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Javier E

Opinion | Our 'Pursuit of Happiness' Is Killing the Planet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ess-is-killing-the-planet.html

happiness liberty American idea government statism

shared by Javier E on 09 May 20 - No Cached
  • it’s unlikely the world will be able to get to net-zero without serious changes in personal behavior. The Green New Deal also mandates “sustainable farming,” which usually includes reductions in methane emissions from livestock, while the Dutch law takes aim at ham through limits to pork production.
  • In a brilliant, now largely forgotten, lecture delivered in 1819, Constant wrote that the democrats of Greece and Rome, like the revolutionaries of his own day, “admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.” By contrast, Constant wrote, “the aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures, and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to those pleasures.”
  • Constant wasn’t thinking of Marie Antoinette’s right to play at shepherdess while her subjects starved, but the right to open a shop and build yourself a home rather than be drafted into Napoleon’s army spreading republicanism across the face of Europe. We moderns build institutions, and establish tacit norms, to guarantee the security of such private pleasures. That’s liberal individualism
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  • what do we do once we see that some of those choices threaten the health and lives of others? We will have to strike a new equilibrium between what society has the right to demand of us and what we have a right to retain for ourselves.
  • Liberal societies, in short, have always faced the problem of secondhand smoke, but what once was exceptional has now become endemic. One man’s meat is another man’s poison
  • Can we forge a new equilibrium before Miami is under water? I would like to think we’ll do so as part of a larger process of democratic deliberation. The Green New Deal envisions a 10-year phase of “transparent and inclusive consultation,” which sounds just about right.
  • The Dutch can reach consensus on painful social questions because they’ve spent the last thousand years working cooperatively to build dikes; the climate accord adopted last year came after a full year of discussion among representatives of all interest groups.
  • That’s not how American democracy works, and especially so in recent years. We allow those interest groups to wage a pitched battle using all the money and influence they can muster against one another. Legislation emerges only after a war of attrition.
  • just maybe we’ll rise to the occasion: With the flood upon us, we, too, will learn how to build dikes together.
anonymous

Queen Elizabeth II recalls WWII evacuations during coronavirus speech - The Washington ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-speech-wwii-child-evacuations

history

shared by anonymous on 20 May 20 - No Cached
  • She also harked back to her first speech to the public ever, when she was only 14 and still a princess.“It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made, in 1940, helped by my sister,” she said, as an archive photo of the girls appeared on-screen. “We as children spoke from here at Windsor [Castle] to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety.”
  • The wave of child evacuations had begun the year before, on Sept. 1, 1939 — the same day Nazi Germany invaded Poland and only two days before Britain’s prime minister declared war. Fearing civilian casualties if British cities were bombed, officials urged parents to send their children to the countryside to live with strangers who volunteered to provide space for them.
  • Evacuation of children was voluntary, according to the Imperial War Museum, but since urban schools had been shut down, the decision was made easier.
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  • In the first wave, nearly 1 million children, hundreds of thousands of teachers and half-a-million mothers with babies were evacuated. The teachers were assigned groups of kids to find spaces for when their trains arrived in smaller towns and villages.
  • In September 1940, the predicted Nazi bombing campaign known as “the Blitz” began, and the last wave of child evacuations took place. Many well-to-do families also arranged for their children to be sent overseas to countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States.
  • Accommodations varied wildly. Some children were virtually adopted by host families and given love and good care. Some lived in large manors housing dozens of children and run by teachers. Many of the urban children were seeing the countryside, agriculture and farm animals for the first time, finding it both inspiring and boring.
  • by January 1940, nearly half of parents had brought their children home, the museum said. The health ministry put up threatening posters to discourage this. One poster depicts a mother visiting her children in the country with a ghostly Adolf Hitler over her shoulder, tempting her like Satan to “Take them back! Take them back!”
  • For others, the evacuation was a nightmare. Their food rations from the government were confiscated by the families they ended up with; they were put to work in fields; many were physically and sexually abused. John Abbott told the BBC he was whipped by his host family whenever he spoke and was eventually rescued by local police, bruised and bleeding.
  • It was after this last wave, in October 1940, that Princess Elizabeth addressed the children of Britain.
  • When Elizabeth turned 18 in early 1945, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she trained as a truck mechanic and driver. To this day, she is the only female member of the royal family to have served in the military.
  • In 1940, she told the children — her contemporaries — “When peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”Now 93, she said Sunday: “I hope, in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.”“Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones,” she closed. “But now, as then, we know deep down that it is the right thing to do.”
brookegoodman

Soviet Union: Stalin, Cold War & Collapse | HISTORY - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...history-of-the-soviet-union

politics culture crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The world’s first Marxist-Communist state would become one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, occupying nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface, before its fall and ultimate dissolution in 1991. The United Socialist Soviet Republic, or U.S.S.R., was made up of 15 soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
  • A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.
  • Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.
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  • Between 1928 and 1940, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated.
  • Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police.
  • The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide.
  • The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
  • At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.
  • On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.
  • Gorbachev’s glasnost plan called for political openness. It addressed personal restrictions of the Soviet people. Glasnost eliminated remaining traces of Stalinist repression, such as the banning of books (like Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning “Dr. Zhivago”) and the much-loathed secret police (though the KGB wouldn’t fully dissolve until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991). Newspapers could criticize the government, and parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.
  • During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes.
  • An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.
brookegoodman

Joseph Stalin - Biography, World War II & Facts - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...joseph-stalin

history politics culture

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower. However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own citizens died during his brutal reign. 
  • Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 18, 1878, or December 6, 1878, according to the Old Style Julian calendar (although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, 1879), in the small town of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire. When he was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin, from the Russian for “man of steel.”
  • Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial superpower. His development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms. Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin’s orders and were shot or exiled as punishment. The forced collectivization also led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions.
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  • In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Joseph Stalin and German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He also launched an invasion of Finland. Then, in June 1941, Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded the USSR, making significant early inroads. (Stalin had ignored warnings from the Americans and the British, as well as his own intelligence agents, about a potential invasion, and the Soviets were not prepared for war.) 
  • Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He prosecuted a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign–especially Western–influence. He established communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and in 1949 led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb. In 1950, he gave North Korea’s communist leader Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) permission to invade United States-supported South Korea, an event that triggered the Korean War.
  • Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, died on March 5, 1953, at age 74, after suffering a stroke. His body was embalmed and preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until 1961, when it was removed and buried near the Kremlin walls as part of the de-Stalinization process initiated by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971).
anonymous

