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aidenborst

Stocks week ahead: Saying goodbye to a wild 2020 - CNN - 0 views

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

Politics US history crisis economics stocks stock-market rebuild

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Dow and the S&P 500 ended the year at record highs and the Nasdaq Composite logged its best performance since 2009 with a whopping 43.6% jump. Overall, the indexes registered gains for the second year in a row.
  • Nobody could have predicted the market mayhem of 2020. Stocks hit record highs at the start of the year, before worries about the coronavirus pandemic — first abroad and then closer to home — pushed US markets into a spiral in February and March. The Dow routinely set new records for worst one-day point drops in history, and the New York Stocks Exchange had to suspend trading in the S&P 500 multiple times as the selloff triggered circuit breakers.
  • But in the months that followed, the market recovered — and faster than many had expected.
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  • Some of the year's biggest winners are investors who closed their eyes and muffled their ears during the pandemic selloff and held onto their stocks. By the end of the year, their portfolio balances were looking pretty good
  • "This year was a year with a lot of reminders for investors: number one, don't overreact," Leo Grohowski, chief investment officer at BNY Wealth Management, told CNN Business.close dialogBefore Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets Open
  • The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street will likely be a topic that follows us into the New Year.
  • The US economy is operating at 82% of where it was in early March, according to the Back-to-Normal Index from Moody's Analytics and CNN Business.
Javier E

After Federalist No. 10 | National Affairs - 0 views

nationalaffairs.com/...after-federalist-no-10

virtue constitution madison institutions democracy survival history crisis Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Federalist No. 10 pertains to the orientation of personal appetites toward public ends, which include both the common good and private rights. The essay recognizes that these appetites cannot be conquered, but they can be conditioned.
  • Madison's solution to the problem of faction — a solution he confines to the four corners of majority rule — is to place majorities in circumstances that encourage deliberation and thus defuse passion.
  • this solution does not depend on any specific constitutional mechanism:
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  • Any republic deployed across an extended territory should be relatively free of faction, at least in the aggregate.
  • Yet Madison's solution depends on certain assumptions. Federalist No. 10 assumes politics will occur at a leisurely pace. The regime Madison foresees is relatively passive, not an active manipulator of economic arrangements. And he is able to take for granted a reasonably broad consensus as to the existence if not the content of the public good.
  • These assumptions are now collapsing under the weight of positive government and the velocity of our political life.
  • Given the centrality of Federalist No. 10 to the American constitutional canon, this collapse demands a reckoning. If a pillar of our order is crumbling, something must replace it.
  • That challenge may call for a greater emphasis on the sources of civic virtue and on the means of sustaining it.
  • The possibility that virtue might be coded into the essay is evident at its most elemental level: Federalist No. 10's definition of a faction as a group "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."
  • this definition hinges on an objective understanding of the public good; one cannot comprehend Madison from the perspective of contemporary relativism.
  • Its reader must be committed to a normative concept of the good and occupy a polity in which it is possible for such a concept to be broadly shared.
  • [T]hose who do not believe in an objective moral order cannot 'enter' Madison's system." Thus, belief in such an order, even amid disputes as to its content, constitutes a first unstated assumption of Federalist No. 10.
  • Madison presents a series of choices, repeatedly eliminating one, then bifurcating the other in turn, and eliminating again until he arrives at his solution. One can remove the causes of factions or control their effects. The causes cannot be removed because the propensity to disagree is "sown in the nature of man," arising particularly from the fact that man is "fallible" and his "opinions and his passions...have a reciprocal influence on each other."
  • Precisely because this influence arises from the link between "reason" and "self-love," the latter of which distorts the former, property accounts for "the most common and durable source of factions," the key being its durability.
  • Whereas David Hume's analysis of parties said that those based on self-interest were the most excusable while those based on passions were the most dangerous, Madison warns of the reverse. Those rooted in emotion — including "an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power" — are the least worrisome precisely because they are based on passions, which Madison believes to be transient.
  • A second assumption of Federalist No. 10 is consequently that irrational passions, which Madison understands to be those not based on interest, are inherently unsustainable and thus are naturally fleeting.
  • Having dismissed minority factions, Madison turns his attention to abusive majorities.
  • if a group is impelled by ill motives, the intrinsic conditions of an extended republic will make it difficult for it to become a majority.
  • A third assumption, then, is that both geographic and constitutional distance will permit the passions to dissipate before their translation into policy.
  • Finally, Madison cautions Jefferson in correspondence about a month before Federalist No. 10's publication that the extended-republic theory "can only hold within a sphere of a mean extent. As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may be too easily formed agst. the weaker party; so in too extensive a one, a defensive concert may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those entrusted with the administration."
  • To recapitulate, the assumptions are as follows: The people will share a belief in the existence of an objective moral order, even if they dispute its content; passions, especially when they pertain to attachments or aversions to political leaders, will be unsustainable; government will not dictate the distribution of small economic advantages; geographic and constitutional distance will operate to dissipate passions; and, finally, the territory will not be so large that public opinion cannot form.
  • none of them stands in a form that would be recognizable to Madison today.
  • ASSUMPTIONS UNDONE
  • It is almost universally acknowledged that moral relativism is ascendant in contemporary American society.
  • The question, rather, is whether the foundational assumptions of Federalist No. 10 can withstand the pressure of contemporary communications technology. There is reason to believe they cannot.
  • There is a balance to be struck: Communication is useful insofar as it makes the "mean extent" that was Madison's final assumption larger by enabling the formation of a "defensive concert" through the cultivation of public consensus against an abusive regime. But on Madison's account, the returns on rapid communication should diminish beyond this point because there will be no space in which passions can calm before impulse and decision converge.
  • what is clear is that there are enough opinions dividing the country that any project attempting to form a coherent public will seems doomed.
  • The Madisonian impulse is to look first for institutional solutions that can discipline interest groups. Constitutional mechanisms like judicial review, then, might be used to inhibit factions. But judicial review can be done well or poorly.
  • The empirical conditions not merely of an extensive republic but of 18th-century reality aided in Madison's effort. The deliberate pace of communication did not require an institutional midwife. It was a fact of life. It need hardly be said that, 230 years after the essay's November 1787 publication, this condition no longer obtains. The question is what replaces it.
  • The answer is that the converse of each assumption on which Federalist No. 10 relies is a restraining virtue.
  • If Federalist No. 10 assumes at least consensus as to the existence of an objective morality, pure moral relativism must be challenged.
  • If the immediate translation of preferences into policy is possible but detrimental, patience must intervene. I
  • If technology has erased the constitutional distance between officeholders and constituents, self-restraint and deference may be required.
  • If it has also shrunk attention spans to 140 characters, an ethic of public spiritedness will have to expand them.
  • What unites these is civic virtue, and thus the American regime must now get serious about its recovery
  • He wrote in Federalist No. 55: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.
  • At Virginia's ratifying convention, similarly, Madison noted the propensity to assume either the worst or the best from politicians. He replied:
  • But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
  • Still, the traditional means of inculcating virtue — the family and institutions such as local schools — are themselves under pressure or subject to political capture.
  • A national effort to instill civic virtue would almost certainly careen into the kind of politicization that has been witnessed in Education Department history standards and the like.
  • Consequently, subsidiarity, the diffusion of authority to the most local possible level, would be vital to any effective effort to revive civic virtue. That is, it could not be uniform or imposed from on high. Political leaders could help in cultivating an awareness of its necessity, but not in dictating its precise terms.
  • The first part of this combination is moral virtue, which the ethic of subsidiarity teaches is likelier to come from the home than from school, and from life lessons than from textbooks.
  • Students as early as elementary school routinely learn the virtues of the Bill of Rights, in part because it is shorter and simpler to teach than the main body of the Constitution.
  • The success of civic education is nowhere clearer than in the arguably distorting effect it has had in provoking what Mary Ann Glendon calls "rights talk," the substitution of assertions of rights for persuasive argumentation about politics
  • Of these virtues, patience will surely be the hardest to restore. This is, to be clear, patience not as a private but rather as a civic virtue.
  • It asks that they consider issues in dimensions deeper than a tweet or, more precisely, that they demand that those they elect do so and thus do not expect their passions to be regularly fed.
  • Perhaps the best that can be achieved here is refusing to allow the positive state to reach further into the minutiae of economic life, generating more spaces for minority factions to hide
  • As any reader of Lincoln's Temperance Address knows, neither heroic self-restraint nor clobbering, moralistic education will succeed in inculcating such virtues as patience and moderation. A combined educational program is necessary, and politics in any modern sense can only account for part of it.
  • civic education can achieve constitutional ends. Of course, rights as contemporarily understood are entitlements; they supply us with something. Civic virtue, by contrast, demands something of us, and as such presents a more substantial political challenge.
  • The second is a shift in civic education from the entitlement mentality of the Bill of Rights to the constitutional architecture of the overall regime, with the latter engendering an appreciation of the cadences and distances at which it is intended to function and the limited objects it is intended to attain.
  • While Madison's "mean extent" for a republic has, in the modern United States, far exceeded the scope possible for forming a public will with respect to most particular issues, it may still be possible to form a coherent if thin understanding of the regime and, consequently, a defensive concert to safeguard it.
  • a recognition that virtue is more necessary now than it used to be — when empirical conditions imposed patience and distance — does not rely on virtue in any blind or total sense. It does not, for example, seek to replace the institutional mechanisms Madison elucidates elsewhere with virtue. It simply recognizes that the particular assumptions of Federalist No. 10 no longer operate without added assistance. In other words, as Daniel Mahoney has argued, we must theorize the virtue that the founders could presuppose.
  • The issue, then, is not that civic virtue is all that is important to the Madisonian system; it is that civic virtue is more important than it used to be for one pillar of that system.
sidneybelleroche

