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Javier E

Leadership and Leitkultur - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...29Habermas.html

Habermas leitkultur immigration Germany toleration

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The real cause for concern is that, as the Sarrazin and Wulff incidents show, cool-headed politicians are discovering that they can divert the social anxieties of their voters into ethnic aggression against still weaker social groups.
  • What we are seeing is not a revival of the mentalities of the 1930s. Instead, it is a rekindling of controversies of the early 1990s, when thousands of refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, setting off a debate on asylum seekers.
  • the idea of the leitkultur depends on the misconception that the liberal state should demand more of its immigrants than learning the language of the country and accepting the principles of the Constitution. We had, and apparently still have, to overcome the view that immigrants are supposed to assimilate the “values” of the majority culture and to adopt its “customs.”
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  • It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from the foreigners.
  • The motivations underlying each of the three phenomena — the fear of immigrants, attraction to charismatic nonpoliticians and the grass-roots rebellion in Stuttgart — are different. But they meet in the cumulative effect of a growing uneasiness when faced with a self-enclosed and ever more helpless political system.
  • The more the scope for action by national governments shrinks and the more meekly politics submits to what appear to be inevitable economic imperatives, the more people’s trust in a resigned political class diminishes.
  • Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.
Javier E

The Columbian Exchange and the Real Story of Globalization - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3454504576486421307171028.html

exchange globalization history Columbian biological

shared by Javier E on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • A growing number of scholars believe that the ecological transformation set off by Columbus's voyages was one of the establishing events of the modern world. Why did Europe rise to predominance? Why did China, once the richest, most advanced society on earth, fall to its knees? Why did chattel slavery take hold in the Americas? Why was it the United Kingdom that launched the Industrial Revolution? All of these questions are tied in crucial ways to the Columbian Exchange.
  • the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in North America before 1492.
  • Intoxicating and addictive, tobacco became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze.
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  • Sailors balanced out the weight by leaving behind their ships' ballast: stones, gravel and soil. They swapped English dirt for Virginia tobacco. That dirt very likely contained the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm. So, almost certainly, did the rootballs of plants that the colonists imported.
  • In worm-free woodlands, leaves pile up in drifts on the forest floor. Trees and shrubs in wormless places depend on litter for food. When earthworms arrive, they quickly consume the leaf litter, packing the nutrients deep in the soil in the form of castings (worm excrement). Suddenly, the plants can no longer feed themselves; their fine, surface-level root systems are in the wrong place. Wild sarsaparilla, wild oats, Solomon's seal and a host of understory plants die off; grass-like species such as Pennsylvania sedge take over. Sugar maples almost stop growing, and ash seedlings start to thrive.
  • Transported in the bodies of sailors, malaria may have crossed the ocean as early as Columbus's second voyage. Yellow fever, malaria's frequent companion, soon followed. By the 17th century, the zone where these diseases held sway—coastal areas roughly from Washington, D.C., to the Brazil-Ecuador border—was dangerous territory for European migrants, many of whom died within months of arrival
  • Initially, American planters preferred to pay to import European laborers—they spoke the same language and knew European farming methods. They also cost less than slaves bought from Africa, but they were far less hardy and thus a riskier investment. In purely economic terms, the historian Philip Curtin has calculated, the diseases of the Columbian Exchange made the enslaved worker "preferable at anything up to three times the price of the European."
  • At the time, England and Scotland shared a monarch but remained separate nations. England, the bigger partner, had been pushing a complete merger for decades. Scots had resisted, fearing a London-dominated economy, but now England promised to reimburse investors in the failed Panama project as part of a union agreement. As Mr. McNeill wrote, "Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Panama."
  • Eighteenth-century farmers who planted potatoes reaped about four times as much dry food matter as they did from wheat or barley. Hunger was then a familiar presence in Europe. France had 40 nationwide food calamities between 1500 and 1800, more than one every decade, according to the French historian Fernand Braudel. England had still more. The continent simply could not sustain itself. The potato allowed most of Europe—a 2,000-mile band between Ireland and the Ukraine—to feed itself. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar role in Italy and Romania.) Political stability, higher incomes and a population boom were the result. Imported from Peru, the potato became the fuel for the rise of Europe.
  • The sweet potato played a similar role in China. Introduced (along with corn) from South America via the Pacific silver trade in the 1590s, it suddenly provided a way for Chinese farmers to cultivate upland areas that had been unusable for rice paddies. The nutritious new crop encouraged the fertility boom of the Qing dynasty, but the experiment soon went badly wrong. Because Chinese farmers had never cultivated their dry uplands, they made beginners' mistakes. An increase in erosion led to extraordinary levels of flooding, which in turn fed popular unrest and destabilized the government. The new crops that had helped to strengthen Europe were a key factor in weakening China.
  • European ships accidentally imported the fungus-like organism, native to Peru, that causes the potato disease known as late blight. First appearing in Flanders in June 1845, it was carried by winds to potato farms around Paris in August. Weeks later it wiped out fields in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Blight appeared in Ireland on Sept. 13.
  • the Columbian Exchange, like a biological Internet, has put every part of the natural world in contact with every other, refashioning it, for better or worse, at a staggering rate.
Javier E