Joe Biden's basement campaign echoes Warren Harding's front porch presidential run - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...harding-porch-biden-basement

history US trump politics

shared by anonymous on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • n 1920, Harding ran the last “front porch” campaign by a U.S. presidential candidate from his home at 380 Mount Vernon Ave. in Marion, just north of Columbus.
  • A century later, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is challenging President Trump from the basement of his Delaware home, where he has been sheltering in place during the coronavirus pandemic
  • Both men are itching to get out on the campaign trail with rallies and speeches. Harding’s goal was exactly the opposite: “to restore the dignity of the office” of president by avoiding the “barnstorming, water tank speech and [railroad-car] tail end platform business.”
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  • Presidential candidates not only sat home but didn’t even campaign before 1840, when Ohio’s William Henry “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison became the first to give speeches with a campaign of carnival-like rallies. In 1880, Republican James Garfield campaigned from his farm in Mentor, Ohio. In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, William Henry’s grandson, ran from his house in Indianapolis.
  • Harding’s campaign theme was “a return to normalcy” after the turmoil of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic.Instead of going to the people, he had the people come to the large, curving front porch of his wood-frame house in Marion, a town of about 30,000 residents.
  • Meantime, Harding’s Democratic rival, Ohio Gov. James Cox, was campaigning by train in 36 of the 48 states.
  • Cox said he was “carrying his front porch” to the country, while his opponent continued “his self-isolation in a small Ohio community,”
  • By October, Harding was far in the lead. His front-porch campaign had drawn more than 600,000 people.
  • Harding didn’t make it to the end of his first term. In the summer of 1923, after a bout of flu, the president took a cross-country train trip. On Aug. 2 in San Francisco, he died after a heart attack.
  • Harding’s legacy was tarnished by scandal following his death. In 1927, it was ruled that his interior secretary secretly sold drilling rights to federal oil wells in Teapot Dome, Wyo., to private oil interests.
  • In 1927, young Nan Britton published a book claiming she was Harding’s mistress and gave birth to his daughter. Decades later, love letters were uncovered showing, in a Stormy Daniels-like moment, the Republican Party in 1920 had paid another Harding high-society mistress to take a long voyage until the election was over.
cartergramiak

Opinion | No One Expects Civility From Republicans - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...publicans-civility-benson.html

history US politics trump crisis gop

shared by cartergramiak on 08 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Perhaps you remember the terrible ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled at for the administration’s family separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.
  • More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election.
  • Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”
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  • The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.
  • After that autopsy, Reince Priebus, then the Republican Party chairman, called for a more “inclusive” G.O.P., saying, “Finding common ground with voters will be a top priority.”
  • Trump would prove that wasn’t necessary. In 2016, he got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did four years earlier, but still won the Electoral College. And while widespread revulsion toward Trump was a problem for him this November, down-ticket Republicans performed far better than almost anyone expected.
  • One thing would change this dynamic overnight: a Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Republicans might learn that there’s a price for aligning themselves with a president trying to thwart the will of the electorate. They might regret the arrogance of Senator David Perdue, who didn’t deign to show up for a Sunday night debate with his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. Trumpism might come to be seen as an electoral albatross, and Republicans would have an incentive to rejoin the reality everyone else operates in.
  • The people screaming outside Benson’s house raise an entirely different question, about how long our society can endure absent any overlapping values or common truths. You can condemn an anti-democratic party for behaving anti-democratically, but you can’t really argue with it.
Javier E

Which 'Succession' Character is James Murdoch? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ames-murdoch-maureen-dowd.html

murdoch fox news fox succession role model right-wing media disinformation culture history

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
  • in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.
  • “I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas
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  • A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.
  • In 2017, President Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Murdoch rebuked Mr. Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”
  • In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox nighttime anchors picked up a false story line about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.
  • So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside?“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”
  • Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”
  • But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?
  • Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.
  • When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one
  • Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News — labeled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren — and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox and its kin — downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line — be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?
  • He is particularly excited about investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.”
  • He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.
  • “So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.
  • I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed.
  • when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.
  • “I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”
  • Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Ms. Murdoch said.
  • Mr. Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23 million to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell yes,” he said with a smile.
  • I noted to Ms. Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.
  • After so much time in the executive suite, Mr. Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.
  • “The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says, ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”
  • I wondered what he made of Fox and Mr. Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalized.“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”
  • He added that Mr. Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu has been “his message from Day 1,” and is “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”
  • “I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”
  • With Mr. Trump and Fox, who is the dog and who is the tail?“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”
  • Confirm or Deny
  • Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.Isn’t that what they say — the harder you work, the luckier you get?
Javier E

FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC95

Louis XIV history france

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
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  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
ethanshilling

To Cut Emissions to Zero, U.S. Needs to Make Big Changes in Next 10 Years - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...erica-next-decade-climate.html

us climate politics

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • If the United States wants to get serious about tackling climate change, the country will need to build a staggering amount of new energy infrastructure in just the next 10 years, laying down steel and concrete at a pace barely being contemplated today.
  • That’s one conclusion from a major study released Tuesday by a team of energy experts at Princeton University, who set out several exhaustively detailed scenarios for how the country could slash its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by 2050.
  • That goal has been endorsed by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as numerous states and businesses, to help avoid the worst effects of global warming.
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  • The researchers identified a common set of drastic changes that the United States would need to make over the next decade to stay on pace for zero emissions.
  • This year, energy companies will install 42 gigawatts of new wind turbines and solar panels, smashing records. But that annual pace would need to nearly double over the next decade
  • The capacity of the nation’s electric grid would have to expand roughly 60 percent by 2030 to handle vast amounts of wind and solar power
  • By 2030, at least 50 percent of new cars sold would need to be battery-powered, with that share rising thereafter.
  • Most homes today are heated by natural gas or oil. But in the next 10 years, nearly one-quarter would need to be warmed with efficient electric heat pumps, double today’s numbers.
  • Virtually all of the 200 remaining coal-burning power plants would have to shut down by 2030.
  • Wind and solar power could be backed up by batteries, some existing nuclear reactors and a large fleet of natural-gas plants that run only occasionally or have been modified to burn clean hydrogen.
  • To start, the United States could make enormous strides over the next decade by rapidly scaling up solutions already in use today, like wind, solar, electric cars and heat pumps. Doing so would require $2.5 trillion in additional investments by governments and industry by 2030.
  • “The scale of what we have to build in a very short time frame surprised me,” said Christopher Greig, a senior scientist at Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
  • Devices that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could help offset emissions.
  • But most of those technologies are still in early development. That would have to change quickly.
  • “We need to be building up our options now,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton.
  • The studies found that, if done right, getting to net zero appears broadly affordable, largely because technologies like wind and solar have become so much cheaper than anyone expected over the past decade.
  • “It’s not a question of whether we have enough land, because we do,” said Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton. “But with that many new projects, you have to ask if they’ll run into local opposition.”
  • Then there are jobs to consider. Net zero would mean eliminating coal and drastically reducing oil and gas use, displacing hundreds of thousands of fossil-fuel workers.
  • On the flip side, millions of new green jobs would spring up for workers retrofitting homes or building wind farms, though those jobs might not be located in the same regions.
  • Politicians would need to figure out how to gain public acceptance for the sweeping changes unfolding, while protecting vulnerable Americans from harm.
  • What both studies do illustrate is that there’s little room for delay.
  • “It may seem like 2050 is a long way off,” said Dr. Jenkins. “But if you think about the timelines for policies, business decisions and capital investments, it’s really more like the day after tomorrow.”
Javier E

