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Farmers Are Feeling The Pain As Drought Spreads In The Northwest : NPR - 0 views

  • Nicole Berg's stunted wheat field is so short and sparse she doesn't think the combine can even reach the wheat without, as she puts it, eating rocks.
  • Berg is a dryland wheat farmer in the sweeping Horse Heaven Hills of southeastern Washington state. She shows off one head of half-turned golden wheat amid a sea of them. Besides being too short, the plant's kernels didn't fill out properly.
  • "See how the wheat head is curled like that?"
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  • "And then you break into it, you might have some berries down here, but this will be empty. There is no wheat inside the wheat head."
  • Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.
  • On her ranch, Berg says she's also worried about 1,000 acres of native grass seeds she has to plant this year into dry soil for a government conservation program. She says with all the Western wildfires in recent years, the wild grass and forage seeds have become expensive. She hates to plant them in shallow, bone-dry soil only to lose the crop if there's not sufficient rain.
  • The Berg's aren't the only ones suffering. The region is parched from near the Canadian border clear to the edge of Nevada, with triple digit temps on the way making it worse.
  • Earlier this year, Oregon declared drought zones for eight counties, and six more have requested it since. Now the drought is rapidly expanding into usually cooler and wetter western Oregon, according to Ryan Andrews, a hydrologist for the state's Water Resources Department. He says the thirsty ground will absorb whatever rain comes, meaning streams and rivers will get little water.
  • Jeff Marti, a drought expert for Washington's Department of Ecology, says it hasn't been this dry since the 1920s.
  • "It's the story of the irrigation haves and the have nots," he says. "Meaning those folks who get their water from rivers or storage, are probably going to be fine for their irrigation needs. But the dryland users and the folks that have cattle that depend on forage on the rangelands may be more challenged."
  • Looking ahead, Marti says the warming climate may mean more rain for the Northwest, but also much less snowpack that melts sooner. That could stress water supplies even more.
  • A bit west of Alderdale, Washington, cattle rancher Gary Hess is also having a hard time with the drought. His grass-fattened mother cows bawl at their calves, wanting them to stay close and away from the cattle dog. But he only has enough irrigated pasture for a small part of his herd, the rest are on dryland range. So Hess recently sold 70 mother cows with calves at their sides to another operator in Wyoming. They had many more good calves in them, and he hated to see them go. But he has no dryland grass to keep them.
  • "When you have to sell younger cows, that's a disappointment," Hess says as he tears up a bit. "With the kind of weather we've had the last couple of years, and the drought and the lack of feed and lack of water, we just finally had to cut back."
  • This spring it's also been windy here, further drying out the landscape like a blow dryer. Hess is thinking he'll have to sell more cows soon just to survive. He says it's hard to lose animals and bloodlines that he's worked so hard to build up. He figures it could take him up to a decade to build his herd back up without going into debt.
  • Most ranchers say they don't have time to dwell on the trucked-off cattle or lost crops. They're busy applying for federal disaster aid. And they're also keeping an eye out for wildfires that are always top-of-mind in the dry, hot summer, but expected to be worse because of this year's terrible drought.
aleija

Can Democrats Still Count on the Grass-Roots? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For Democrats who care deeply about progressive causes, Donald Trump’s presidency was a frightening experience. It was also a call to action. Progressive campaigns and causes experienced a huge spike in donations over the past four years, and in 2020 candidates up and down the ballot far outpaced fund-raising records from previous cycles.
  • They found that these donors were feeling more positive about Democrats in Washington than in years past, and that they remained energized — but a significant chunk of them were in fact planning to donate less, now that Trump is out of office.
  • After Mr. Trump’s defeat, there have been some signs of donor burnout. Close to nine out of 10 respondents said Mr. Trump had been one of the top factors driving them to donate in recent years. And upward of one in five grass-roots donors said they were now likely to cut back on their gifts to candidates and political parties.
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  • Close to half of all donors expressed a positive view of the Democratic Party, and a wide array of top Democratic officials received broadly favorable ratings from the survey’s Democratic respondents. Those include establishment politicians like President Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, as well as left-wing figures like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders.
  • The study also revealed that anxiety about Mr. Trump’s continued influence on Republican politics remained a concern for many left-leaning donors.
  • With Democrats controlling only a slim majority in both chambers of Congress, he said many donors still saw the opposition party as a threat to legislation on popular issues like climate change and voting rights.
Javier E

