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katyshannon

U.S. B-52 joins flyover after North Korea's bomb claim - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Days after North Korea claimed it tested a hydrogen bomb, the United States responded with a display of military might on the Korean Peninsula.
  • A B-52 bomber jet from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam flew over Osan, South Korea, on Sunday "in response to a recent nuclear test by North Korea," United States Pacific Command said.
  • "This was a demonstration of the ironclad U.S. commitment to our allies in South Korea, in Japan, and to the defense of the American homeland," said PACOM Commander Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr.
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  • The B-52 was flanked by South Korean F-15 fighter jets and U.S. F-16 fighter jets.
  • "They absolutely took notice," CNN's Will Ripley reported from the North Korean capital. "A lot of North Korean military commanders find U.S. bombers especially threatening, given the destruction here in Pyongyang during the Korean War, when much of the city was flattened," Ripley said.
  • The show of solidarity has caught the attention -- and likely the ire -- of North Korea.
  • The show of solidarity between the U.S. and South Korea came after Seoul reactivated loudspeakers broadcasting propaganda into North Korea near the heavily fortified border between the countries.Pyongyang considers the broadcasts tantamount to an act of war, and in the past has responded to them with artillery fire.
  • North Korea bragged about the "spectacular success" of its first hydrogen bomb test on Wednesday. But outside the hermit kingdom, the claims have been met with skepticism.
  • The United States, South Korea, Japan and China have been testing for airborne or ground radiation in the region, but say they haven't found any evidence supporting the claim of an H-bomb test.Wednesday's test yielded a blast of a similar magnitude to a previous North Korean test in 2013, said Martin Navias, a military expert at King's College London.
  • "We won't know for another few days or weeks whether this was (a hydrogen bomb)," he said. "It doesn't look like one. ... One would have expected [the power] to be greater if it was an H-bomb."One analyst in Seoul cast doubt on whether enough material could be collected to ever find out definitively what Pyongyang has tested.
Javier E