Opinion | For Teen Girls, Instagram Is a Cesspool - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-teen-girls-mental-health.html

instagram social media teen girls addiction insecurity

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • the whistle-blower was citing the company’s own research, which among other things found that, based on surveys, “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,”
  • What exactly are we talking about here? Say you’re a 13-year-old girl who is beginning to feel anxious about your appearance, who has followed some diet influencers online. Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved,” “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect.”
  • n an interview with “60 Minutes,” Ms. Haugen called this “tragic.” “As these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed,” she said. “It actually makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more.”
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  • Facebook and Instagram are simply carrying on a longstanding American tradition: stoking the insecurities of teenage girls to cash in on them.
  • The global beauty industry generates $500 billion in annual sales, and social media is now an important driver, especially for the youngest target demographic, Gen Z.
  • The global weight management market was estimated at more than $260 billion in 2020, and is projected to grow to more than $400 billion by 2027.
  • Before American girls’ confidence was commodified by Instagram, it was at the whim of magazines filled with impossibly slender, airbrushed models and ads from industries relying on girls and women for revenue
  • That’s because social media is addictive. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson called it “attention alcohol,” explaining, “Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency.”
  • as a student at Harvard, he put his female classmates’ photos on his now-notorious “Facemash” website, where students could rank and compare the students’ headshots based on how hot they were. He wrote at the time, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
  • For girls now, things have changed. They’re largely worse. Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both. In the feed, influencers’ and celebrities’ photos are interspersed with photos of your friends and yourself. Now any photo is subject to scrutiny, comparison and assessment in the form of likes and comments.
  • No school health class or parental reassurance is a match for the might of these powerful tech platforms, combined with entire industries that prey on girls’ insecurities.
  • Girls themselves often know Instagram is not good for them, but they keep coming back.
  • At the core of this marketing, the message endures: You are riddled with flaws and imperfections. We will tell you what to buy, and what do, to fix yourself.
  • Ultimately, Instagram is just a vicious messenger. But the cesspool of content fueling it? That comes from us.
Javier E

Opinion | Got Climate Doom? Here's What You Can Do to Actually Make a Difference - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-change-personal-actions.html