Most-read 2022: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under easter... - 0 views

  • I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing
  • Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.
  • over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’
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  • Karahan Tepe, and its penis chamber, and everything that inexplicably surrounds the chamber – shrines, cells, altars, megaliths, audience halls et al – is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible.
  • After all, hunter gatherers – cavemen with flint arrowheads – without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.
  • Taken together with its age, complexity, sophistication, and its deep, resonant mysteriousness, and its many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’ – these carved, ochre-red rocks, so silent, brooding, and watchful in the hard whirring breezes of the semi-desert, constitute what might just be the greatest archaeological revelation in the history of humankind.
  • The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made an irreversibly profound discovery – which would eventually lead to the penis pillars of Karahan Tepe, and an archaeological anomaly which challenges, time and again, everything we know of human prehistory.
  • in late 1994 the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe to begin his slow, diligent excavations of its multiple, peculiar, enormous T-stones, which are generally arranged in circles – like the standing stones of Avebury or Stonehenge. Unlike European standing stones, however, the older Turkish megaliths are often intricately carved: with images of local fauna. Sometimes the stones depict cranes, boars, or wildfowl: creatures of the hunt. There are also plenty of leopards, foxes, and vultures. Occasionally these animals are depicted next to human heads.
  • The obsession with the penis is obvious – more so, now we have the benefit of hindsight provided by Karahan Tepe and the other sites. Very few representations of women have emerged from the Tas Tepeler so far; there is one obscene caricature of a woman perhaps giving birth. Whatever inspired these temple-towns it was a not a benign matriarchal culture. Quite the opposite, maybe.
  • Urfa man now has a silent hall of his own in one of Turkey’s greatest archaeological galleries. More importantly, we can now see that Urfa man has the same body stance of the T-shaped man-pillars at Gobekli (and in many of the Tas Tepeler): his arms are in front of him, protecting his penis
  • ‘Gobekli Tepe upends our view of human history. We always thought that agriculture came first, then civilisation: farming, pottery, social hierarchies. But here it is reversed, it seems the ritual centre came first, then when enough hunter gathering people collected to worship – or so I believe – they realised they had to feed people. Which means farming.’ He waved at the surrounding hills, ‘It is no coincidence that in these same hills in the Fertile Crescent men and women first domesticated the local wild einkorn grass, becoming wheat, and they also first domesticated pigs, cows and sheep. This is the place where Homo sapiens went from plucking the fruit from the tree, to toiling and sowing the ground.’
  • People were already speculating that – if you see the Garden of Eden mythos as an allegory of the Neolithic Revolution: i.e. our fall from the relative ease of hunter-gathering to the relative hardships of farming (and life did get harder when we first started farming, as we worked longer hours, and caught diseases from domesticated animals), then Gobekli Tepe and its environs is probably the place where this happened
  • ‘I believe Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden’. It’s a quote I reused, to some controversy, because people took Klaus literally. But he did not mean it literally. He meant it allegorically.
  • This number is so large it is hard to take in. For comparison the Great Pyramid at Giza is 4,500 years old. Stonehenge is 5,000 years old. The Cairn de Barnenez tomb-complex in Brittany, perhaps the oldest standing structure in Europe, could be up to 7,000 years old.
  • I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’
  • These days Gobekli Tepe is not just a famous archaeological site, it is a Unesco World-Heritage-listed tourist honeypot which can generate a million visitors a year. It is all enclosed by a futuristic hi-tech steel-and-plastic marquee (no casual wandering around taking photos of the stones and workers
  • Necmi shows me the gleaming museum built to house the greatest finds from the region: including a 11,000 year old statue, retrieved from beneath the centre of Sanliurfa itself, and perhaps the world’s oldest life size carved human figure
  • ‘We have found no homes, no human remains. Where is everyone, did they gather for festivals, then disperse? As for their religion, I have no real idea, perhaps Gobekli Tepe was a place of excarnation, for exposing the bones of the dead to be consumed by vultures, so the bodies have all gone
  • Aslan tells me how archaeologists at Gobekli have also, more recently, found tantalising evidence of alcohol: huge troughs with the chemical residue of fermentation, indicating mighty ritual feasts, maybe.
  • he explains how scientists at Karahan Tepe, as well as Gobekli Tepe, have now found evidence of homes.
  • The builders lived here. They ate their roasted game here. They slept here. And they used, it seems, a primitive but poetic form of pottery, shaped from polished stone. They possibly did elaborate manhood rituals in the Karahan Tepe penis chambe
  • Yet still we have no sign at all of contemporary agriculture; they were, it still appears, hunter gatherers, but of unnerving sophistication.
  • Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe?
  • Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘We have dug up maybe 1 per cent of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones – might be buried here. He casually points at a rectangular rock peering above the dry grass. ‘That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably thousands more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’
  • Karahan too was definitely and purposely buried. That is the reason Necmi and his team were able to unearth the penis pillars so quickly, all they had to do was scoop away the backfill, exposing the phallic pillars, sculpted from living rock.
  • the most remarkable answer of all, and it is this: archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.
Javier E