The G.O.P. Created Donald Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-gop-created-donald-trump.html

GOP demagogues politics

shared by Javier E on 12 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • A poll released in September found that Republicans were more likely to think that Obama was born abroad than that Ted Cruz was. That poll found that Trump supporters believed by nearly a three-to-one ratio that Obama was born overseas.
  • This echo chamber deluded its believers to the point that it sometimes apparently killed them. During the 2009-10 flu pandemic, right-wing broadcasters like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck denounced the call for flu shots, apparently seeing it as a nefarious Obama plot.
  • The upshot was that Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say that they would get flu shots, according to a peer-reviewed article in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. So when the pandemic killed up to 18,000 Americans, they presumably were disproportionately conservatives.
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  • The Republican strategy also nurtured expectations at the grass roots that could never be met. “The Republican Party created Donald Trump,” said Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, “because they made a lot of promises to their base and never kept them.”
  • This is a theme of a smart new book by E.J. Dionne Jr., “Why the Right Went Wrong,” who argues that Republican leaders repeatedly made unrealistic pledges — of smaller government, preservation of bygone values and an end to demographic change. “The history of contemporary American conservatism is a story of disappointment and betrayal,” he writes, and that helps explain the disenchantment with the Republican establishment.
Javier E

The monumental fall of the Republican Party - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-9443-7074c3645405_story.html

gop demagogue culture history rhetoric

shared by Javier E on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • After Obama won, the main goal of Republican leaders of all stripes was to take back Congress as a prelude to defeating the president in 2012. The angry grass-roots right — it has been there for decades but cleverly rebranded itself as the tea party in 2009 — would be central in driving the midterm voters the GOP would need to the polls. Since no one was better at rousing them than Palin, old-line Republican leaders embraced and legitimized her even if they snickered privately about who she was and how she said things.
  • Today’s Republican crisis was thus engineered by the party leadership’s step-by-step capitulation to a politics of unreason, a policy of silence toward the most extreme and wild charges against Obama, and a lifting up of resentment and anger over policy and ideas as the party’s lodestars.
  • this is a battle that needed to be joined long ago (which, I should say, is a central theme of my new book, “Why the Right Went Wrong”). A showdown was required before the steady, large-scale defection of moderate voters from the party. Now that opponents of Trump and Cruz need the moderates, they are no longer there
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  • instead of battling the impulses now engulfing the party, GOP honchos exploited them. They fanned nativist feeling by claiming that illegal immigrants were flooding across our borders, even when net immigration from Mexico had fallen below zero.
  • They promised radical reductions in the size of government, knowing no Republican president, including Ronald Reagan, could pull this off.
  • They pledged to “take the country back,” leaving vague the identity of the people (other than Obama) from whom it was to be reclaimed. Their audiences filled in the blank.
  • They denounced Obamacare as socialist, something, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is pointing out, it decidedly is not. Indeed, it’s rooted in proposals Republicans once made themselves.
  • Politicians whose rhetoric brought the right’s loyalists to a boiling point now complain that they don’t much like the result. But it’s a little late for that.
maddieireland334

Money Given to Kenya, Since Stolen, Puts Nike in Spotlight - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kenya-runners-are-drained.html