The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • This go-it-alone mentality works against the ways that, historically, workers have improved their lot. It encourages workers to see unions and government as flawed institutions that coddle the undeserving, rather than as useful, if imperfect, means of raising the relative prospects of all workers.
  • It also makes it more likely that white workers will direct their frustration toward racial and ethnic minorities, economic scapegoats who are dismissed as freeloaders unworthy of help—in a recent survey, 64 percent of Trump voters (not all of whom, of course, are part of the white working class) agreed that “average Americans” had gotten less they they deserved, but this figure dropped to 12 percent when that phrase was replaced with “blacks.” (Among Clinton voters, the figure stayed steady at 57 percent for both phrases.
  • This is one reason that enacting good policies is, while important, not enough to address economic inequality. What’s needed as well is a broader revision of a culture that makes those who struggle feel like losers.
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  • One explanation for why so many come to that conclusion in the first place has to do with the widening of the gulf between America’s coasts and the region in between them
  • Cities that can entice well-educated professionals are booming, even as “flyover” communities have largely seen good-paying factory work automated or shipped overseas, replaced to a large extent with insecure jobs: Walmart greeters, independent-contractor truck drivers, and the like.
  • a college degree has become the true mark of individual success in America—the sort of white-picket-fence fantasy that drives people well into their elder years to head back to school
  • the white working class that emerged in the 19th century—stitched together from long-combative European ethnic groups—strived to set themselves apart from African Americans, Chinese, and other vilified “indispensable enemies,” and build, by contrast (at least in their view), a sense of workingman pride.
  • this last election was a reminder that white male resentment of “nasty” women and “uppity” racial and other minorities remains strong.
  • That said, many Americans with more stable, better-paid jobs have blind spots of their own. For all of their professed open-mindedness in other areas, millions of the well-educated and well-off who live in or near big cities tend to endorse the notion, explicitly or implicitly, that education determines a person’s value
  • white voters from hard-hit rural areas and hollowed-out industrial towns have turned away from a Democratic Party that has offered them little in the way of hope and inspiration and much in the way of disdain and blame.
  • such a fervent belief in the transformative power of education also implies that a lack of it amounts to personal failure—being a “stupid” person
  • As much as both liberals and conservatives have touted education as a means of attaining social mobility, economic trends suggest that this strategy has limits, especially in its ability to do anything about the country’s rapidly growing inequalities
  • Well into the 21st century, two-thirds of Americans age 25 and over do not have a bachelor’s degree. The labor market has become more polarized, as highly paid jobs for workers with middling levels of education and skill dwindle away.
  • even some workers I spoke to—all former union members—said they felt that people without a good education did not deserve to make a good living.
  • The rules of meritocracy that these blue-collar workers say they admire barely apply to the very top levels of the economy. Groups of elite workers—professionals, managers, financial workers, tenured professors—continue to wall themselves off from competition. They still organize collectively, through lobbying, credentialing, licensing, and other strategies. But fewer ordinary workers have the same ability to do so
  • What has emerged in the new economy, then, is a stunted meritocracy: meritocracy for you, but not for me
  • One of the few things he could really depend on was his church. He volunteered on their Sunday-school bus, leading the kids in singing songs. “It helps to be around young people,” he said. For many of the jobless workers I interviewed, religion and tradition provided a sense of community and a feeling that their lives had purpose.
  • However exaggerated by stereotypes, the urbane, urban values of the well-educated professional class, with its postmodern cultural relativism and its rejection of old dogmas, are not attractive alternatives to what the working class has long relied on as a source of solace.
  • In the absence of other sources of meaning, Americans are left with meritocracy, a game of status and success, along with the often ruthless competition it engenders. And the consequence of a perspective of self-reliance—Americans, compared to people in other countries, hold a particularly strong belief that people succeed through their own hard work—is a sense that those who fail are somehow inferior
  • The concept of grace comes from the Christian teaching that everyone, not just the deserving, is saved by God’s grace. Grace in the broader sense that I (an agnostic) am using, however, can be both secular and religious. In the simplest terms, it is about refusing to divide the world into camps of deserving and undeserving, as those on both the right and left are wont to do
  • It rejects an obsession with excusing nothing, with measuring and judging the worth of people based on everything from a spotty résumé to an offensive comment.
  • Unlike an egalitarian viewpoint focused on measuring and leveling inequalities, grace rejects categories of right and wrong, just and unjust, and offers neither retribution nor restitution, but forgiveness.
  • With a perspective of grace, it becomes clearer that America, the wealthiest of nations, possesses enough prosperity to provide adequately for all. It becomes easier to part with one’s hard-won treasure in order to pull others up, even if those being helped seem “undeserving”—a label that today serves as a justification for opposing the sharing of wealth on the grounds that it is a greedy plea from the resentful, idle, and envious.
  • ignorance shouldn’t be considered an irremediable sin. Yet many of the liberal, affluent, and college-educated too often reduce the beliefs of a significant segment of the population to a mash of evil and delusion
  • From gripes about the backwardness and boredom of small-town America to jokes about “rednecks” and “white trash” that are still acceptable to say in polite company, it’s no wonder that the white working class believes that others look down on them. That’s not to say their situation is worse than that of the black and Latino working classes—it’s to say that where exactly they fit in the hierarchy of oppression is a question that leads nowhere, given how much all these groups have struggled in recent decades.
  • While there are no simple explanations for the desperation and anger visible in many predominantly white working-class communities, perhaps the most astute and original diagnosis came from the rabbi and activist Michael Lerner, who, in assessing Donald Trump’s victory, looked from a broader vantage point than most. Underneath the populist ire, he wrote, was a suffering “rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.”
  • That cuts right to it. The modern economy privileges the well-educated and highly-skilled, while giving them an excuse to denigrate the people at the bottom (both white and nonwhite) as lazy, untalented, uneducated, and unsophisticated.
  • many well-off Americans from across the political spectrum scorn the white working class in particular for holding onto religious superstitions and politically incorrect views, and pity them for working lousy jobs at dollar stores and fast-food restaurants that the better-off rarely set foot in
  • This system of categorizing Americans—the logical extension of life in what can be called an extreme meritocracy—can be pernicious: The culture holds up those who succeed as examples, however anecdotal, that everyone can make it in America. Meanwhile, those who fail attract disdain and indifference from the better-off, their low status all the more painful because it is regarded as deserved.
  • the shame of low status afflicts not just the unemployed, but also the underemployed. Their days are no longer filled with the dignified, if exhausting, work of making real things.
  • For less educated workers (of all races) who have struggled for months or years to get another job, failure is a source of deep shame and a reason for self-blame. Without the right markers of merit—a diploma, marketable skills, a good job—they are “scrubs” who don’t deserve romantic partners, “takers” living parasitically off the government, “losers” who won’t amount to anything
  • Even those who consider themselves lucky to have jobs can feel a sense of despair, seeing how poorly they stand relative to others, or how much their communities have unraveled, or how dim their children’s future seems to be: Research shows that people judge how well they’re doing through constant comparisons, and by these personal metrics they are hurting, whatever the national unemployment rate may be.
Javier E

There's a 'poisonous dynamic among white people' over who's to blame for racism - The W... - 0 views