Elections 2021: Key ballot measures US voters are deciding on - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by sidneybelleroche on 01 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Voters will decide Tuesday on key ballot measures related to issues including policing, election reform and some proposals authored in response to Covid-19 restrictions.
  • Voters will decide Tuesday on key ballot measures related to issues including policing, election reform and some proposals authored in response to Covid-19 restrictions.
  • there are 24 statewide ballot measures for consideration in six states
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  • Voters in some major cities, in addition to choosing their next mayor, will also have the opportunity to weigh in on an important issue that has been heavily debated in their communities.
  • Proposition 6 would codify the right for long-term care residents to designate an essential caregiver for in-person visitation.
  • Texas -- Proposition 3 Read MoreWritten in response to Covid-19 restrictions, Texans will consider a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the state or a political subdivision, such as an elected official, from "prohibiting or limiting religious services of religious organizations."
  • Like Proposition 3, Proposition 6 was also influenced by the Covid-19 restrictions enforced during the height of the pandemic.
  • Texas -- Proposition 3 Read MoreWritten in response to Covid-19 restrictions, Texans will consider a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the state or a political subdivision, such as an elected official, from "prohibiting or limiting religious services of religious organizations." Enter your email or view the Vault By CNN webpage to own a piece of CNN History with blockchain technology.close dialogExplore Vault by CNN . Presidential elections, space discoveries, CNN exclusives and more.Explore NowGet UpdatesBe the first to know about upcoming releases from our Vault, with updates delivered right to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing, you agree to our privacy policy.Success!See you in your inbox.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1426699 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1426699 *//* custom css from creative 60682 *//* V Text Alignment Fix */ .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1426699 .bx-row-input + .bx-row-submit { vertical-align: top;}/* custom css from creative 60872 *//************************************ CREATIVE STRUCTURE Do not remove or edit unless non applicable to creative set.************************************//* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1426699 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1426699.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 185px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1426699.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {bo
  • Question 2 would replace Minneapolis Police Department with a new "Department of Public Safety" overseen by the mayor and city council.
  • Cleveland -- Issue 24 Ballot initiative Issue 24 would establish a new civilian commission, called the Community Police Commission, whose members will have final authority over the police department's policy and procedures, hiring and training, and disciplinary action.
  • Proposal 7, also known as Local Law J, asks city residents whether to expand a civilian police review board's authority to conduct investigations and "to exercise oversight, review, and resolution of community complaints alleging abuse of police authority."
  • Austin, Texas -- Proposition A Voters in Austin, Texas are being asked whether to bulk up the city's police department with Proposition A, as its supporters argue that the city is in the midst of a "crime wave" and a shortage of police officers.Proposition A would require that the Austin police department employs at least two police officers for every 1,000 residents.
  • Detroit -- Proposal R A "yes" vote on Proposal R would be in favor of the Detroit City Council establishing a task force that would recommend housing and economic programs that "address historical discrimination against the Black community in Detroit."
  • New Jersey -- Question No. 1 Question No. 1 asks New Jersey voters whether to allow betting on college sports. Currently, sports betting on college events in the state and on college events in which New Jersey teams participate is prohibited.
  • Richmond, Virginia -- Local ReferendumResidents of Virginia's capital city will decide whether to approve the construction of a new casino and 250-room luxury hotel in south Richmond along the I-95 highway.
  • New York -- Ballot Proposal 1New Yorkers are being reminded to flip over their ballots to answer five statewide ballot proposals.
  • New York -- Ballot Proposal 3New York currently requires that its residents register to vote at least 10 days before an election. Ballot Proposal 3 would remove that requirement, clearing the way for state lawmakers to enact new laws that would allow a resident to register to vote in less than 10 days -- such as same-day voter registration.
  • New York -- Ballot Proposal 4As it stands now, New York voters may vote by absentee ballot if they are unable to appear at their polling place due to illness or physical disability or expect to be absent from their county of residence, or New York City if they're residents, on Election Day.Ballot Proposal 4 asks whether to eliminate the requirement that a voter provide a reason if they wish to vote by absentee ballot.
  • Philadelphia -- Question #1: Asks whether to amend the city charter so it urges the Pennsylvania legislature and governor to legalize cannabis for recreational use in the state.
Javier E