Kenya Nike agreement economy

shared by maddieireland334 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • When a Chinese clothing company swooped in and offered to sponsor Kenya’s famed runners, Nike panicked, Kenyan officials say.
  • Kenya’s athletics federation — has led to a major scandal in Kenya, a country in the midst of its biggest war against corruption in years.
  • In a contract signed several years ago, Nike agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in honorariums and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus,” which the former employee called a bribe.
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  • money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty.
  • immediately sucked out of the federation’s bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.
  • does not appear to be under investigation by the United States authorities.
  • all three Kenyan athletics officials accused of taking money from Nike have been suspended
  • For more than 20 years, Nike Inc. has been paying the Kenyan national runners’ association millions of dollars in exchange for the Kenyans wearing Nike’s signature swoosh, superb advertising in the running world.
  • Ethiopian runners, who also excel at middle- and long-distance races, have a sponsorship agreement with Adidas, but an official there said their contract contained no commitment bonus
  • In a sworn statement provided to Kenyan investigators, the former assistant said the $500,000 commitment bonus was “bribe money from Nike” so that the top officials could pay back the $200,000 from the scuttled deal with the Chinese company and then make even more by agreeing to sign up again with Nike.
  • Nearly every day there seems to be allegations of some new scandal: a government ministry buying plastic pens for $85 apiece, a Supreme Court judge taking a $2 million bribe, questions about what exactly happened to the proceeds of a multibillion-dollar bond deal.
  • Kenyan athletes were so outraged when they learned in November that hundreds of thousands of dollars from Nike had been stolen by their bigwigs that they staged a protest at their headquarters in Nairobi, with elite athletes camped out in the grass and holding up signs that read “blood sucers.” (Some of the runners never finished school.) Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • But those complaints may have been a ruse by Kenyan officials to get out of the Nike contract so they could receive a bribe from another company, said a member of the executive board of Kenya’s track and field federation, known as Athletics Kenya.
  • The sports-marketing agent who made the payment, Papa Massata Diack, was recently banned for life by the International Association of Athletics Federations, a global governing body for track and field.
  • After they received a letter from a Nike lawyer saying there were no legal grounds to terminate the contract, the Kenyan officials abruptly changed course.
  • They negotiated a new contract in which Nike agreed to pay Athletics Kenya an annual sponsorship fee of $1.3 million to $1.5 million — plus $100,000 honorariums each year and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus.”
  • Nike executives refused to discuss the contract, issuing a short statement that the money paid to Athletics Kenya was supposed to support the athletes. It said that Nike conducted business with integrity and that “we are cooperating with the local authorities in their investigation,” a point the Kenyan detectives dispute.
  • Western nations have threatened sanctions, and the United States government has been especially vocal about corruption, with White House officials unveiling a 29-point plan to root it out.
  • He said corruption in the athletics federation was so ingrained and so brazen that officials routinely extorted money from athletes who failed drug tests. He also said the organization’s chairman, Isaiah Kiplagat, had asked Nike to wire the bonus directly to his personal account, a request that Nike refused.
  • Within days, according to bank records, the $500,000 was withdrawn by Athletics Kenya’s top officials. There were no major track and field activities going on at the time, and the board member and the former administrative assistant said just about all of the money had been concealed from Athletics Kenya’s executive committee, including $200,000 sent to a bank account in Hong Kong.
  • Analysts said this case was especially tricky because it did not appear to fall under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the American law that covers crimes involving American companies and foreign government officials.
  • The Kenyan running association, while it receives some government money, is not a Kenyan government agency.
  • He noted that sports federations, like Athletics Kenya and FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, which is embroiled in its own corruption saga, often fell between the cracks of the rules that governed businesses, public agencies and traditional nonprofit organizations, even though sports federations have qualities of all three.
sgardner35

Tensions Simmer as a Small Town Seeks Answers in a Boy's Killing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llips-in-potsdam-new-york.html