  • “White people who are not privileged feel belittled. They feel stereotyped. They feel openly ridiculed and they are really, really angry because of what elite white people are doing to them,”
  • “Now, because of this poisonous dynamic among white people, guess who’s paying the price?”
  • “Working-class whites, whose claims to privilege rest on morality and hard work, stereotype black people by conflating hard living and race,” she notes. “Professional-class whites, whose claims to privilege rest on merit, stereotype black people as less competent than whites.”
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  • the working-class admire the super rich they see on television but can’t stand the professionals they interact with everyday. Part of it has to do with the glib condescension of the elite. “We call them rednecks with plumber’s butt in flyover states. And then they get offended,” Williams said. “Gee, why would that be? Because we’re insulting them.”
Javier E

Trump's Fate 2018 & 2020: Odds Favor Trump | National Review - 0 views

  • Voters may say that they find Trump puerile and repellent while in private enjoying that he is as petty as they are and hits back at those who long ago needed a smack. That disconnect could explain why polls are now less relevant and why those who voted for Trump can fudge and mislead about their politics more than Trump himself does. Trump’s take-no-prisoners style may serve some people’s vicarious need to push back against the progressive trajectory of the country, in a way that voting for a Cruz or a Rubio in the primary did not.
  • We pundits talk about being “presidential” and “elevating the office” over the lowest common denominator of the mob. Perhaps. But what if after $20 trillion in debt, unwon wars in the Middle East, the 2008 meltdown, nuclear missiles 20 minutes from Portland and San Diego, and a country without borders and torn apart by race, the proverbial people do not want an aspirational president who leads only to more such lofty aspirations? What if they instead prefer someone who is in some sense unpresidential or at least anti-presidential, if being status quo “presidential” got us where we are?
  • Stylistically or politically, what exactly would acting unpresidential these days consist of — politicizing the IRS, allowing the VA to decay, surveilling, unmasking, and leaking communications of U.S. citizens, or inviting into the White House misogynistic and profane rappers whose lyrics are about hating the police?
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  • it may be that it was not just Trump’s conservative populist message but also Trump himself, the unique populist loudmouth messenger, who won the Electoral College. Trump prevailed not only because he appealed to the concerns of flyover country, but also because he voiced these concerns in a way that no other Republican would have.
  • In other words, the very manner in which Trump agonizes our elite is also precisely what may still energize half the country — the half that lives supposedly nowhere but in electoral terms is very much somewhere.
blythewallick

6 Takeaways From the January 2020 Democratic Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There was little incentive to go on the attack.
  • It’s a reflection of the muddled state of the race. The candidates have all made a calculation that being the aggressor in any interpersonal conflict would only lead to increasing their unfavorable ratings — or falling down Iowa caucusgoers’ second-choice lists, a critical element because supporters of candidates who don’t receive 15 percent support will be free to back someone else.
  • The Sanders-Warren clash fell flat — until after the debate.
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  • Ms. Warren did highlight her status as the top-polling female contender at several points in the debate, ending her closing statement with a reference to the possibility of electing the first woman president.
  • Warren makes her electability pitch.
  • One of Ms. Warren’s biggest political obstacles is the perception among some voters that she would face daunting challenges in a general election — both thanks to her boldly progressive outlook, and to societal sexism that many Democrats believe damaged Mrs. Clinton in 2016. @charset "UTF-8"; /*********************** B A S E S T Y L E S ************************/ /************************************* T Y P E : C L A S S M I X I N S **************************************/ /* Headline */ /* Leadin */ /* Byline */ /* Dateline */ /* Alert */ /* Subhed */ /* Body */ /* Caption */ /* Leadin */ /* Credit */ /* Label */ /********** S I Z E S ***********/ /******************** T Y P O G R A P H Y *********************/ .g-headline, .interactive-heading, .g-subhed { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; } .g-alert, .g-alert.g-body, .g-alert_link, .g-byline, .g-caption, .g-caption_bold, .g-caption_heading, .g-chart, .g-credit, .g-credit_bullet, .g-dateline, .g-label, .g-label_white, .g-leadin, #interactive-leadin, .g-refer, .g-refer.g-body, .g-table-text { font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; 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  • And she invoked her 2012 victory over then-Senator Scott P. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, as she declared herself “the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican anytime in the past 30 years.”
  • Klobuchar throws punches.
  • Yet while she described herself as a winner tethered to the Midwest, somebody whose friends and neighbors hail from flyover country, she didn’t come out of Tuesday’s debate with any significant headlines of her own.
  • The only vetting of Buttigieg came from the moderator Abby Phillip on race.
  • Mr. Buttigieg deftly dodged by suggesting that the black voters who “know me best” — in his native South Bend — chose him twice to lead the city. And he cited recent endorsements from Representative Anthony Brown of Maryland and Mayor Quentin Hart of Waterloo, Iowa, who this week became the two most prominent African-American elected officials to back him.
  • Biden avoids attacks.
  • Mr. Biden, who flew under the radar particularly at the last debate, often stayed in his comfort zones — discussing foreign policy and health care — and he was not the center of the kind of memorable exchanges that had dealt his campaign blows earlier in the race.
aidenborst