personal responsibility climate response politics guilt

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 21 - Cached
  • My guests are author David Wallace-Wells, who wrote the book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and Genevieve Guenther, climate communication activist and founder of the organization, End Climate Silence.
  • genevieve guentherAll right, well, let me talk about this point that you shouldn’t have kids or you should have one fewer kid to lower your carbon footprint because it’s misanthropic and it’s just wrong. So there was one study that came up with the top personal carbon footprint actions, and one of them was have one fewer kid. But if you dig down into that study you see that they assume that the consumption of parenthood would remain the same with each subsequent kid. People in the global south generally have large families. And it hasn’t increased their carbon emissions at all. It’s not the kids, it’s the consumption.
  • genevieve guenther
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  • the benefits are really vivid, they are really clear. Everybody agrees that the world will be better off the faster we move. And that really wasn’t the case five or 10 years ago. There was much more muddled analysis and messaging then. And I think we have to take advantage of the new unanimity and not let people fall back on the logic of status quo bias and incumbency and just think that change is expensive and difficult
  • david wallace-wellsMy basic feeling is that the changes that we need are all systemic. And so the things that individuals can do to make that change are primarily through the political realm, not through their individual behavior. If we want to really halt this problem and get a handle on it, it means large, large scale changes that are beyond the capacity of individuals to enact on their own.
  • jane coastonHow do we get our house in order? What do I as an individual or the people listening to this podcast, how do I make this happen on my level? Knowing all of that, what do I do? What do I personally need to do? Give me a thing to do, Genevieve!
  • If you want to learn more about personal responsibility, I recommend Jason Marks’s article in the Sierra Club magazine, “Yes, actually, individual responsibility is essential to solving the climate crisis,” and the New York Times guest essay by Auden Schendler, “Worrying About Your Carbon Footprint is Exactly What Big Oil Wants You to Do.”
  • david wallace-wells
  • I don’t know that we have to all take on a feeling of guilt for the rise of G.D.P. under neoliberalism, because I don’t know that most of us have actually even seen that money.
  • ultimately, the things that we need to do to really get a hold of this are way bigger than cutting your food emissions by 10 percent or 50 percent or whatever. It’s like, the three of us in this room, we can’t build an electric grid, a solar farm. We can’t make sure that there are Tesla charging stations all across the country. We can’t re-imagine land use policy or agricultural policy. We can’t put an honest price on carbon so that when you’re buying gas, you’re actually paying for the environmental damage that’s being caused or when you’re buying an airplane ticket. Those are just things that are well outside of our capacity to control
  • jane coastonCould you explain what climate justice means to an audience that is me?genevieve guentherBasically, it means that the global north historically has been responsible for the vast majority of carbon pollution. And the global south has been responsible for almost none of it. Since 1990, for example, the top 10 percent of earners have been responsible for 52 percent of the growth of global emissions. And the poorest, 50 percent, who largely live in the global south, have been responsible for about 7 percent of global emissions. But that hasn’t grown at all. Historically, they have contributed nothing to the exponential growth of emissions and the increased and accelerating global heating that we’re already seeing. So the idea of climate justice is that global north nations have a moral responsibility to reduce their emissions first and faster so that there is some room left in whatever carbon budget we still have for the global south to pull themselves out of poverty.
  • jane coastonDavid, what do you make of what Genevieve said about the messaging about good and evil there?
  • david wallace-wellsI would say even more importantly, we can’t set our standard at extinction. It’s not like if we survive and avoid extinction, that that’s a success. There is huge suffering between here and there. And every degree of temperature rise is going to create more suffering. And every degree we avoid can help us avoid that.
  • The climate crisis has begun in the United States, too. But the real violence of it is in the global south. And I would argue that the global north doesn’t see it because the news media isn’t reporting on it and because the kind of white supremacy prevents people in this country from really recognizing that this is a violence that would feel unimaginable if it happened to their children.
  • genevieve guentherOK, so the first part is understanding why we have to do this. And I would argue that most Americans still don’t know enough about global heating and the climate crisis.
  • jane coastonYeah, but and a benefit when? Because I think a lot of this messaging relies on something that, in general, people do not like, which is, you may need to do a thing or change a thing about your life for a future that we have not yet defined. From a messaging perspective, how do we message the urgency
  • To think about the concrete impacts, 350,000 Americans, it’s estimated, die every single year from the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. That is a death toll literally equal to the 2020 death toll from COVID.
  • Or is it going to take so long that, in fact, things are going to spiral out of control?
  • within the space of a few years, by simply refusing to accept their own impotence, they have literally remade the entire landscape of global climate politics. Like in the U.S., when we have Joe Biden who Sunrise gave an F to in the primary, talking about this as an existential threat, that is because the protests worked. And they worked in an incredibly short amount of time
  • I personally think the high consumption, and particularly the flying of people who are in the public eye, trying to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis, is incredibly destructive to building a political movement. They’re actually doing something extremely counterproductive in my interpretation. They’re reinforcing everybody’s cognitive dissonance with their behavior, which is also a form of speech. They’re communicating that they’re not willing to make transformative changes and not willing to support transformative policies, and that, in fact, you need to use fossil fuels even to do climate work. And so, for me, I feel like the people who need to worry about their carbon footprints insofar as anybody does are the 1 percent and people in the climate movement.
  • here are huge, huge health consequences from this pollution. It may be the case that air pollution may even be a bigger crisis than climate change. That is how dramatic these impacts are. They happen to be caused largely by the same thing so we can solve them at the same time, but we’re talking about rising rates of respiratory disease and coronary disease and cancers of all kinds and Alzheimer’s and dementia and ADHD and criminality and premature birth and low birth weight. And just every aspect of human flourishing is damaged by the pollution that is produced by the burning of fossil fuels
  • david wallace-wellsIt’s really, really stark, as Genevieve lays out, that it is the wealthy countries of the world and the wealthy people of the world who have engineered this crisis. So whenever we hear about the problem of India, the problem of electrifying sub-Saharan Africa, these are problems. We need to figure them out and do them clean in a way that doesn’t imperil the future of the planet. But those are only problems that we have to deal with now because of the development patterns that countries like ours and across northern Europe went through over the last few decades and centuries.
  • Half of all emissions in the entire history of humanity have come in the last 30 years. Now since Al Gore published his first book on warming, you know I often joke it’s since the premiere of “Friends,” which means that, actually, the people who have done the lion’s share of the damage to the planet are alive today. And it is true, of course, that the people who have been running Shell and Chevron and ExxonMobil have much more responsibility than I do or Genevieve does or Jane does. But it is also the case that all of us have benefited in significant ways from economic activity that has been powered by fossil fuels and to which we could have raised louder objections earlier.
  • genevieve guentherI think it’s worthwhile to point out that the vast majority of Americans are literally going to be richer once we have decarbonized, because their electricity, their heating, their transportation, and their health care costs are going to go down significantl
  • genevieve guentherPick one. Do it once a week, and things will change. First thing is vote. You can’t do that once a week, but vote in every election. Vote
  • some of the actions that you’re talking about, the individual actions, I think can be useful in terms of generating small scale political energy that can eventually sort of trickle up into politics. Leaders see that we’re making changes. They see that we’re demanding changes. They may feel more comfortable making those changes themselves.
  • We as a culture need to normalize that it’s actually healthy not to be happy in the face of climate change and that it doesn’t mean we’re failed Americans. It means that we’re actually human beings who are having an appropriate and ethical moral response to the suffering that is coming in the pipe for everybody, also our own children
  • Or you can donate to groups that are working on electoral politics directly, like the Environmental Voter Project or Stacey Abrams’s Verified Action
  • david wallace-wellsHonestly, the person I was talking to was the United States. I mean, that is the perspective that we have as a country. And as guilty as I feel as responsible as I feel, as I’m sure, Genevieve, and to some extent, Jane, you feel, all of us are actually behaving in ways that are imposing that kind of suffering on people elsewhere in the world. It’s almost unavoidable, given the systems that we live in today. And that is really horrifying. But I think the more clearly that we can see that, the more likely we are to be demanding real change of our leaders and the systems in which we live
  • david wallace-wellsWell, some of them can matter in limiting your carbon footprint. So if you don’t eat beef, if you don’t take airplanes, if you drive an electric car, you’re probably pretty far along in reducing your own carbon footprint. And that is one measure of climate responsibility, carbon responsibility
  • The ability to put your preferred candidates in office is a huge part of the climate fight
  • david wallace-wellsI think that this story is one about our responsibility towards other humans, in which collectively, human behavior has imperiled the future of the planet. I think as a result, we have to talk about it in terms of good and evil, that there are very obvious sides.
  • And it is borne disproportionately by Black and Brown and poor people.
  • genevieve guentherI actually agree with David. This is a systemic problem that is only going to be solved by governments and large corporations leading the transformation of our economies to zero-emission economies. That said, rich people across the globe have a responsibility, a personal responsibility, to reduce their discretionary emissions, to reduce their consumption, both for climate justice reasons and also simply because we need them to do it if we’re going to meet our emissions targets and halt global heating.