shared by sgardner35 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Garrett Phillips, a popular and outgoing 12-year-old, was strangled in his home in fall 2011. The murder set off a mad, all-consuming pursuit for a killer in a region where such crimes are extraordinarily rare.
  • It took more than 30 months for prosecutors to charge him with second-degree murder, in May 2014 — and months more to secure a second indictment after the first was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. Despite the long pursuit, the case that a jury will hear this summer is far from perfect: There is a distinct lack of hard evidence, according to police testimony — no fingerprints, no witnesses, no hair or tissue samples, seemingly no conclusive forensic evidence at all connecting Mr. Hillary to the crime.In the long lead-up to the prosecution of Mr. Hillary, his supporters have highlighted not only the absence of physical evidence but the lack of any plausible motive or history that would suggest he was capable of murdering a child. They have also said that another man, a local sheriff’s deputy who once dated Garrett’s mother, was removed from suspicion too quickly.
  • “I can’t think of any other person who would want to hurt Garrett,” Ms. Cyrus said in a statement to the police after her son died.Like the Raquette River, which splits Potsdam in two, the case has divided opinion and tested residents’ patience in St. Lawrence County, a rural and job-challenged region where 94 percent of the population is white. But the emotional impact on Potsdam is raw and evident: Garrett’s former teachers and family friends cry at his memory, while the village’s elders echo one another, saying such terrible crimes simply do not happen in places like this.“It was like a meteor hitting,” said Ron Tischler, the mayor of Potsdam, home to around 9,600 residents that is about 25 miles south of Ontario.
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  • Mr. Hillary has also accused the county prosecutor, Mary Rain, of forsaking justice in the name of keeping a campaign promise: Ms. Rain was elected in 2013, in part on the strength of campaigning with Ms. Cyrus and promising to focus the energies of her small office on Garrett’s murder.
  • The suspicions and repercussions surrounding the boy’s death have rippled through time and distance. A key defense witness, for instance, suddenly discovered “Justice for Garrett” signs posted near his new workplace and home — each hundreds of miles from Potsdam. Mr. Hillary, now free on bail, found himself rearrested in September for allegedly violating an order of protection by using a drive-through A.T.M. at the bank where Ms. Cyrus worked.
  • Garrett Phillips was an ebullient child despite an early-life tragedy: When he was a toddler, his father, Robert — an amiable grounds worker at the State University of New York at Potsdam — suffered a brain aneurysm and never recovered. He died before Garrett was 3.Though Garrett never knew his father, the boy emulated him as he grew. Like his father, he hunted and fished; played any sport involving a ball; and balanced his rowdy and respectful sides, rambunctious sometimes in public but polite to family and strangers.
  • On the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2011, Garrett was playing basketball at the middle school with some friends as rain fell intermittently. A little before 5 p.m., Tandy Cyrus called his cellphone and told him to go home to do schoolwork.
  • Garrett got on his caster board — something of a cross between a skateboard and a snowboard — and headed home, his progress captured by a series of surveillance cameras and later described in a police timeline.
  • Combing the apartment for evidence, investigators found a possible clue: The screen of the bedroom window, about 20 feet off the ground, was “bent outward,” according to the incident report. A tile seemed to be broken on the roof of a lower section of the building, about 10 feet below, and there was a gash in the grass
  • His appeal, as both a coach and a person, is evident: His energy is intense, but his smile is unencumbered. He said he had always loved the North Country region’s rural mountains and summertime greenery — when it was warm it reminded him of Jamaica — though he was aware of the cultural boundaries beyond campus.“You’re a black person,” he said in an interview. “You were viewed as such.”A year after being hired by Clarkson, Mr. Hillary found that his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Stacia Lee, the mother of his three children, was struggling. At a bar called Ton’s, he became acquainted with a bartender, Tandy Cyrus.
  • “I go, ‘Listen. Help me understand. Are you and Tandy together?’” Deputy Jones said.Ms. Cyrus, 37, declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Hillary said he had been harassed because of his relationship with her. “It’s not a community with a lot of interracial relationships,” he said, adding that he had “to be mindful” when he was out. “I would go to the local restaurant,” he said, and Deputy Jones’s “friends would come up to me and like, ‘You know you’re not supposed to be dating John’s girl.’”A few months after they met, Mr. Hillary and Ms. Cyrus moved in together, forming a household of five, including his teenage daughter, Shanna-Kay, and Ms. Cyrus’s two sons.
  • Lieutenant Murray saw Mr. Duff as deeply credible.“I just can’t bring myself to fathom why a collegiate person playing on a Division III soccer team with his entire future ahead of him would lie and perjure himself on a sworn statement for no reason,” he said.On the evening after the murder, Lieutenant Murray went to watch Clarkson’s men’s soccer squad and videotaped Mr. Hillary coaching the penultimate game of a rough season. (The 2011 Clarkson squad had more losses than goals.)According to a search-warrant application, as Mr. Hillary strode along the sideline, he seemed stiff and sedate and had a “significant limp in his right leg,” something the detective inferred would have been caused by jumping from a second-story window. Last year, though, The Watertown Daily Times posted a clip from Lieutenant Murray’s video: In it, Mr. Hillary appears to walk unhindered along the sidelines.
  • As the men were being questioned, detectives searched for damning evidence. They seized Mr. Hillary’s phone and examined the contents of his pockets and his socks. Nude photographs, fingerprints and palm prints were taken. Mr. Hillary’s car was searched. (The timing of the seizures, and of the subsequent search warrants, has been a focus of Mr. Hillary’s civil suit.) The police also obtained his DNA from a coffee cup and the butt of a cigarette.
redavistinnell