He Already Saw the Election as Good vs. Evil. Then His Tractor Burned. - The New York T... - 0 views

  • It was even possible to tell his political outlook from across a field, from the two “Trump 2020” flags that he had hoisted above his combine — until a couple of weeks ago, when a fire destroyed much of his farm equipment.
  • Though it is unclear how the fire started, the news about it startled a community that believes it shares a common value system. The fact that one vehicle was outfitted with Trump flags has led some residents and some of the more than 1,700 people who commented on Mr. Rempel’s Facebook post about the blaze to declare the fire politically motivated.
  • In Henderson, and many places like it, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign pitch that he is fighting for the soul of the nation simply doesn’t resonate. People here would view its soul as being in jeopardy if he triumphed.
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  • “Always look where I am,” a man coached a young girl in coveralls, telling her to stay close as they held hands and wove through the Omaha crowd waiting for Mr. Trump. “But these are Trump supporters. You don’t have to worry.”
  • It’s what made the phone call Mr. Rempel received about two weeks ago from fire officials as he and his wife were readying their children for school all the more shocking. His farm equipment was in flames. The combine, a tractor and two semitrailer trucks parked in a corn field south of town apparently had been set on fire
  • “I said, ‘No, that’s not possible,’” Mr. Rempel, a fourth-generation farmer, recalled, describing his disbelief that his equipment had been destroyed and his corn harvest put in jeopardy.
  • Nearly four years ago, in his election night victory speech, Mr. Trump pledged to fight for the “hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their family.”“The forgotten men and women of our country,” he promised back then, “will be forgotten no longer.”
  • For his part, Mr. Rempel refuses to speculate about a motive, but here in Henderson, a certain fear is being whispered: The fire-starters are aligned with antifa, coming from the cities to attack their way of life.
  • Like most other states, Nebraska is cleaved by an urban-rural divide. Mr. Trump won overwhelming support from the state as a whole. But people in Nebraska’s two major cities tend to vote more liberally than those in rural areas. Mr. Trump won in Omaha’s Second Congressional District in 2016, but Barack Obama won in 2008. The district’s winner picks up a single electoral vote in a state that, unlike most others, splits its votes, which could play a pivotal role in a close election.
  • Ms. Goossen and other supporters of Mr. Trump speak with reverence about the president’s plain talk, how he isn’t a typical pontificating politician, how he, a real estate mogul from New York City, can relate to all strata of society.
  • The president has been on job sites and spoken to workers “hauling drywall and raising steel,” said Blake Collingsworth, who runs a home-building business in Lincoln.
  • “I love being in flyover country. I love it. I embrace it,” Mr. Rempel said, walking through his rows of corn and fretting over every bent stalk. “I lived in Omaha. Nobody knew who you were. You could do whatever you wanted. You could go steal a car and run into a post and run away and nobody cares.”
peterconnelly

Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee Celebrates Her 70 years on the Throne - The New York... - 0 views

  • LONDON — With columns of Scots and Irish guards, throngs of Union Jack-clad admirers and waves of aircraft roaring overhead, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 70 years on the throne Thursday, earning tributes from world leaders and ordinary people for one of history’s great acts of constancy.
  • “You are the golden thread that binds our two countries, the proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations,” said President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in English in a videotaped greeting.
  • It was only the first of four days of festivities, known collectively as the queen’s Platinum Jubilee. But it was perhaps the grandest, featuring a military parade with 1,200 officers and soldiers from the Household Division, hundreds of Army musicians, 240 horses, a 41-gun salute and a 70-aircraft flyover.
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  • In the ensuing decades, the queen has become an irreplaceable figure in Britain, central to its self-identity.
  • That the queen made it to this Platinum Jubilee at all was far from given. She contracted the coronavirus in February and has talked about how the ordeal left her exhausted. She lost her husband, Prince Philip, last year, and her fragile health has forced her to cancel multiple public appearances, including two major events on the royal calendar: a remembrance service for the war dead and the state opening of Parliament.
  • “I like democracies, but I have a fascination with monarchical displays of power,” said Nichola Persic, an Italian exchange student who left his college in Canterbury, England, at dawn to stake out a position along the parade route. “And it’s nice to be a part of something people will remember.”
  • Strictly speaking, Elizabeth has not yet set the longevity record for any monarch.
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