"Modern chicken has no flavor" - let's make it in a lab - Salon.com - 0 views

  • “If you take a fresh strawberry after processing, it’s nothing. It tastes like nothing,” said Wright, as a way of explaining why the food industry is so reliant on the $12 billion global flavoring industry.
  • When I asked Dave Adams, the food scientist who founded Savoury Systems, why actual meat is such an inferior source for the chicken flavor that, strangely enough, goes into chicken, he gave me the same answer Wright did. Modern chicken, he grumbled, has no flavor. “They grow them so fast, they don’t have time to develop flavor,” he said. And chicken — even tasteless, scrap stuff — is more expensive than soy.
  • The flavoring game wasn’t always so sophisticated. When it began in Europe in the 19th century, companies imported spices and procured plants such as lemongrass, which yielded citronella oil, ideal for concentrating into lemon flavor. These essential oils went mostly into fragrances, medicines and candies. As the field of chemistry progressed in the latter half of the century, European scientists, particularly Germans, figured out how to synthesize flavors and fragrances from chemicals instead of having to wrench them from natural materials.
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  • World War II forced transformative market changes when supplies from Europe and elsewhere were cut off. Many companies expanded and moved across the Hudson to set up new factories
  • One of the newer breakthroughs to come along in the science of flavor is called taste modulation. About a decade ago, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego named Charles Zuker isolated, for the first time, the receptors on the tongue that are responsible for our perception of taste. He did this using tastebud cells from laboratory mice. What he found was that each cell was incredibly specific, containing receptors for just one taste — either sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory (also called umami
  • Coupled with mass spectrometers, which identify what’s been isolated, this technology opened up a vast world of possibilities, allowing for a much more thorough (though still incomplete) map of nature’s aromas. The number of flavor chemicals known in orange peels, for instance, has gone from nine in 1948 to 207 today. In spearmint leaves, it’s leapt from 6 to 100, and in black peppercorns, from seven to 273.
  • In nature, flavor comes as a sophisticated mix of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals, each with its own unique taste and smell. Using early-20th-century chemistry tools, scientists could hope to identify perhaps a handful of these in any given plant
  • Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.
Javier E

A People Without a Story - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Tigers were for so long the custodians of the Tamil people’s hope of self-realization. But theirs was a deeply flawed organization. Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers pioneered and perfected the use of the suicide bomber. This was not simply a mode of warfare, but almost a symbol, an expression of a self-annihilating spirit. And it was to self-annihilation that Mr. Prabhakaran committed the Tamils. He was a man who, like a modern-day Coriolanus, seemed to lack the imagination for peace. He took the Tamils on a journey of war without end, where no offer of compromise was ever enough, and where all forms of moderation were seen as betrayal.
  • This was an added layer of shame in the Tamil defeat. It was not just that they had lost the war. It was also that the grass-roots movement they originated, and for which they had paid taxes and sacrificed able-bodied men and women, had, in the end, been more vicious to them than to anyone else.
  • the loss the Tamils feel is really the loss of a story. They are now a people without a story, a traumatized people, devastated by decades of war and migration, whose dream of self-determination was hijacked by the nihilistic vision of their leader and turned to nightmare.
Javier E

'Prediction professor' who called Trump's big win also made another forecast: Trump wil... - 0 views