Tragedy Forges Alliance for Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ge-in-concussion-protocol.html

tragedy alliance change new york times

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Tragedy ForgesAlliance for Change After a young rugby player died in Northern Ireland, his family anda brain expert set about to establish concussion guidelines in Britain.
  • As a heartbroken Mr. Robinson and his family left the Old Townhall Courthouse in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that day in September 2013, they were told they could slip out the back to avoid the news media. But Mr. Robinson was determined that his son should not die in vain, so he, along with his ex-wife, Karen Walton, and their families, exited through the front, spoke to a scrum of reporters and instantly landed among the most vocal advocates for concussion safety standards in Britain.
  • Within months, Mr. Robinson was meeting with politicians, sports executives, professional athletes and, most important, Dr. Willie Stewart, the foremost scientist on the subject in Britain who formed a bond with Mr. Robinson that has helped produce some of the most comprehensive concussion guidelines in the world.
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  • “It took something high profile to get people to understand, and it needed something in the media to make people aware,” Dr. Stewart said, referring to Benjamin’s death. “Even if it just means we’re preventing another Ben Robinson and not addressing dementia, that’s still very important. We’ve got to get things to change.”
  • Much of what Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart have accomplished is second nature in the United States, where concussions have been a growing part of the public dialogue for several years. Coaches and players in many sports are now taught that concussions, brain injuries resulting from a blow to the head or whiplash, can lead to headaches, memory loss, dizziness, sensitivity to light and other problems.
  • After an outcry from scientists, retired players and family members of injured and deceased athletes, the N.F.L. and other leagues have adopted protocols during games to detect concussions, pull players from the field, administer on-the-spot tests and detail when they can return to play.
  • hris Nowinski, a co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, an American nonprofit group that pushes for safe sports, said that concussion management in Britain lags five to six years behind the United States. Photo
  • “Scotland is a great example of a team of passionate advocates creating change in their community,” he said. “It’s a template that I hope others follow.”
  • Concussions were far from Mr. Robinson’s mind when his son joined his teammates from Carrickfergus Grammar School to play their rivals from Dalriada that day.
  • Soccer was Benjamin’s first love, but when he was 11, he took up rugby, which was mandatory at his new school. Initially, he did not enjoy the sport. But he warmed to it after winning the award for most improved player. He did strength and conditioning drills to add muscle, and arm wrestled with his father.
  • The night before the game, his son watched “Invictus,” the film about South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. He slept that night in his uniform. When his mother dropped him off at the field the next day, Benjamin flashed a thumbs-up sign.
  • As time ran down, Benjamin made a tackle and then collapsed. The game was stopped. Ms. Walton ran onto the field, where Benjamin’s teammate told her that he was out cold. He was rushed to Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.
  • But just minutes into the second half, Benjamin collided with another player, whose shoulder hit him in the chest, according to Mr. Robinson, who obtained a DVD of the match from the police. His son’s head whipped back, and he fell. The coach came to look at Benjamin, who was on the ground for about 90 seconds, and helped him to his feet. A doctor who was watching his son play for Dalriada briefly walked onto the field but then turned back.
  • When Mr. Robinson and his wife, Carol, arrived at the hospital, he knew the situation was dire from the faces of the staff. His son was on life support. The doctors said that his brain injury looked like it was sustained in a car accident and that he had a slim chance of surviving.
  • Initially, though, a police investigator deferred to the schools when it came to gathering comments from Benjamin’s teammates and opponents. Officials at Carrickfergus declined to discuss the case.
  • Ms. Walton and Mr. Robinson, though, had to piece together much of what happened on their own. One break came while Ms. Walton was visiting her son’s grave — which she said she did every day — and met one of his teammates, who was out jogging. He told her that Benjamin had been knocked out during the match, not just hit at the end, as had been contended.
  • The big break came when a police officer gave Mr. Robinson a copy of a video taken of the match by a student. Mr. Robinson watched the shaky footage repeatedly and confirmed that his son suffered not one big blow, but at least three, and that the coach attended to him several times.
  • Yet she effectively absolved the coach and referee, who were not “made aware of Benjamin’s neurological complaints,” even though the coach can be seen on the video checking on him after a hit during the match. She implied that Benjamin could have let them know about his condition, even though experts say concussion victims often cannot adequately communicate what they are experiencing.
  • Soon after, Mr. and Ms. Robinson, Dr. Stewart and James Robson, the chief medical officer of Scottish Rugby, met with Scotland’s sport and education officials to lobby for change. A concussion-awareness leaflet was produced at the beginning of 2014.
  • It has been an unlikely road for Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart, an avid bike rider with no experience as a sideline doctor. But about five years ago, even before Benjamin’s death, Dr. Stewart began to get calls from former professional players and had conversations with Scottish Rugby as it tried to address brain trauma and degenerative brain disease.
  • Still, some sports executives have anonymously challenged Dr. Stewart. In one match in April in London, Oscar, the Brazilian star player on Chelsea who is known by one name, collided violently with the goalkeeper yet was not immediately taken out of the game. There are no concussion spotters at Premier League matches, but team and league officials could watch a replay of the game later. That is why Dr. Stewart — an adviser to the Football Association — was dismayed that Oscar was in uniform three days later, violating the league’s return-to-play guidelines that require at least six days of rest.
  • “I don’t need to stand up in front of a conference of sports medicine and be personally criticized,” he said. “But then I’ll get a call from Peter, who is enthused about something we’ve done with the leaflets, or some research collaborators who are keen to move forward, and I say, ‘Ah, for all the small minds that are critical and obviously trying to deny the inevitable signs, there are a whole bunch of people who are having a positive effect on it.’
  • On a chilly evening in late October, with teenagers practicing on a nearby field, Lianne Brunton, the club’s physical therapist, showed off the test on a tablet computer. At the start of the season, hundreds of youth and adult players are timed as they read aloud a series of numbers on several screens. If a player is suspected of having a concussion during a match, he or she is taken off and asked to read the numbers again. Players who take longer are evaluated further.
  • The test, which is widely used in the United States, is another example of how the grass-roots campaign to improve safety standards after Benjamin’s death has changed attitudes.
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
alexdeltufo