Reach Out and Elect Someone-Postman.pdf - 0 views

Postman media politics amusing text language censorship television print tyranny power freedom

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."
  • I~ politic~ were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.
  • t has accomplished this in two ways. The first_ is by requiring its form'AQ) to be used in political ca~p~igns.
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  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.
  • An \ American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well h ver one million television commercials in his or her lifeti~e, nd has close to another million to go before the first Social ecurity check arrives.
  • the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. I Cartels and monopolies, for example, undermine the theo,ry
  • evision commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be rationally considered, any claim-commercial ! or otherwise-~ust be made in language. More precisely, it i' must take the fomi of a proposition, for that is· the universe of II discourse from which such words as "true" apd "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then 'the application of/ empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the othtr instrum¢nts \ of reason are impotent.
  • Today, on television commercials, propositions are as. scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply_not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama-a mythology, if you will-of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamb_urgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune.
  • The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.
  • the commercial insists ~n . , an unprecedented brevity of expression.
  • One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what l is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product .. research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • pear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes tinie and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of th~ point_ being made.
  • More9ver, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that shor:t and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with 1 questions about ·problems.
  • ninous form of pubhc commumcauon m our society, it was I inevitable that Americans would ac~ommo~~te themselves ,~o tl:le philosophy of television commercials. By accommodate, I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that the television commerl cial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, espe( dally the printed word.
  • Such beli~fs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the tekvision commercial.
  • For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures-or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty.
  • But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? show business is not entirely ·without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
  • Such a: person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an act<;>r, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to s~eak for the virtues (?f a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.
  • The commercial asks us to believe that all problems am solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry.
  • his is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and would ap-
  • Although it may go ,too far to say that the politician-ascelebrity has, by itself, made political partie~ irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter.
  • The point is that television does not reveal whol the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by "better"
  • such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in ) executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, ._and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image."
  • This is the lesson of all great television commercials: TheD provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
  • The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
  • In the shift from party politics to television ·politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Sena~or, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
  • The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modem mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
  • It follows from this that hjggr¥_can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
  • "The past is a world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of [ grey haze." But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public discourse.
  • Terence Moran, I be~ lieve, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole."·
  • A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time-from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is
  • We do opt refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, .it requires a contextual basis-a theory, a vision, a metaphorsomething within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
  • But televisio. n is a ~peed-of-light me~um, a present-centered \ medium, lts grammar, so to say, penruts no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a ideotape we are seeing was made months before.
  • But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare 41d deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.
  • "History," Henry Ford said, "is_bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
  • profound cultural proolem until the maturing of the Age of ·l Print. Whatever dangers th~re may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.
  • We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy-namely, to freedom of information.
  • To paraphrase J David Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.
  • Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1) government c:ontrol over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western: democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.)
  • The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might_ be superseded by another sort of problen:i altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
  • I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
  • in fact, information and ideas did not become a
  • Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch .... 6
  • The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue, which was largely won in the twentieth.
  • What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our a.ccess to information but in fact. widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian., It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form ~ that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
  • Tyrants of all varieties' have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusement.s as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses·would ignore that which does not amuse.
  • iri the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;
  • That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares.
  • hat, in fact, we have ~o way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
  • How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of. the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when ~II political discourse takes the form of a jest.
Javier E

Ozempic or Bust - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678211

obesity treatment culture history policy health

shared by Javier E on 09 May 24 - No Cached
  • June 2024 Issue
  • Explore
  • it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.
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  • The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started
  • Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.
  • The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic.
  • Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”
  • Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.
  • In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight
  • The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight
  • For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.
  • The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify
  • if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”
  • How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk
  • The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years
  • the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out.
  • adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time?
  • “All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”
  • in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.
  • The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories.
  • But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991.
  • Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses.
  • Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent
  • National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.
  • Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm.
  • In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,”
  • In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million.
  • It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life.
  • the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”
  • News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque.
  • Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.
  • “I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”
  • She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”
  • For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.
  • In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.
  • In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.
  • he message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.
  • Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could.
  • Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country.
  • An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.
  • when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.
  • The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out.
  • although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.
  • sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,
  • that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.
  • Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.
  • From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.
  • obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”
  • she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions
  • Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years.
  • if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it
  • She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit.
  • Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.
  • “Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.
  • Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.
  • As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid
  • By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners
  • But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.
  • Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look
  • The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.
  • In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”
  • that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity.
  • That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism
  • But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”
  • Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events.
  • As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell.
  • Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed.
  • In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion
  • In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.
  • Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight.
  • If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat.
  • Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.
  • Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”
  • When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.
  • the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now
  • Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies.
  • “The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”
  • The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways
  • When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.”
  • why wasn’t there another kind of nagging voice that wouldn’t stop—a sense of worry over what the future holds? And if she wasn’t worried for herself, then what about for Meghann or for Tristan, who are barely in their 40s? Wouldn’t they be on these drugs for another 40 years, or even longer? But Barb said she wasn’t worried—not at all. “The technology is so much better now.” If any problems come up, the scientists will find solutions.
katherineharron