  • a Washington, D.C.-based professor insisted that Trump was lined up for a win — based on the idea that elections are “primarily a reflection on the performance of the party in power.”
  • Allan Lichtman uses a historically based system of what he calls “keys” to predict election results ahead of time. The keys are explained in-depth in Lichtman’s book, “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016.”
  • “I'm going to make another prediction,” he said. “This one is not based on a system; it's just my gut. They don't want Trump as president, because they can't control him. He's unpredictable. They'd love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I'm quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”
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  • “Polls are not predictors,” he said Friday in an email. “They are snapshots that simulate an election. They are abused and misused as predictors. Even the analysis of polls by Nate Silver and others which claimed a probable Clinton victory with from more than 70 percent to 99 percent certainty are mere compilations that are no better than the underlying polls.”
  • he has particular disdain for prediction systems that assign a likelihood of winning. “For all his acclaim, Nate Silver is only a clerk, not a scientific analyst,” Lichtman said.
  • As for the real reason for Trump's win, Lichtman says the blame can't be put on Hillary Clinton or her campaign — rather, he says, it was decided by the larger forces that shape American politics.
  • “The Democrats cannot rebuild by pointing fingers at Hillary Clinton and her campaign, which as the Keys demonstrated, were not the root cause of her defeat,” he said. “The Democrats can rehabilitate themselves only by offering an inspiring progressive alternative to Republican policies and building a grass-roots movement.”
Javier E

The GOP is at its peak, but conservatism has hit rock bottom - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Now, not only the quality but also the legitimacy of our democracy is at stake. This extreme threat would seem to require a commensurately radical response — some way to change the outcome.
  • no serious constitutional recourse seems to remain. While open to other options, I see none. It will now fall to citizens and institutions to (1) defend the legislature and judiciary from any encroachment, (2) defend every group of people from organized oppression, including Muslims and refugees, (3) expand and defend the institutions — from think tanks to civil liberty organizations — that make the case for a politics that honors human dignity. And pray for the grass to grow.
Javier E

The GOP is at its peak, but conservatism has hit rock bottom - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • It is one of fate’s cruel jokes that conservatism should be at its modern nadir just as the Republican Party is at its zenith — if conservatism is defined as embracing limited government, displaying a rational, skeptical and moderate temperament and believing in the priority of the moral order.
  • All these principles are related, and under attack
  • Conservatives believe that human beings are fallible and prone to ambition, passion and selfishness
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  • It is the particular genius of the American system to balance ambition with ambition through a divided government (executive, legislative and judicial)
  • Conservatives believe that finite and fallen creatures are often wrong. We know that many of our attitudes and beliefs are the brain’s justification for pre-rational tendencies and desires
  • All of us have things to learn, even from our political opponents. The truth is out there, but it is generally broken into pieces and scattered across the human experience. We only reassemble it through listening and civil communication.
  • And conservatives believe that a just society depends on the moral striving of finite and fallen creatures who treat each other with a respect and decency that laws can encourage but not enforce.
  • no serious constitutional recourse seems to remain. While open to other options, I see none. It will now fall to citizens and institutions to (1) defend the legislature and judiciary from any encroachment, (2) defend every group of people from organized oppression, including Muslims and refugees, (3) expand and defend the institutions — from think tanks to civil liberty organizations — that make the case for a politics that honors human dignity. And pray for the grass to grow.
  • this type of conservatism — a conservatism of intellectual humility and moral aspiration — also has the advantage of being organic. It grows with tenacity in hidden places, eventually breaking down the cement and asphalt of our modern life.
  • This is not the political force that has recently taken over the Republican Party
  • That has been the result of extreme polarization, not a turn toward enduring values. The movement is authoritarian in theory, apocalyptic in mood, prone to conspiracy theories and personal abuse, and dismissive of ethical standards. The president-elect seems to offer equal chances of constitutional crisis and utter, debilitating incompetence.
  • The plausible case that Russian espionage materially contributed to the election of an American president has been an additional invitation to anger. Now, not only the quality but also the legitimacy of our democracy is at stake.
  • But what is the proper conservative response? It is to live within the boundaries of law and reality
  • In the midst of all our justified skepticism, we can never be skeptical of this: that the reason for politics is to honor the equal value of every life, beginning with the weakest and most vulnerable. No bad goal — say, racial purity or communist ideology — outweighs this commitment. And no good goal — the efficiency of markets or the pursuit of greater equality — does either.
  • The GOP is at its peak, but conservatism has hit rock bottom
  • Michael Gerson Opinion
Javier E

