Saccone ahead of Tuesday's special congressional election for a seat in the heart of America's steel industry, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 20 percentage points in 2016. But after immediately endorsing Saccone when he hit the stage, Trump pivoted to a 75-minute torrent of policy musings, political attacks and presidential campaign previews.
  • The psychology of a con is a complicated science. But it might have more in common with our everyday relationships than we think.
  • Trump delivered "about five minutes" of what had been scripted for Saturday night's rally, a White House official familiar with the speech said. He had discussed his message on North Korea with aides shortly before taking the stage. But he scrapped his prepared remarks on Saccone, improvising and at one point handing the microphone to Saccone, too.
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  • He said those convicted of killing just one person in shootings and stabbings at times face the death penalty or life in prison without parole. But, he said, someone can "kill 5,000 people with drugs because you're smuggling them in and you're making a lot of money and people are dying," and go without serious punishment.
  • "Our new slogan, when we start running, in -- can you believe it, two years from now -- is going to be, Keep America Great, exclamation point," Trump said.
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Spain | Facts, Culture, History, & Points of Interest - Charles II | Britannica.com - 0 views

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  • In 1669 Nithard was overthrown by Juan José de Austria, an illegitimate son of Philip IV, but the regent still managed to keep him out of the central government. In 1677 Juan José led an army against Madrid and made himself Charles II’s principal minister.
  • Until the mid-1680s the Castilian economy declined
  • the reign of Charles II as “an uninterrupted series of calamities.” The population of Castile declined from about 6.5 million at the end of the 16th century to under 5 million about 1680
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  • the unwillingness of other European powers, especially the United Provinces, to see the Spanish dominions in Europe swallowed up by France
  • recurrent plagues
  • Castilian industries continued to decline
  • three successive wars with France
  • military casualties
  • The last years of the childless and clearly dying Charles II were occupied by the maneuvers of the European powers for the Spanish succession or, alternatively, for the partition of the Spanish empire
  • the rule of the house of Austria came to an end with the death of Charles II, on November 1, 1700.
  • The court of Charles II was neither financially nor psychologically capable of playing the patronage role that Philip IV’s court had played
  • the aggressive militarism that was central to the Castilian aristocratic tradition led to the political hubris of Spanish imperial policy, from Philip II to Philip IV. The Castilian ruling classes never produced, or perhaps gave no chance to, a leader who could break out of this tradition
  • It was the wars, however, that devoured Castile, even though they were fought beyond its borders
  • They do not directly explain the end of the “Golden Age,” but it may be suggested that a society that invests most of its energies and all of its pride in war
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I lost 13 stone - now I know the truth about obesity | Society | The Guardian - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Myth 2: ‘Being overweight isn’t that bad for you’
  • Analysis from 2013 investigated the long-term consequences of obesity with the specific aim of examining so-called “healthily obese” people. A comparison between healthy people of normal weight and healthy but obese subjects showed the latter group had a significantly higher risk of dying or developing cardiovascular disease. The scientists who carried out the study therefore came to the conclusion that the belief you can be “fat but fit” is just a myth.
  • A 2015 study confirmed those results. It followed supposedly healthily obese subjects over 20 years and found that more than half became unhealthily obese during that time. Their risk of becoming ill was eight times higher than that of the healthy group with normal weight. The risks include, but are not limited to: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, sleep apnoea, arthritis/joint problems, fertility problems, asthma, back pain, incontinence, gout and stroke.
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  • Myth 3: ‘Being overweight doesn’t impede me’
  • Myth 4: ‘My family and friends don’t think I need to lose weight’
  • Myth 5: ‘Obesity is largely due to your genes’
  • Genes create a basic situation, but they don’t oblige anyone to be fat. Things that can genuinely be explained by genetics are appetite, preferences for certain flavours (such as sweet or fatty) and the natural urge to be physically active.
  • Several studies have shown that carriers of so-called obesity genes consume on average 125-280 kcal a day more and have no differences in their metabolic rates. To say that some children have a genetic propensity towards obesity means only that they have an inherently larger appetite than naturally slim children, who feel hungry less often.
  • But the deciding factor in whether children have a tendency towards being fat is the set of conditions created by their parents and the rest of their environment (such as school meals), which can serve either to encourage or discourage obesity.
  • Living in a household where high-calorie food is constantly available won’t necessarily make children fat if their genetics mean they have a naturally small appetite. Children with naturally large appetites, by contrast, will pounce on the proffered fare.
  • However, studies have shown that food preferences are not an inescapable fate
  • In the end, our genes just set out the path we will follow if we don’t actively strive to change its direction (which can take great effort). However, those efforts are only temporary: once we have become habituated to new behaviours, we no longer have to struggle to maintain them.