90% of people are biased against women. That's the challenge we face - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Almost 90% of the world's men, and women, are biased in some way against women, according to the Gender Social Norms Index. Half of men and women feel that men make better political leaders. More than 56% feel that men have more right to a job and/or make better business executives. Read Moreclose dialogGet the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the weekSign up for CNN Opinion’s Provoke/Persuade weekly newsletter.Please enter aboveProvoke/Persuade MeBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy. Thanks For SubscribingContinue Readingclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1118904 *//* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1118904 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 38px 40px 30px 40px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 400px;padding: 20px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 737px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 285px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: #1a1a1a;border-style: none;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 170px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 20px;stroke: rgb(169, 169, 169);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 100%;padding: 0px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 90%;padding: 0px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {width: 80px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: absolute;left: 30;top: 20px;width: 80px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: relative;left: 0;top: -10px;width: 80px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {width: 100%;padding: 20px 0 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {padding: 0 0 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 28px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 25px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {padding: 0px 0px 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {width: auto;padding: 0px 0px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 17px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;letter-spacing: 0.01em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 13px;padding: 0px 20px ;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 100%;padding: 0px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 300px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {padding: 15px;font-size: 12px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(220, 220, 220);}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {font-size: 12px;padding: 12px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-
  • Around the world, women are equally likely to vote, but only 10% out of 193 heads of government are female, according to the Pew Research Center. Women are overrepresented in low-wage employment, but represent only 21% of employers and 12% of billionaires. They are about equally represented in jobs at S&P Fortune 500 companies, but represent only 5.8% of the total CEOs, the index found.
  • People's reactions to a woman's pregnancy at work is a good example of how much bias still exists. In the United States, as recently as 2011, some employers still fired employees on the spot who had become pregnant, according to a report by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. (That's illegal.) More subtly, women announcing a pregnancy may be taken off the partner track or denied raises and bonuses. (Also illegal.) A pregnancy can easily reset the course of a woman's career. Pregnancy discrimination is widespread and difficult to police.
runlai_jiang

The Form of Islamic Government | Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist | Books o... - 0 views

www.al-islam.org/...form-islamic-government

islam

shared by runlai_jiang on 10 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • Islamic government is a government of law. In this form of government, sovereignty belongs to God alone and law is His decree and command. The law of Islam, divine command, has absolute authority over all individuals and the Islamic government.
    • runlai_jiang
      runlai_jiang on 10 Dec 17
       
      For latin civilization, they have clergies who burdens the public servics and created corruption.
  • Islamic government is not a form of monarchy, especially not an imperial one. In that type of government, the rulers are empowered over the property and persons of those they rule and may dispose of them entirely as they wish. Islam has not the slightest connection with this form and method of government. For this reason, we find that in Islamic government, unlike monarchial and imperial regimes, there is not the slightest trace of vast palaces, opulent buildings, servants and retainers, private equerries, adjutants to the heir appare
  • Even though that excellent man ruled over a vast realm that included Iran, Egypt, Hijāz3 and the Yemen among its provinces, he lived more frugally than the most impoverished of our clergy students.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • re would have been no monarchy and no empire, no usurpation of the lives and property of the people, no oppression and plunder, no encroachment on the public treasury, no vice and abomination. Most forms of corruption originate with the ruling class, the tyrannical ruling family and the libertines that associate with them. It is these rulers who establish centers of vice and corruption, who build centers of vice and wine-drinking, and spend the income of the religious endowments constructing cinemas.5            
  • In addition, superfluous bureaucracies and the system of file-keeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced in them, all of which are totally alien to Islam, impose further expenditures on our national budget not less in quantity than the illicit expenditures of the first category.
  • dicating disputes, and executing judgments is at once simple, practical, and swift. When the juridical methods of Islam were applied, the sharī‘ah judge in each town, assisted only by two bailiffs and with only a pen and inkpot at his disposal, would swiftly resolve disputes among people and send them about their business.
kaylynfreeman

Meghan and Harry interview: Prince William says royals are 'very much not a racist fami... - 0 views

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Politics

shared by kaylynfreeman on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • London (CNN)Prince William has denied the royal family is racist in his first public remarks since his brother Prince Harry, and his wife Meghan, made explosive claims in a TV interview.
  • Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, made a series of damning accusations against the royal family in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired in the UK on Monday night.
  • In the interview, Meghan said that the skin tone of the couple's child, Archie, was discussed as a potential issue before he was born. The couple would not reveal who had made the remarks, but said it wasn't Queen Elizabeth II or her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. close dialogDo you want the news summarized each morning?We've got you.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success!See you in your inbox.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1271788 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1271788 *//* custom css from creative 53617 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-row-input.bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { font-size: 11px; color: #ee2924;}@keyframes bx-anim-1271788-spin { 100% { transform: rotate(360deg); }}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1271788 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 185px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 10px;vertical-align: middle;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-PGhroUO {width: 135px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-PGhroUO {text-align: center;display: none;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-LHjAYNs {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-LHjAYNs {width: 45px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-eWRqNk4 {width: 505px;padding: 2px 0 0 25px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-eWRqNk4 {width: 100%;padding: 5px 0 0;text-align: left;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs {width: 100%;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 21px;color: #282828;line-height: 1em;letter-spacing: -.015em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs> *:first-child {font-size: 22px;min-width: auto;padding: 0;line-height: 1.1m;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 21px;padding: 6px 0 0;color: #ee2924;line-height: 1.1em;letter-spacing: -.015em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY> *:first-child {font-size: 18px;padding: 8px 0 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-kw4VbV5 {width: 640px;padding: 10px 0 0;min-width: 550px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-kw4VbV5 {min-width: auto;width: 100%;padding: 10px 0 0;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-wi
mattrenz16

Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
  • That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
  • In attempting to force her hand, they essentially forced her out. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Get CNN Opinion's newsletter for the latest thoughts and analysis on today's news.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376914 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campa
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Open organizers didn't stop there, issuing a news release threatening to expel her from the tournament if she kept it up.
  • And so, she quit. Read More
  • Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
  • Osaka first came into the spotlight at the 2018 US Open when her historic win against Serena Williams received boos from a crowd convinced that Williams was unfairly targeted by the umpire. What should have been an extraordinarily joyous occasion, her first major victory and the event that catapulted her into public recognition, was instead one that made her cry, both immediately following the match and when she went to collect her trophy. ESPN declared that "Naomi Osaka was denied her magic moment."
  • Simply put, it's because the world has unrealistic expectations of celebrities and athletes. We believe the public nature of their fame entitles us access to their private lives. In several recent interviews, such as one with podcaster Dax Shepard, Prince Harry has talked openly of his own mental health struggles and of the pressures he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have felt as objects of media fascination, pressures so severe that Markle thought of suicide.
  • Many of her fellow athletes agreed with her decision. Steph Curry tweeted, "you shouldn't ever have to make a decision like this -- but so damn impressive taking the high road when the powers that be don't protect their own. major respect @naomiosaka." Martina Navratilova tweeted her support of Osaka, noting that "as athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental & emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference." Serena Williams offered her support, too.
  • Some tennis players, of course -- including Rafael Nadal and Sofia Kenin -- have come out to say that speaking to reporters is part of the job. But just because something has been part of the job needn't mean it should be, or that it should be for everyone. Osaka didn't just decide she didn't feel like giving interviews. She was forced to make a choice, and she chose herself. That takes courage, courage that is a shame she had to muster at all. Because in the end, the tennis world has lost a great, at least for now -- a point that deserves much more attention.
aidenborst

Opinion: Michael Flynn is playing with fire - CNN - 0 views

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

US politics Trump history crisis Culture policy GOP Michael-Flynn coup

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It's hard to get a grip on what's happened to one-time war hero, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn.
  • Flynn, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, shockingly appeared to support a military coup in the United States during a Sunday keynote address to a Dallas conference organized by supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.
  • An audience member at the Dallas event asked Flynn: "I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic) can't happen here?" The audience raucously cheered this question. Flynn replied, "No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That's right." Again, the audience cheered heartily. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Healing a divided country starts with listening. Sign up for refreshing takes from every perspective. Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376913 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376913 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376913 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-group-1376913-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-group-1376913-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-element-1376913-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: au
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On Monday, Flynn seemed to be trying to dial back, saying on social media that he doesn't support a military coup. Yet Flynn's comments in Dallas Sunday were made on video, which can be seen here by anyone who wants to judge Flynn's response for themselves.
  • Flynn's recent musings about coups, martial law and overturning legitimate presidential elections are all a very long way from the period after 9/11, when he served in the elite Joint Special Operations Command as a highly regarded intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • Flynn was so well thought of that he was eventually promoted to lieutenant general and to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but Flynn's overseers in the Obama administration thought he was an ineffective manager of DIA, a large agency with 17,000 employees, and in 2014 he was pushed out of his post.
  • After Trump won the presidency in 2016, he appointed Flynn his national security adviser, a post in which he served for the record briefest amount of time; only 24 days.
  • Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the content of conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the same issue.
  • Trump pardoned Flynn, but the eradication of his conviction doesn't seem to have impacted Flynn's continuing lack of good judgment: Calling for the overturning of a legitimate presidential election; floating the imposition of martial law and appearing to approve of a coup in the United States.
aidenborst

Dogecoin surges after Coinbase Pro lets some users trade it - CNN - 0 views

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

US Culture Economics Dodgecoin Investing Stocks stock-market cryptocurrency

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Dogecoin is going to the moon again.
  • The canine-themed digital currency soared more than 25% Wednesday to about 40 cents. Investors cheered the news that crypto giant Coinbase (COIN) was planning to let users of its Coinbase Pro service buy and sell dogecoin.
  • By Wednesday night, Dogecoin had reached 42 cents, according to Coinbase.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "One of the most common requests we receive from customers is to be able to trade more assets on our platform," Coinbase said in a blog post Tuesday.
  • "We will make a separate announcement if and when this support is added," the company said.
  • But Musk is cheering the dogecoin comeback. Following the Coinbase announcement, Musk resurfaced a tweet of his from last July that showed a gigantic cloud with a dog's face on it and the text "dogecoin standard" that was approaching a landscape labeled "global financial system."Enter your email to receive CNN's nightcap newsletter. "close dialog"We read all day so you don’t have to.Get our nightly newsletter for all the top business stories you need to know.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! Thanks for signing up for the CNN Business Nightcap newsletter."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1334631 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1334631 *//* custom css from creative 52221 */@keyframes bx-anim-1334631-spin { 100% { transform: rotate(360deg); }}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1334631 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 240px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #00c59e;border-style: none;background-size: contain;background-color: #00c59e;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 18px;vertical-align: middle;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 18px 5px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(0, 0, 0);stroke-width: 1.5px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-3EEWyi6 {width: 310px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-3EEWyi6 {text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1 {width: 290px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1 {width: 230px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-GCtdzI1> *:first-child {alt: CNN business Nightcap;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-ZEoAbMC {width: 380px;padding: 15px 0 0 10px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-ZEoAbMC {width: 300px;padding: 18px 0 0;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 700;font-size: 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-3bKsKxs> *:first-child {font-size: 15px;min-width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9 {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 16px;padding: 8px 0 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-element-1334631-PQSiIV9> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;padding: 6px 0 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1334631 .bx-group-1334631-UY4jwxF {width: 695px;paddi
katherineharron