  • what is hopeful about these net zero pledges, even as they are greenwashing, is the fact that these companies feel pressure to make them at all, right? This is a sea change in politics. If they can’t actually transform, they’re going to be pushed out, and new incumbents are going to come in. And the question is, can we do this fast enough to halt global warming in time to preserve much of the habitable world?
  • The second piece is a kind of climate communication that shows people how this is going to affect them. Most people think of this as a crisis that’s for the global south or for the distant future or for our grandchildren’s grandchildren or whatever. And it’s up to every single communicator, as far as I’m concerned, to make it clear in really concrete embodied terms what this crisis is going to mean for the children who are alive today.
  • When I started writing about climate five years ago, I would not have thought that this kind of political change was at all possible. We are living through what is a genuinely unprecedented global climate awakening, which has totally changed the landscape of what is possible. And it really has made the world and the future look sunnier
  • famously last year, Drew Shindell, who’s an air pollution expert at Duke, testified before U.S. Congress saying that a green transition of the American energy system would entirely pay for itself through the public health benefits of cleaner air. You could put aside all of the climate impacts. You could put aside all the benefits of cheaper electricity. And just because we would be healthier as a result, even in the U.S. where air is already clean, the dollars and cents would add up and make that a very, very clear win for all of us
  • here’s another thing you can do. You can organize your workplace to ask your company to make greener business decisions or to lobby Congress for climate policies
  • once they’re in office, keep pressuring them. Call their D.C. offices. Call their local offices. Send them emails regularly
  • he dynamic is even more horrifying elsewhere in the world where other countries have much dirtier air than we do. Estimates are as high as 10 million people globally dying of air pollution every single year, 8.7 million of them from the burning of fossil fuels
  • then the third piece of that is really showing how making these changes that are required would be such a benefit to them.
  • that you have to live like a monk to make this work. That may have been, to some degree, true 25, 30 years ago when the alternative systems that we now see right around the corner were much farther away in the distance and much more expensive. But it just isn’t the case now that to green our economy will require an enormous burden
  • when we think of it simply in terms of, is the economy going to grow faster or is it going to go slower, I think we really, really miss the huge, huge public health consequences of continuing running the systems as we are running them today, and also the huge benefits we would get from getting off those systems
  • david wallace-wellsIn 2070, we’re in a net zero world. Nobody has a carbon footprint. So having more kids is not going to make one difference in either direction. And I think we’re still in a place where we can keep that goal in mind and fight to make that possible so that we don’t have to do things like reduce family size.
  • I had this interaction just before the pandemic at an event I did. I keep thinking about it. I think about it maybe every week, maybe every day, where I gave a talk about looking at how dire some of these situations could be. And afterwards, somebody came up to me who assured me that he was not a climate denier. And then he said, so really, how bad is it going to get? And I said, well, at two degrees, we’re talking about 150 million people dying of air pollution. And he said, but that’s out of 8 billion. And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I’m not talking about the total extinction of the human race here, but 150 million is 150 million. That’s 25 Holocausts. And he said, but out of 8 billion.
  • the true, are we going to make humans extinct, kind of futures that we were talking about as slim but real possibilities a few years ago, I think are much, much less likely today. And that is in large part the result of climate protests by people who started their activism within the last few years.
  • genevieve guentherAnd just say that the word “responsibility” has two different definitions, right? There’s the sense of responsibility as guilt. Who is responsible for this crime? Who has to pay the price? But then there’s responsibility as duty. Who’s going to take responsibility for cleaning up this mess?
  • There is a very small ask that can be made, which is just to support the people who support aggressive climate action. We’re talking about massive, immediate, or quasi immediate payback for all of the investments we’re making.
  • If you don’t have the time to do that, donate money. Donate money to organizations that are putting their bodies on the line. Here are some of them— Sunrise, Fridays for Future
  • finally, one of the most impactful things that you can do is simply talk about climate change in your social networks, especially when it feels most socially awkward and embarrassing. Because unless we continue to break the kind of conspiracy of climate silence that allows people to look away, we’re not actually going to have the kind of pressure internally and psychologically in people that will help them join the climate movemen
  • genevieve guentherWell, let me contextualize this for a moment. The concept of the carbon footprint is actually a legitimate concept in sustainability research. It was developed by two researchers in the 1990s
  • What is the 1 percent? In the United States, I would define the 1% as people making $450,000 a year and above. So it’s hard to imagine how much consumption is normalized among these people. It is not at all considered wasteful to buy a new SUV every two or three years as new models come out. It is not all considered extravagant to fly up to 20 times a year. It is not at all horrific to buy an entirely new wardrobe two or three times a year and throw it all away. In fact, this is considered a signal that you are in the rich group and that you are living your best life.
  • it actually has to be done right now. We don’t get another shot at this.
  • Do my personal actions, be they avoiding plastic straws or composting or calculating my personal carbon footprint, as oil companies seem to really want me to do, or switching light bulbs or becoming a vegetarian, in the scheme of averting climate change or mitigating climate change, do those actions really matter?
  • I think that there are certain actors who have played hugely disproportionate, often toxic, roles in that story, namely the fossil fuel industry and their allies in political power, not just in the U.S. but all around the world.
  • that’s not to say that that person is as culpable as the CEOs of ExxonMobil. Obviously, there’s a huge spectrum of culpability, but I think that a huge majority of Americans are understandably viewed by people elsewhere in the world as contributing to the problem as opposed to contributing to the solution, and that we should not dismiss that judgment because we happen to think, well, I was just doing it for myself, or I was just acting in the system in which I live. We should take seriously that judgment and try to think about what we can do to sort of make it right, so to speak.
  • But BP extracted this concept from academia and created a multimillion dollar campaign, trying to change the discourse of the climate crisis and make, as you said, Jane, everybody feel responsible for causing the climate crisis, but also feeling responsible for solving it by doing things like no longer driving or no longer flying or no longer eating beef or turning off lights or using plastic straws. And as David said, this is impossible. Even if every single one of us brought our personal carbon emissions down to zero, we would not halt global heating.
  • number two, join a campaign or an activist group. There are local chapters of groups called the Sunrise Movement and 350.org in many communities. If you’re really hardcore, you can join Extinction Rebellion
  • It will require an investment, but that will sort of pay for itself in the relatively short term. And so we’re now in a situation where a lot of people often think that moving into a sustainable future is going to make their lives suck. And the truth is that just isn’t the case, but that is what the companies that are profiting from the status quo would like you to think because nobody wants their lives to suck.
  • I think we need to really tell the climate story as a story of good and evil because these people have known for decades what their products were going to do. And not only did they keep producing and selling fossil fuels, they lied about it. They lied about what they knew. And they tried to do everything they could to capture our political system just to sustain their own wealth and power. I think that’s pretty bad. It’s criminal. It’s absolutely criminal.
  • some of the changes that you’re talking about, people are compelled to do because they don’t want to feel a part of the ugliness of the destruction of the planet, more than because they’re making a rational calculation about how best to use their time and what they can do that has the highest impact
  • But the fossil fuel industry, as part of their disinformation campaign, wants to make everyone feel helpless, feel overwhelmed, and wants to shift our attention away from the political action that has a chance of resolving the climate crisis to what can’t possibly work, which is focusing on our carbon footprint.
  • I just don’t think that that’s the end all, be all of it, because I do think that many people, even today, think, OK, I want the future to be stable and green and prosperous. But I don’t want to pay $1 more at the pump for a gallon of gas and may actually vote in an election on that basis
  • That said, reducing the discretionary emissions of the top 1 percent is actually a piece of the decarbonization puzzle. So, if the top 10 percent reduced their carbon emissions do
  • n to the level of the average European, which is still quite significant — eight tons a year — we would be about one-third of the way to decarbonizing our systems. So we emit as a globe about 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year. And this reduction in luxury consumption would reduce emissions by about 10 gigatons a year. So that is just a staggering number.
  • Most of the people who are listening to this podcast and nobody in this room, for sure, is responsible for causing the climate crisis. But we’re all responsible for now solving it to the best way that we can.
  • Greenpeace. And here are some social justice organizations — UPROSE and WE ACT. There are also two new organizations who are writing climate policy in a new way and lobbying on the Hill to get them passed. They are Climate Power and Evergreen Action.
  • While there is a sort of transition bump and we should have public policy that addresses it, especially for communities who are already suffering, it’s also the case that the obvious economic logic is also the obvious environmental logic here. These are no longer in tension.
  • for me, that answer is really exclusively through a political engagement and political activism because we really need to shake the whole infrastructure of the world. And the only people who are capable of doing that are the people who are in corridors of power in politics and the corporate worl
Javier E

Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...omsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

doomsday Collapse rich prepper history crisis Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
  • In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
  • Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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  • When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
  • Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
  • Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. “Lots of money and resources,” he said. “What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It’s like insurance.”
  • Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
  • How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures,
  • “When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
  • In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history.
  • A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
  • Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”
  • In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
  • I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me
  • In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
  • “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
  • The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”
  • “Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting,” he said, “and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the system that manages domain names. “Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don’t even know about, and you ask, ‘What’s the chance of this breaking in the next decade?’ Or invert it: ‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?’ ”
  • “Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution,” he told me recently.
  • “People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
  • By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”
  • many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.
  • The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled.
  • r the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said
  • Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
  • “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
  • The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book “Emergency,” told me, “We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens.”
  • Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall’s condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of “social conflict” and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them.” But, he added, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”
  • d G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
  • That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
  • If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”
  • In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year
  • Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
  • The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”
  • Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.”
  • Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City
  • In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
  • “Kiwis used to talk about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. “Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”
  • American clients have also sought strategic advice. “They’re asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?’ ”
  • In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”
  • An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. “The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle,” he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. “Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-year problem, but it’s not fifty years away, either.”
  • He said, “This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending.” He laughed, and added, “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
  • Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
  • Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
  • As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ 
  • As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”
lucieperloff

How a Stunning Lagoon in Spain Turned Into 'Green Soup' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...agoon-pollution-mar-menor.html

climate politics spain foreign

shared by lucieperloff on 27 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Tons of dead fish have washed ashore as the once-crystalline waters became choked with algae.
  • But they agree that nitrate-filled runoffs from fertilizers from nearby farms have heavily damaged the waters where oysters and sea-horses used to thrive
  • He also put some of the blame on local politicians, accusing them of long downplaying the contamination
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  • And waste produced by a nearby electricity plan and oil refinery has damaged the giant Berre lagoon in southern France.
  • When five tons of dead fish washed up in August near her house on the lagoon, she decided that she was ready to move.
  • Madrid says the responsibility lies at the local level.
  • She said at least 75 percent of the lagoon’s water contamination came from runoffs.
  • ut in September, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography published a report that rejected the idea that excessive summer heat helped kill the fish.
  • the contamination comes from water seeping into the lagoon from an aquifer in which toxic substances have accumulated over decades.
  • Laggards should get government incentives to invest in green technology rather than “stones thrown by people who have no knowledge of our modern irrigation systems,” he added.
  • “I unfortunately do think that political colors matter,” she said.
  • The lagoon was proof that “one of the major problems of Europe is the contamination of its waters by nitrates,” he said.
  • Mr. Morán said that his central government planned to use 300 million euros, or about $350 million, from the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund to protect the Mar Menor’s natural habitat and waters.
sidneybelleroche

Associated Press News - 0 views

apnews.com/...7084f4e606c10a33a15384fbe05967

shared by sidneybelleroche on 06 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Bob Dole, who overcame disabling war wounds to become a sharp-tongued Senate leader from Kansas, a Republican presidential candidate and then a symbol and celebrant of his dwindling generation of World War II veterans, died Sunday. He was 98.
  • His wife, Elizabeth Dole, said in an announcement posted on social media that he died in his sleep.
  • He shaped tax policy, foreign policy, farm and nutrition programs and rights for the disabled, enshrining protections against discrimination in employment, education and public services in the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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  • Dole announced in February 2021 that he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. During his 36-year career on Capitol Hill, Dole became one of the most influential legislators and party leaders in the Senate
  • Dole could be merciless with his rivals, whether Democrat or Republican.
  • Long gone from Kansas, Dole made his life in the capital, at the center of power and then in its shadow upon his retirement, living all the while at the storied Watergate complex.
  • He tried three times to become president. The last was in 1996, when he won the Republican nomination only to see President Bill Clinton reelected.
  • He sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1980 and 1988 and was the 1976 GOP vice presidential candidate on the losing ticket with President Gerald Ford.
  • Today’s accessible government offices and national parks, sidewalk ramps and the sign-language interpreters at official local events are just some of the more visible hallmarks of his legacy and that of the fellow lawmakers he rounded up for that sweeping civil rights legislation 30 years ago.
  • But when Bush died in December 2018, old rivalries were forgotten as Dole appeared before Bush’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda. As an aide lifted him from his wheelchair, Dole slowly steadied himself and saluted his one-time nemesis with his left hand, his chin quivering.
  • For all of his bare-knuckle ways, he was a deep believer in the Senate as an institution and commanded respect and even affection from many Democrats. Just days after Dole announced his dire cancer diagnosis, President Joe Biden visited him at his home to wish him well. The White House said the two were close friends from their days in the Senate.
  • Biden ordered that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff at the White House and all public buildings and grounds until sunset Thursday.
  • He served as a committee chairman, majority leader and minority leader in the Senate during the 1980s and ’90s. Altogether, he was the Republicans’ leader in the Senate for nearly 11½ years, a record until Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell broke it in 2018.
  • After Republicans won Senate control, Dole became chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee and won acclaim from deficit hawks and others for his handling of a 1982 tax bill, in which he persuaded Ronald Reagan’s White House to go along with increasing revenues by $100 billion to ease the federal budget deficit.
  • Relegated to private life, Dole became an elder statesman who helped Clinton get a chemical-weapons treaty passed.
  • He also tended his wife’s political ambitions. Elizabeth Dole ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, then served a term as senator from North Carolina.
lucieperloff