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Andrew Sullivan: Can the Republic Strike Back? - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • There are few historical guides. It is hard to think of a precedent for a president who endorses violence against political foes, sees the Justice Department as his own personal prosecutor, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” tears children from parents, brags of multiple sexual assaults, threatens to lock up his opponents, enthuses about war crimes, “falls in love” with the foulest dictator on the planet, refuses to divest of personal holdings in office, lambastes allies, treats the Treasury as a casino, actively endorses the poisoning of the environment, destabilizes NATO, baits minorities, lies incessantly, and oversees a resurgence of the white nationalist right. Any single gesture in any one of these areas would have been political death for most previous presidents
  • White anxiety and discomfort in the face of mass immigration is not going to disappear. As I argued last week, it will likely intensify. The global pressures that suppress wages are not waning. The despair in so much of left-behind America cannot be blotted out indefinitely with fentanyl. The collapse of local communities is not going to turn around overnight, and automation is unstoppable. Fear of change is correlated to the pace of change, and the latter shows no sign of deceleration
  • this new alignment is organized less around policy or the role of government, than on the feelings of security and confidence in the modern world. And in our current crisis, the closed, fixed, fearful view of the world is, understandably, in the ascendant
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  • Tom Edsall made a vital point yesterday in the New York Times, citing a new study. In America, a center-right country, those with “fixed views” are 42 percent of the electorate; those with “fluid views” are 32 percent; and those hybrids in the middle (which is where I find myself) are 26 percent. More to the point, the hybrids “are more like the fixed than they are the fluid.”
  • The Italian leftist, Antonio Gramsci, famously wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
  • At what point is it legitimate to make sweeping negative generalizations about whole classes of people?
  • On the facts, he insisted, he is not wrong about domestic terrorism. Right-wing terror is at least as dangerous as Islamist terror, maybe more: “Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, far-right violent extremists have killed 106 people in 62 attacks in the United States, while radical Islamist violent extremists have killed 119 people in 23 attacks.” He’s right about that — and, with Pittsburgh, there are now 11 more victims on the far-right side of the ledger
  • He was being deliberately provocative in his original remarks: “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.” He suggested “we have to do something about them,” and referred to the “Muslim ban” as an analogy. It’s a dumb analogy, since it’s about immigrants from a select number of Muslim-majority countries, while “white men” is clearly about American citizens. But the Muslim analogy works in another way. We go out of our way — and rightly so, in my view — not to associate Islamist terrorists with American Muslims. And we do so because it’s grotesquely unfair to generalize from a tiny few to an entire population. If it’s unfair to do that for Muslims, why is it okay for “white men”?
  • it seems to me important to keep the denigration of entire classes of people in check. It’s morally wrong, and it’s politically counterproductive. The issue is not the far-right terrorists’ whiteness or their maleness, but their extremism and psychology.
  • In a liberal society, we don’t judge the individual by the group or the group by the individual. It’s worth resisting the urge to do so when you feel it (as we all do from time to time). Especially when you believe your motives are good ones
  • The most striking thing about Max Boot, the former neocon who has become one of the most passionate Never Trumpers, is his naïveté. After decades of diligence in the ranks of the conservative movement, it took the emergence of Trump to make him see that almost everything he previously trusted and believed in could disappear overnight. I’m glad he has seen the light on this, and enjoyed his book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, as a memoir of that naïveté
  • He’s a first-generation immigrant, just like me. And we tend to idolize America. Unlike most people, we chose it. For us, America will always be an escape and a vision of a life made new. We look past its flaws, blur over its past, miss the racial backstory, rationalize foreign interventions in ways many native-born Americans would balk at. We immigrants are the ultimate American idealists
  • If you are also a conservative, and came here in the twilight of the Cold War, you will also have been swept away by what appeared to be the triumph of your set of ideas, the total defeat of Soviet Communism, the collapse of collectivism, and the spread of freedom around the world. And the last two decades of the 20th century, when Boot and I came of age, were as intoxicating for a conservative immigrant to America as the first two decades of the 21st have been profoundly disillusioning
  • My breaking point was the revelation that the GOP backed the brutal torture of prisoners, the total abnegation of a politics of freedom. If you didn’t recognize the barbarism that lay just beneath the Republican surface then, you were blinded by something pretty powerful.
  • But there’s a danger to Damascene moments. It’s so very tempting to replace one tribe with another, one fixed ideology for its opposite, and to make that conversion the central part of your identity.
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An exodus from Venezuela has prompted Latin America's biggest migration crisis in decad... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...r-crisis-torn-country-en-masse venezuela exodus deportation crisis
shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.
  • In Venezuela, children are dying. People are starving and being persecuted. What they’re getting from us is a door in the face.
  • Nowhere is the crisis more acute than here in Colombia, where 3,000 troops are fanning out across the 1,400-mile border to contain an influx of Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy and an increasingly repressive socialist regime.
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  • In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.
  • y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.
  • Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.
  • Our migration levels are now comparable to Syria or to [the Rohingya going to] Bangladesh,”
  • leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country
  • Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.
  • Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.
  • bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.
  • The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands
  • Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.
  • They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”
  • The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.
  • Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.
  • “Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.
  • The operations are sending as many as 100 migrants a day back to Venezuela.
  • You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”
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