Opinion: The danger of a giant Covid belly flop - CNN - 0 views

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

covid

shared by katherineharron on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • As more and more vaccinations are administered in the US, the Covid-19 story, which once was nothing more than a tale of enormous tragedy, now has a new plotline: how best to return to normal.
  • transmission of a virus depends on a non-immune person bumping into an actively infected person. With more and more vaccination, the likelihood that a non-immune person will come in contact with an infected person is progressively reduced until -- poof -- the risk of catching the infection is almost gone (though never zero).
  • The issue in 1918, when the first article describing herd immunity was published, was the threat of epidemic miscarriage due to a bacterium among pregnant cows in Kansas.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Consider a calculation to determine the threshold for herd immunity: Vc=(1− 1/R0)/E. "Vc" is the proportion of people who must be vaccinated to protect the rest of the herd, "R0," pronounced R-naught, is an estimate of the number of secondary cases from the original infected person and "E" represents effectiveness of a given vaccine against transmission. And this, which resembles a brutal SAT math section entry, is the dumbed-down version.
  • This is not a fund-raiser with a fixed universal goal we all are striving to reach. The above equation evaluates the nation as a homogenized entity, but people live in communities
  • In other words, susceptible cows should be culled to lessen the risk of new infections
  • Though, of course, the fix -- culling -- is not an option for human disease, the benefit of an immune herd is self evident.
  • Fast forward to the 21st century world of vaccines. Pandemics and health care are decidedly more complex, which has led all to wonder: what is the magic number of people we need to vaccinate so we can all forget these disastrous last 14 months?close dialogOur free Provoke/Persuade newsletter compiles the week’s most thought-provoking pieces and delivers them straight to your inbox. Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1295603 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1295603 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1295603 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-PZ8dLrW {min-width: auto;width: 310px;padding: 0;}}@media all and (min-wi
  • Lessening the threat of fetal loss therefore was straightforward: farmers should "retain" immune cattle -- those who had already had a spontaneous abortion -- and not waste "material, time, and energy ... on animals of doubtful value." Rather, they advised to butcher the non-immune cows and concentrate on the immune, "profitable" ones.
  • A famous mumps outbreak in adolescent boys from the Orthodox Jewish community is thought to have been exacerbated by the school practice of promoting close, sustained (15 hours a day) contact with a study partner ("chavrusa") including "animated" face-to-face discussion resulting in transmission despite the fact that most had been vaccinated years before.
  • Stated more simply, the herd likely is protected at a very different percent of vaccinated people in an Orthodox Jewish community in San Diego where people live near the school and walk to most activities compared to a gated community in a Minneapolis suburb where many prefer to keep to themselves.
  • We have received a master class in viral variants in recent months, witnessing day by day the alarming uptick in new cases as the B.1.1.7. variant has been introduced to new communities. But a single R-naught cannot fit all variants of Covid-19; a community with higher rates of B.1.1.7. and, therefore, a higher R-naught will require, among other things, a higher level of vaccination to designate the herd as sufficiently immune.
  • There is not one magic number to signal to the entire country that we have finally made it;
  • This is extremely important to keep in mind in the weeks and months ahead as we continue to vaccinate and wait and vaccinate and wait, chasing a number that is fundamentally misleading.
  • The heterogeneity of human behavior, geography and the virus itself explains the vagueness of the pronouncements of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, and other experts as they seek to evade specifying just how many more people need vaccination before we officially can claim victory.
  • As we have seen in the US during the 15-month arc of the pandemic, trust in science and scientists has been the key to progress. Masks work. Vaccines work. Certain medications work.
katherineharron

Why Biden's secretary of state pick tells us a lot about his priorities as president - ... - 0 views

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

biden

shared by katherineharron on 23 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden is poised to name Antony Blinken as his secretary of state on Tuesday,
  • There's no set order to these things, of course, but it is absolutely purposeful and therefore noteworthy that Biden is not only leading his Cabinet announcements with the nation's top diplomat but also that he is doing it so early in his transition.
  • "You're going to see the first of the President-elect's cabinet appointments on Tuesday of this week. Meeting the pace -- beating, in fact, the pace that was set by the Obama/Biden transition, beating the pace set by the Trump transition."
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Fixing America's standing in the world -- after four years of President Trump fighting our traditional allies and making nice with our longtime enemies -- is absolutely urgent. There's no time to waste.
  • The primacy of the secretary of state pick is meant to send that message not just to the federal bureaucracy, but, more importantly, to the world community.
  • The last four years are an aberration. It is not who we will be.Read More .duval-3{width:100%;position: relative; border: 1px solid #979797; border-left: none; border-right: none;padding: 20px 0; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; -moz-box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0 0 20px 0; max-width: 660px;} .duval-3 a{color: #1a1a1a; text-decoration: none;font-size: 0;} .duval-3 a:hover { color: #d9d9d9; text-decoration: underline; -moz-text-decoration-color: #d9d9d9; text-decoration-color: #d9d9d9; } .duval-3>a>*{vertical-align: top; display: inline-block;} .duval-3>a>div{display: inline-block; font-size:1.0666667rem;width: 80%; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 2%;} .duval-3>a>img{width: 18%; height: auto;} @media screen and (max-width:640px){ .duval-3>a>*{display:block; margin: auto;} .duval-3>a>div{width: 100%;} .duval-3>a>img{width: 50%;} }
  • He, like Klain, has deep roots with Biden. He served as staff director at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden chaired it.
  • And like Klain, he is a longtime Democratic policy hand. Blinken served in the Clinton administration as special assistant to the president and chief foreign policy speechwriter for the president. close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1219472 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1219472 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { -ms-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -ms-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @-moz-keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { -moz-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -moz-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @-webkit-keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { -webkit-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -webkit-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @keyframes bx-anim-1219472-spin { from { transform: rotate(0deg); } to { transform: rotate(360deg); } }/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1219472 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 400px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 737px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 230px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: #fefefe;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(213, 213, 213);border-width: 1px 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 20px;stroke: rgb(169, 169, 169);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-tBtYNNU {width: 100%;padding: 0px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-tBtYNNU {padding: 0px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-vnxQeDA> *:first-child {font-weight: 700;font-size: 18px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-vnxQeDA> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-zNZm3ba {width: auto;height: 100px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-bWybe9u {width: 254px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-bWybe9u {width: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-bWybe9u> *:first-child {height: 100px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-group-1219472-9wCndcV {width: 300px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-XG1hSFu {padding: 0px 0px 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-XG1hSFu {width: auto;padding: 0 0 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1219472 .bx-element-1219472-XG1hSFu> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: #262626;letter-spacing: 0.01em
  • Blinken is a striking contrast to Trump's first secretary of state, former Exxon boss Rex Tillerson, who Trump touted as the crown jewel of his Cabinet but who proved ineffective at building relationships within the State Department or with the President.
  • The Blinken pick -- and Biden's decision to name him first among his Cabinet choices -- is best understood, then, as the President-elect doing everything he can to make clear that he will be the exact opposite of the man who preceded him in office.
  • If Trump ran and governed as the anti-Barack Obama, then Biden is signaling that he will govern as the anti-Trump. And the wheel turns.
Javier E