Oil Prices Stay High as Output From OPEC and Others Falls Behind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oil-prices-opec.html

international climate crisis us politics

shared by lucieperloff on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The sharp pullback came with an implicit promise that as factories reopened and planes returned to the air, the oil industry would revive, too, gradually scaling up production to help economies return to prepandemic health.
  • Members of the cartel OPEC Plus, which agreed to cut output by about 10 million barrels a day in early 2020, are routinely falling well short of their rising monthly production targets.
  • Production in the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, has also been slow to recover from its one-million-barrel-a-day plummet in 2020, as companies and investors are wary of committing money amid climate change concerns and volatile prices.
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  • A prolonged period when more oil has been consumed than pumped has drained tank farms to low levels. Investment in new drilling for new oil has also fallen to multiyear lows, though it is expected to pick up this year. At the same time, demand is expected to grow strongly, reaching prepandemic levels this year.
  • Energy Aspects forecasts that the deficit will reach just over one million barrels a day this month, or 1 percent of world supplies, and will probably increase later in the year.
  • Following a schedule agreed to in July, the group plans to raise the overall output by 400,000 barrels a day each month, even though they are missing the targets.
  • Nigeria’s industry is plagued by damage to infrastructure caused by oil thieves and others, problems that have worsened in recent months, according to the industry.
  • Kamel al-Harami, a Kuwaiti analyst, said that the domestic industry “does not have the experience and the expertise to deal with old and aged oil fields” but that public opinion is resistant to bringing in international companies.
  • A variety of factors are causing production in some countries to fall short, including political turmoil, outmoded regulatory regimes and pressures on international oil companies to rethink their investments so as to bolster profits and reduce carbon emissions. That shift could leave developing countries that depend on oil income out in the cold.
  • Analysts say Saudi officials don’t want to unilaterally increase output and risk busting up the arrangement with other producers that gives them so much control.
lucieperloff

Heavy Rains in India and Nepal Kill Dozens - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-nepal-floods-landslides.html

environment global foreign farming climate

shared by lucieperloff on 21 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Unseasonably heavy rainfall has destroyed crops, washed away bridges and killed dozens of people across India and Nepal in a reminder of the devastation caused by a changing climate.
  • across the subcontinent, reaching the Himalayas in Nepal and spreading all the way down to the coastal ravines of India’s southwestern peninsula.
  • India and its neighbors have struggled to square development projects intended to lift millions of people out of poverty with the risks of a changing climate.
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  • Meteorologists were not expecting the catastrophic rainfall that has deluged India and Nepal in recent days.
  • Torrential rains also soaked southern India, triggering flash floods and landslides in the state of Kerala.
  • This week, officials in Kerala opened overflowing dams, the first time state officials had made such a move since catastrophic flooding killed more than 400 people in 2018.
  • Rice paddy that was ready for harvest was damaged in the rain, causing Nepal’s farmers to despair and prompting fears of a food crisis in one of the world’s poorest countries.
  • “Rainfalls in October were reported in the past, too, but not to this intensity,” said Ajaya Dixit, an expert on climate change vulnerability in Nepal. “Climate change is real, and it is happening.”
criscimagnael

Dubai restaurant using tech to stop seafood fraud - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • If you order snapper at a restaurant, you probably expect to be served snapper. But multiple reports over the last decade say there's a strong chance you'll be getting a lower-value fish.
  • Consumers could be paying double the price for wild-caught salmon, but being served the farmed equivalent. Or they may think they're eating fresh-off-the-boat lobster, which has in reality been frozen for months.
  • Tackling fish fraudRead MoreDiners ordering fish at Rockfish, a beachfront Italian restaurant, receive a QR code with their order.
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  • "Seafood is an industry that is wrought with not necessarily fraud but opacity or darkness within the supply chain," says the company's CEO and co-founder Sean Dennis."It is very difficult for buyers to know where they're getting their seafood from," he adds.
  • The code links to a web page that tells them when and where their fish was caught, how it was transported, and provides necessary certifications to verify it was sustainably sourced.
  • he kitchen's executive sous chef Marco Acquaroli says there is a lot of "fake product or fake naming" on menus around the world. "Here we are looking for freshness, quality, sustainability and traceability."
  • Because Seafood Souq tracks every point on the supply chain, Dennis says it can provide accurate data. "Traceability ... really addresses the inefficiencies within the supply chain," he says.
  • "We're very happy now," says Acquaroli. "Our guests (are) 100% sure where the fish was in the last 24 hours."
woodlu