The Party Surrenders - The New York Times - 0 views

  • a wide array of figures whose own commitments seemed incompatible with Trumpism decided that he was worth defending and eventually supporting.
  • These figures, strikingly, came from both sides of the pre-existing civil war
  • Early in the campaign, when it seemed as if Jeb Bush had a chance to coast to the nomination as the standard-bearer of the establishment, it was mostly voices from the professional base — talk-radio voices, Fox News voices and for a time Cruz himself — who worked to build up Trump as a populist alternative
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  • Then as it became clear that the most establishment-friendly candidates (Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, even the more right-wing Rubio) weren’t going to hack it, it was the establishmentarians and self-conscious moderates who decided that Trump was a man they could do business with, not like that crazy Tea Partier Senator Cruz.
  • Which is how Trump ended up as the candidate of Sean Hannity and John Boehner, Ann Coulter and Jon Huntsman, with Rush Limbaugh running interference for him with the grass roots, and various lobbyists doing the same on Capitol Hill.
  • The narcissism of small differences, in other words, led both the professional establishment and the professional base to surrender to a force that they had countless ideological and pragmatic reasons to oppose.
  • many were clearly motivated by grudges and fears instilled by the party’s civil war, and by a sense that even though Trump might represent a grave threat to their vision of Republicanism, it would still be better to serve under his rule for a season than to risk putting their hated intraparty rivals in the catbird seat.
  • So to catalog my wrongness: I overestimated the real commitment of both factions’ leaders to their stated principles and favored policies.
  • It is possible that a dishonorable, cowardly, unprincipled course will yield the result that many in both G.O.P. factions clearly crave: Trump defeated in the general election, his ideas left without a champion, and then a reversion to the party’s status quo
  • And yes, since to acquiesce to Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is to gamble recklessly with the party’s responsibilities to the republic, I overestimated their basic sense of honor.
  • it’s possible that the establishment and the Tea Party are more like Byzantium and Sassanid Persia in the seventh century A.D., and Trumpism is the Arab-Muslim invasion that put an end to their long-running rivalry, destroyed the Sassanid Dynasty outright, and ushered in a very different age. Write A Comment No doubt many thought at first that those invaders were a temporary problem, an alien force that would wreak havoc and then withdraw, dissolve, retreat.But a new religion had arrived to stay.
  • ) I overestimated their ability to put those principles ahead of personal resentments
  • Before Trump’s emergence, the Republican elite was in the midst of a long-running civil war, pitting the much-hated “establishment” against the much-feared “base,” the center-right against the Tea Party, the official party leadership against a congeries of activists, media personalities and up-and-coming right-wing politicians
  • But beneath the noise of battle, the establishment’s leaders and the base’s tribunes were often in near-agreement on policy (or, in some cases, on the absence thereof)
  • on many issues they were fighting about how to fight, as much as about what specifically to do.
  • Because of this underlying agreement, the G.O.P. elite’s civil war actually covered over many of the deeper ideological divisions within the party’s rank and file.
Javier E

The Wall Street Journal is giving Paul Ryan and the Republican Party terrible advice. - 1 views

  • If the Journal really wants to understand the rise of Trump, they’d do well to look closer to home. For years, congressional Republicans, Ryan foremost among them, have championed a Wall Street Journal–approved policy agenda that grass-roots Republicans have found doesn’t address their concerns.
  • for decades, the Journal has insisted the GOP make tax cuts for high earners a centerpiece of its economic agenda, despite the fact that support for this position is neither broad nor deep.
  • In the Journal’s ideal world, the GOP would largely abandon social conservatism and instead offer tax cuts for the rich, open borders, and deep cuts in programs like Social Security and Medicare. There is no longer any doubt that this generation of Republican voters has thoroughly repudiated the newspaper’s worldview.
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  • the Journal doesn’t support these policies because they are popular among Republicans or the public at large. Anyone with even a casual familiarity with American politics would know that simply isn’t so. Rather, the Journal takes these positions because they believe them to be intellectually and morally compelling.
  • hat’s fair enough. What the Journal should do, then, is give up on offering political advice and get on with making the intellectual and moral case for welcoming more poor immigrants to America while denying them food stamps and subsidized medical care.
nataliedepaulo1