Health Experts Warily Eye XBB.1.5, the Latest Omicron Subvariant - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-omicron-variants-xbb.html

pandemic policy history variants

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Most recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses have dwindled away in a matter of weeks or months, unable to outcompete other lineages. XBB, on the other hand, got a winning ticket in the genetic lottery.
  • From one parent, it gained a set of mutations that helped it evade antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations. From the other parent, it gained a separate set of mutations that made it even more evasive.
  • “XBB literally picked up the most possible mutations that it could possibly pick up from those two parents,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. The new combination made XBB one of the most evasive Omicron subvariants in existence last summer.
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  • Recent experiments suggest that XBB paid a steep price for its power to evade immunity. The mutations allow it to escape antibodies by altering the shape of the protein, called spike, that covers its surface. But some of those mutations also make it harder for XBB spike proteins to grab tightly to cells — the first step required for an infection.
  • That loose grip may have lessened XBB’s advantage against other forms of the virus. In late 2022, it jostled alongside a number of other Omicron subvariants. In Singapore, XBB caused a surge in October, for example, while remaining rare in many other parts of the world.
  • As XBB multiplied, it continued to mutate into new forms. The earliest samples of XBB.1.5 were isolated in October in New York. The new subvariant gained one crucial mutation, known as F486P.
  • Yunlong Cao of Peking University and his colleagues tested out XBB.1.5 in dishes of cells, comparing how it fared against earlier forms of XBB. The researchers found that the F486P mutation allowed XBB.1.5 to grab tightly to cells again. But the new subvariant could still evade antibodies as well as earlier forms of XBB.
  • In Connecticut, for example, Nathan Grubaugh at Yale University and his colleagues found that by mid-December, other Omicron subvariants were falling. Only XBB.1.5 cases were growing. Dr. Grubaugh estimates that it is about 20 percent more transmissible than BQ.1, which had been the dominant form.
  • How severe XBB.1.5 infections are compared with other forms of the coronavirus is not yet clear. “It’s serious,” Dr. Grubaugh said. “I just don’t necessarily know if it’s really more serious than some of the other Omicron lineages in terms of the overall impact.”
  • XBB.1.5 has already spread to other countries, and is growing rapidly in Germany, Denmark and elsewhere in Europe
  • Scientists are already scanning new sequences being uploaded to an international database called GISAID in the hopes of spotting an upgraded version of XBB.1.5. But their job is getting harder because governments are pulling back on sequencing efforts. “Worldwide, sequencing has taken a real hit,” Dr. Peacock said.
  • The United States, which once lagged behind other nations, has managed to maintain a fairly strong sequencing effort. Without it, Dr. Peacock said, XBB.1.5 might have stayed below the radar for much longer. If XBB.1.5’s next generation is evolving somewhere with little sequencing, it may go undetected for some time to come.
  • Dr. Lemieux said that paring back on sequencing was a mistake, given how many infections and deaths the virus is still causing. “This is a part of public health,” he said.
Javier E

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939

concept creep psychology liberalism harmful trauma torture prejudice

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
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  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
julia rhodes

Echoes of Palestinian partition in Syrian refugee crisis | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...tioninsyrianrefugeecrisis.html

palestinian refugee crisis policy history politics syria

shared by julia rhodes on 30 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c
  • Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.
  • The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.
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  • A Dec. 13 Amnesty International report calls the Syrian refugee crisis an international failure, but this regional crisis necessitates a regional response — one that more systematically offers Syrian refugees legal protections. The Amnesty report rightly points out that it is not just the European Union that is failing the refugees. It is the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council that, in spite of their wealth and support for the military action in Syria, have not offered any resettlement or humanitarian admission places to refugees from Syria. 
  • After World War II, the European refugee crisis blotted out other partition crises across the globe as colonial powers withdrew in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Partitions at the time were about questions of borders and the forced un-mixing of populations.
  • The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees — the international legal framework for the protection of refugees, which obligated states to not return refugees to their countries of origin (non-refoulement), to respect refugees’ basic human rights and to grant them freedoms equivalent to those enjoyed by foreign nationals living legally in the country — did not include those displaced from partitioned countries in its definition of a refugee.
  • Today, this largely leaves Syrian refugees entering those countries without legal recourse. It is also the most dangerous injustice that Syrian refugees face.
  • Turkey is heeding the call. In April it enacted a law establishing the country’s first national asylum system providing refugees with access to Turkish legal aid
  • The origins of the Middle East’s stagnation lie in the partition of Palestine in 1948. When half a million Arab refugees fled Jewish-held territory, seeking refuge in neighboring states, countries like Lebanon and Saudi Arabia moved to stop them. In the final days of the drafting of the United Nation General Assembly’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the war in Palestine raging, Saudi Arabia persuaded many countries, including the U.S., to dilute the obligation of a state to grant asylum. The Middle Eastern countries feared that they would be required to absorb Palestinians and that Palestinians might lose a right of return to what is now Israel.
  • I am heartened by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ recent call not just for financial and humanitarian assistance and emergency development in the Middle East to aid Syria but also for legal protection for refugees.
  • Bangkok Principles on the Status and Treatment of Refugees. Formally adopted in 2001, the principles provide for a right of return, a broader definition of a refugee and a mandate that countries take up the responsibility of determining refugee status based on rule of law.
  • With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers.
  • what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies.
  • The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland.
Javier E