As nuclear talks resume, Iran is rattled by protests over water | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21806553

economics policy history crisis

shared by woodlu on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • On November 29th diplomats gathered for yet more negotiations meant to salvage the nuclear deal that Iran signed with six world powers in 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
  • The JCPOA set limits on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of many international economic sanctions.
  • The JCPOA allows Iran to enrich uranium to 3.67% purity. It breached that limit in 2019 and is exceeding it to an ever greater degree
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  • It has also started turning gaseous uranium into solid metal, a key step in bomb-making. On December 1st the agency reported that Iran had begun installing advanced centrifuges and spinning uranium up to 20% at Fordow, a fortified site dug into a mountain where the JCPOA forbids any enrichment.
  • UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency reported in November that Iran had stockpiled more than 2,300kg of enriched uranium, 11 times the level permitted in the deal.
  • Earlier this year it enriched uranium up to 60%, a level that has no civilian use and is a whisker from weapons-grade.
  • Before this round of talks, Iran indicated it would not discuss its own violations, only America’s. It wants an apology for Mr Trump’s withdrawal, along with compensation and a promise that it will not happen again.
  • America cannot provide such a guarantee—nor, for that matter, can the deal’s other signatories, including Iran itself.
  • Even if forbidden work is halted, Iran has gained valuable know-how that cannot be forgotten. American officials say time is short to restore the deal, but refuse to say what would constitute an irreparable step on Iran’s part.
  • November 29th that Iran had at last agreed to discuss not only sanctions but also its own activities.
  • America, they argue, will preserve non-nuclear sanctions that hobble Iran’s economy. They would rather shun the West, pursue trade with China and focus on building a so-called “resistance economy” at home.
  • Farmers started the demonstration, angry about a long drought that has ruined their livelihoods. The government, they said, has done little to help.
  • Water shortages are common in Iran. The UN says that available water per person has dropped by 28% over the past three decades, to 1,675 cubic metres a year, a level it defines as “water stress”.
  • The drought is not directly linked to sanctions: it stems from decades of mismanagement, water-intensive farming and climate change.
  • Yet even a more attentive government would find it hard to fix such problems while under sanctions that limit access to both foreign technology and hard currency.
  • The rial has lost 86% of its value in the past five years. Though inflation eased last month, it is still running at 44% a year. Prices for staple foods like milk, bread and eggs are rising even faster.
  • In recent years there have been frequent protests over living conditions, despite a sometimes brutal crackdown by the authorities.
Javier E

Rift Between Wyden and Son Shows the Challenge of Taxing the Ultrarich - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taxing-the-rich.html

tax rich billionaire politics policy lobbying

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • “Many millionaires perhaps may consider themselves tomorrow’s billionaires.”
  • The billionaire class has long leaned on farmers and ranchers to beat back efforts to tax inheritances more heavily. This year, the tactic worked to kill a proposal from Mr. Biden that would have set the value of inherited assets at their original purchase price, not their worth at the time of the original owner’s death.
  • “Not only does it distort discussion of incredibly important policy,” he said, “it ends up advancing the interest of this very small number of people and industries that have a chokehold on public policy in Washington.”
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  • Dennis Kelleher, who heads Better Markets, a group that works against income inequality, said the marshaling of little guys to protect the big guys “happens all the time.” Small-business owners protest estate taxes they will never pay. Community banks protest regulations aimed at the large banks that are their biggest competitors. Minimum-wage workers are somehow framed as the targets for I.R.S. enforcement proposals aimed at the ultrarich.
  • That “step up” in the value of an inherited asset means that its unrealized gains over a lifetime are often never taxed, a boon to wealthy heirs, protected in Washington by those considered politically untouchable.
  • Two former Democratic senators from rural states, Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, lobbied against the Biden proposal and quickly won over Senator Jon Tester, the current Democrat from Montana, who killed it in October in the name of “our family farms, ranches and small businesses.”
Javier E

Iraq's ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change | Iraq | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...climate-change-salt-sandstorms

climate change erosion archaeology sites history culture destruction

shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Some of the world’s most ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change, as rising concentrations of salt in Iraq eat away at mud brick and more frequent sandstorms erode ancient wonders.
  • Iraq is known as the cradle of civilisation. It was here that agriculture was born, some of the world’s oldest cities were built, such as the Sumerian capital Ur, and one of the first writing systems was developed – cuneiform. The country has “tens of thousands of sites from the Palaeolithic through Islamic eras”, explained Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Cambridge.
  • Damage to sites such as the legendary Babylon “will leave gaps in our knowledge of human evolution, of the development of early cities, of the management of empires, and of the dynamic changes in the political landscape of the Islamic era”,
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  • Salt in the soil can aid archaeologists in some circumstances, but the same mineral can also be destructive, and is destroying heritage sites, according to the geoarchaeologist Jaafar Jotheri, who described salt as “aggressive … it will destroy the site – destroy the bricks, destroy the cuneiform tablets, destroy everything”.
  • The destructive power of salt is increasing as concentrations rise amid water shortages caused by dams built upstream by Turkey and Iran, and years of mismanagement of water resources and agriculture within Iraq.
  • “The salinity in Shatt al-Arab river started to increase from the 90s,” said Ahmad N A Hamdan, a civil engineer who studies the quality of the water in Iraq’s rivers. In his observations, the Shatt al-Arab – formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates - annually tests poor or very poor quality, especially in 2018, which he called a “crisis” year when brackish water sent at least 118,000 people to hospital in southern Basra province during a drought.
  • The climate crisis is adding to the problem. Iraq is getting hotter and dryer. The United Nations estimates that mean annual temperatures will rise by 2C by 2050 with more days of extreme temperatures of over 50C, while rainfall will drop by as much as 17% during the rainy season and the number of sand and dust storms will more than double from 120 per year to 300. Meanwhile, rising seawater is pushing a wedge of salt up into Iraq and in less than 30 years, parts of southern Iraq could be under water.
  • “Imagine the next 10 years, most of our sites will be under saline water,” said Jotheri, a professor of archaeology at Al-Qadisiyah University and co-director of the Iraqi-British Nahrein Network researching Iraqi heritage. He started to notice damage from salt at historic sites about a decade ago.
  • One spot suffering significant damage is Unesco-recognised Babylon, the capital of the Babylonian Empire, where a salty sheen coats 2,600-year-old mud bricks. In the Temple of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, the base of the walls are crumbling. In the depths of the thick wall, salt accumulates until it crystallises, cracking the bricks and causing them to break apart.
  • Other sites that have been affected are Samarra, the Islamic-era capital with its spiral minaret that is being eroded by sandstorms, and Umm al-Aqarib with its White Temple, palace and cemetery that are being swallowed up by the desert.
  • This year, Iraq lost a piece of its cultural heritage. On the edge of the desert, 150km south of Babylon, is a bed of salt that was once Sawa Lake. The spring-fed water was home to at least 31 species of bird, including the grey heron and the near-threatened ferruginous duck. Now, it is completely dry because of overuse of water by surrounding farms and climate change. Lack of enforcement of regulations over groundwater use means farmers can freely drill wells and plant wheat fields that are an eruption of lush green in the dusty desert landscape.
  • “When I was a child I remembered that Sawa Lake was a big lake, a large lake. It looked like the sea. But now it’s gone. Totally gone. We don’t have any lake any more,” said Jotheri.
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