Trump Intensifies His Attacks on Journalists and Condemns F.B.I. 'Leakers' - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • Trump Intensifies His Attacks on Journalists and Condemns F.B.I. ‘Leakers’
  • President Trump turned the power of the White House against the news media on Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people” and berating members of his own F.B.I. as “leakers” who he said were putting the nation at risk.
  • “The grass is dry on both sides,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary to George W. Bush, “so it only takes a very small match to light it on fire.”
Javier E

Can America Quit Football? - Patrick Hruby - Entertainment - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • To discuss the wider cultural implications of Seau's death, the Saints' scandal, and football's ongoing identity crisis, The Atlantic spoke with documentary filmmaker Sean Pamphilon. He recently released audio of former New Orleans defensive coordinator Gregg Williams imploring his players to injure opponents and is working on a film, The United States of Football, which explores the sport's dark, beloved place in America society.
  • What is The United States of Football about? Why are you making it? It's a cultural examination of football from pee-wee to the pros. It's about the motivation for playing and enjoying the sport. The escapism. The violence, for sure—it feeds something in our culture. There's a reason why baseball isn't the top sport anymore. It's too slow. People aren't getting the shit knocked out of them. We're a very aggressive culture.
  • I started working on it because I realized I was basically training my son to play football. Playing in the park all the time. We had this one patch of grass in a park in Brooklyn that was our field. It was our special place. In 2004, I was interviewing Kyle Turley for Run Ricky Run. He said to me, "If you have a kid, don't let him play football. Let him play any other sport." He was adamant about that. My son was six at the time. We kept playing in the park. Five years later, I read an article about Turley having a seizure. I had heard of CTE before. It never stuck with me. But after reading about Kyle, it did. I felt a personal connection with him. Because of his issues, I was becoming more interested in the health issues that players were having. And I had to decide: Did I still want my son to play football?
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  • So what does football mean to our culture, and why does it occupy such an important place? I think it means everything. I think it feeds and fills a lot of gaps.
  • Football means money for television networks. It means escapism for most of the country. I read a book by Mariah Burton Nelson called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football. That's a really interesting concept. The game feeds something that's primal in males; in a lot of women, it feeds something sexual.
  • You've also written, "Any parent who has a young tackle football playing child with an underdeveloped brain is committing apathetic child abuse if they do not educate themselves on this issue." Why? I wrote that because I interviewed a neurorehabilitation specialist. She talked to me about when she has kids in her office. I asked her, what's the difference between the times when she has the kids by themselves versus when the parents are there? When the parents are in there, it's scholarships. How they can make it in football. When the kids are alone, it's a different story. They feel so much pressure. They feel they have to do this to mitigate the financial damage they're going to cause their families by going to college
  • They don't understand that it's not just about second-impact syndrome killing you. It goes way deeper than that. There are people who literally do not become the people they were supposed to be becoming. Or they experience huge bouts of depression.
  • Are you allowing your son to play football? No. Now, if he's a 16-, 17-year-old kid and says, "Dad, it's in my blood, I have to do this," I would have a hard time saying no. I honestly would. I don't want to live his life for him. But I think my kid is smart. The last thing he wants to do is affect his brain because he knows it's his future. If you give him enough information, he can make smart choices. I hope people who see my film can make informed decisions. I think there are young kids who will watch this film and actually be able to challenge their parents, to say, "You know what? I don't think football is a good idea for me." I'd love to give young people the strength to stand up to their fathers. And it's not me saying that. It's all the people in the film.
Javier E

It's All About Mao - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Mr. Bo’s policies from 2007 to 2012 as the party secretary in the megacity of Chongqing replicated many of the methods Mao used to mobilize and govern the Chinese people.
  • Like Mao, Mr. Bo used mass campaigns and grass-roots mobilization to deal with the party’s governance problems.
  • Mr. Bo also initiated his own Mao-like “great leap forward” for economic development in Chongqing to win over the poor.
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  • Mr. Bo also learned from Mao to establish a cult of personality.
  • Without a full national reflection on Mao’s crimes, the current Communist Party leadership may be able to remove Mr. Bo as a political challenger while still embracing Mr. Bo’s political tactics to solidify its own power.
  • Modern Chinese history offers several examples of this “remove and subsume” strategy.
  • After the Empress Dowager Cixi cracked down on the reform movement in 1898, she promoted aggressive policies that did not differ from that of the reformists
  • After China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping removed Zhao Ziyang, an advocate for market reforms, as party secretary in 1989, Beijing conducted economic reforms that were bolder than Mr. Zhao’s
  • Now that party leaders have removed Mr. Bo as a political rival, will they adopt Mr. Bo’s revival of Maoist tactics?
Javier E