What's Wrong With 'All Lives Matter'? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ts-wrong-with-all-lives-matter

white supremacy white privilege dignity racism culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be
  • we have to remember that under slavery black lives were considered only a fraction of a human life, so the prevailing way of valuing lives assumed that some lives mattered more
  • when and where did black lives ever really get free of coercive force? One reason the chant “Black Lives Matter” is so important is that it states the obvious but the obvious has not yet been historically realized. So it is a statement of outrage and a demand for equality, for the right to live free of constraint, but also a chant that links the history of slavery, of debt peonage, segregation, and a prison system geared toward the containment, neutralization and degradation of black lives,
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  • We can see the videos and know what is obviously true, but it is also obviously true that police and the juries that support them obviously do not see what is obvious, or do not wish to see.
  • we cannot name all the black men and women whose lives are snuffed out all because a police officer perceives a threat, sees the threat in the person, sees the person as pure threat. Perceived as a threat even when unarmed or completely physically subdued, or lying in the ground, as Rodney King clearly was, or coming back home from a party on the train and having the audacity to say to a policeman that he was not doing anything wrong and should not be detained: Oscar Grant.
  • also a police system that more and more easily and often can take away a black life in a flash all because some officer perceives a threat.
  • The perception is then ratified as a public perception at which point we not only must insist on the dignity of black lives, but name the racism that has become ratified as public perception.
  • to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it. Achieving that universal, “all lives matter,” is a struggle
  • it is not just that black lives matter, though that must be said again and again. It is also that stand-your-ground and racist killings are becoming increasingly normalized, which is why intelligent forms of collective outrage have become obligatory.
  • At least in these cases that have galvanized the nation and the world in protest, we all see the twisted logic that results in the exoneration of the police who take away the lives of unarmed black men and women. And why is that the case? It is not because what the police and their lawyers present as their thinking in the midst of the situation is very reasonable. No, it is because that form of thinking is becoming more “reasonable” all the time. In other words, every time a grand jury or a police review board accepts this form of reasoning, they ratify the idea that blacks are a population against which society must be defended, and that the police defend themselves and (white) society, when they preemptively shoot unarmed black men in public space.
  • What has led us to this place? J.B.: Racism has complex origins, and it is important that we learn the history of racism to know what has led us to this terrible place. But racism is also reproduced in the present, in the prison system, new forms of population control, increasing economic inequality that affects people of color disproportionately.
  • I’ve heard that some white people have held signs that read “All Lives Matter.” J.B.: When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.
  • So the police see a threat when there is no gun to see, or someone is subdued and crying out for his life, when they are moving away or cannot move. These figures are perceived as threats even when they do not threaten, when they have no weapon, and the video footage that shows precisely this is taken to be a ratification of the police’s perception
  • we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter? Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, “all lives matter,” then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of “all lives.”
  • whiteness is figured as a young virgin whose future husband is white — this characterization ratifies the sentiments that oppose miscegenation and defend norms or racial purity. But whose sexuality is imperiled in this scene? After all, black women and girls were the ones who were raped, humiliated and disposed of under conditions of slavery, and it was black families who were forcibly destroyed: black kinship was not recognized as kinship that matters
  • women of color, and black feminists in particular, have struggled for years against being the sexual property of either white male power or black masculinity, against poverty, and against the prison industry, so there are many reasons it is necessary to define racism in ways that acknowledge the specific forms it takes against men, women, and transgendered people of color.
  • there are white people who may be very convinced that they are not racist, but that does not necessarily mean that they have examined, or worked though, how whiteness organizes their lives, values, the institutions they support, how they are implicated in ways of talking, seeing, and doing that constantly and tacitly discriminate. Undoing whiteness has to be difficult work, but it starts, I think, with humility, with learning history, with white people learning how the history of racism persists in the everyday vicissitudes of the present, even as some of us may think we are “beyond” such a history, or
  • It is difficult and ongoing work, calling on an ethical disposition and political solidarity that risks error in the practice of solidarity.
  • It is probably important and satisfying as well to let one’s whiteness recede by joining in acts of solidarity with all those who oppose racism.
  • Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.”
  • it is probably an error, in my view, for white people to become paralyzed with guilt and self-scrutiny. The point is rather to consider those ways of valuing and devaluing life that govern our own thinking and acting, understanding the social and historical reach of those ways of valuing.
  • ut just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time
  • There are many ways to do this, in the street, the office, the home, and in the media. Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter.
  • This week’s conversation is with Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Javier E

The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-business-climate-change.html

climate change tech

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

Australia cancels Milo Yiannopoulos's visa after Christchurch comments | Australia news... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...os-after-christchurch-massacre

white supremacy free speech right-wing terrorism

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Labor spokesman for citizenship and multiculturalism, Tony Burke, earlier on Saturday called on Coleman to treat far-right extremism as it would other forms of extremism and revoke Yiannopoulos’s visa
  • “We knock back people all the time with respect to other forms of hatred that have been consistent with what has resulted in terrorism actions,” Burke said. “We need to make sure the full force of the law treats this as the same as any other form of terrorism.”
  • He said the use of hate speech was connected to violence and extremism and should be taken more seriously.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Burke also criticised Anning’s comments but said: “the normalisation of bigotry is something that is not only confined to him.”
  • “There’s been an attempt in Australia by many people to normalise hate speech,” Burke said. “We get told, ‘Oh, it’s just freedom of speech’.”
  • The Australian man charged with murder over the Christchurch attack was not on a terrorist watchlist, and Burke said it was possible that “up until now, many people would not have viewed this form of extremism as being as dangerous to people as every other form of extremism”. “Anyone who had that doubt, that doubt finished yesterday,” he said.
malonema1

FACT CHECK: Has Citizenship Been A Standard Census Question? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...een-a-standard-census-question

US culture policy

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • After a controversial decision by the Department of Commerce to add a question about U.S. citizenship to the 2020 census, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the move as nothing out of the ordinary.
  • In 1970, the Census Bureau began sending around two questionnaires: a short-form questionnaire to gather basic population information and a long form that asked detailed questions about everything from household income to plumbing. The short form went to most households in America. The long form was sent to a much smaller sample of households, 1 in 6. Most people didn't get it.
  • The state of California has already sued to block the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, and New York's state attorney general has announced plans for a multistate lawsuit. The concern expressed by states with large undocumented immigrant populations is that asking about citizenship will scare people off, forms won't get filled out and the count won't be accurate, affecting federal funding and the number of congressional seats. (The Census Bureau is legally required to keep answers confidential, even from the FBI and other government entities. That means it isn't allowed to release data identifying an individual. But federal agencies and researchers can request census information on specific population groups.)
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
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