Puddleglum and the Savage - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth.
  • Two passages from their work illustrate this point — that comfort purchased by sacrificing transcendence might not be worth the cost. The first comes from Lewis’s Narnia novel “The Silver Chair,” in which a character named Puddleglum confronts a queen who has confined the heroes in an underground kingdom, and lulled them with the insistence that the underground world is all there is — that ideas like the sun and sky are dangerous wishful thinking, undermining their immediate contentment. “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things,” Puddleglum replies — “trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones ... We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”
  • The second comes from the end of “Brave New World,” when a so-called “Savage” raised outside the dystopia confronts its presiding “Controller,” Mustapha Mond. The Savage lists everything that’s been purged in the name of pleasure and order — historical memory, art and literature, religion and philosophy, the tragic sense. And Mond responds that “these things are symptoms of political inefficiency,” and that the comforts of modern civilization depend on excluding them. “But I don’t want comfort,” the Savage says. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
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  • in many ways the impulses driving the Kennedy nostalgists are the same ones animating Lewis’s Puddleglum and Huxley’s Savage — the desire for grace and beauty, for icons and heroes, for a high-stakes dimension to human affairs that a consumerist, materialist civilization can flatten and exclude.
  • “It is a serious thing,” Lewis wrote, describing the implications of his religious worldview, “to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship.”
grayton downing

BBC News - Starved Syria civilians flee besieged Damascus suburb - 0 views

  • Thousands of Syrian civilians have finally been allowed to leave the besieged Damascus suburb of Moadamiya.
  • The exodus of civilians has been made possible by an apparent relaxation of a blockade by government forces.
  • The situation has become so desperate that earlier this month Muslim clerics issued a religious ruling allowing people to eat cats, dogs and donkeys just to survive.
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  • For months, the UN and other aid agencies have been calling for urgent help, fearing the worst for the people of Moadamiya.
  • "We didn't see a piece of bread for nine months,"
  • "We were eating leaves and grass."
  • Before Syria's civil war began in 2011, some 95% of children in the country were vaccinated against the disease, but now an estimated 500,000 children have not been immunised.
  • The disease has been largely eradicated in developed countries but remains endemic in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Javier E

Texans Stick With Cruz Despite Defeat in Washington - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Texas is not America,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political consultant in Austin and the former spokesman for Mr. Cruz’s Republican predecessor in the Senate, Kay Bailey Hutchison. “It’s in America, but it’s not America. National polls don’t mean anything. Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in Texas since 1994. There are no Peter Kings in Texas.”
  • the fact that Mr. Cruz and House Republicans lost their fight with the White House over Mr. Obama’s health care law was a side issue. What mattered, they said, was that Mr. Cruz, who had campaigned on shaking up the status quo in Washington, had fulfilled his promise. From local party leaders to county commissioners to Tea Party members, Mr. Cruz was praised for his courage.
  • The doubts from Texas Republicans invariably play out behind closed doors. They do not fear Mr. Cruz’s personal wrath, but that of his supporters and the possibility of a primary fight if they criticize him. Mr. Cruz won his Senate seat by defeating one of the most powerful Republicans in Texas, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a victory that exposed the ideological split between moderate establishment Republicans and the younger, more aggressive and conservative movement of grass-roots activists and Tea Party supporters.
rachelramirez

Bernie Sanders Narrows Fund-Raising Gap With Hillary Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Bernie Sanders Narrows Fund-Raising Gap With Hillary Clinton
  • Mrs. Clinton, who has been able to tap into one of the most successful fund-raising networks in American politics, reported raising more than $28 million for her primary campaign since the beginning of July, while Mr. Sanders, who has largely eschewed fund-raising from large donors, reported raising about $26 million.
  • when she brought in a total of $47.5 million, almost all of it for the primary campaign.
Javier E

Donald Trump vs. the Party: Why He's Still Such a Long Shot - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Grass-roots conservatives and liberals may resent it, but many analysts — including me — argue that the outcome of presidential nominations is shaped or even decided by party elites.
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