Syrians weep as first aid in months reaches Madaya - CNN.com - 1 views

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

shared by alexdeltufo on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The first shipment of foreign aid since October reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya on Monday,
  • The first shipment of foreign aid since October reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya on Monday
  • It was set to deliver enough aid to sustain 40,000 people for a month, WFP spokeswoman Abeer Etefa said.
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  • The situation has been so dire that a doctor told CNN that he has nothing to give his patients except sugar or salt water.
  • But the United Nations said last week that it had received credible reports of people dying of starvation and that the Syrian government had agreed to allow aid convoys into Madaya, Foua and Kefraya.
  • On Monday, activists said that 15 people -- including at least 12 children -- had been killed in an aerial bombardment on a school in the town of Enjarah on the western outskirts of Aleppo, the largest Syrian city, which is in the north of the country.
  • He denied the Syrian government is using starvation as a tool of war, which is generally considered a war crime.
  • For example, in Damascus, flour costs 79 cents a kilogram. But in Madaya, a kilo of flour costs $120, and a kilo of rice costs $150.
  • In the capital, milk costs $1.06 a liter. But in Madaya, the price soars to $300 a liter.
  • "The problem is the terrorists are stealing the humanitarian assistance from the Syrian Red Crescent as well as from the United Nations," al-Ja'afari said.
  • The first shipment of foreign aid since October reached the besieged Syrian city of Madaya on Monday
  • Syria's state news agency, 65 trucks loaded with aid supplies entered Madaya and two other besieged towns, Foua and Kefraya.
  • It's heartbreaking to see so many hungry people," said Sajjad Malik, the UNHCR representative in Syria. "
  • "Syrians are suffering and dying across the country because starvation is being used as a weapon of war by both the Syrian government and armed groups."
  • An activist described scenes of chaos at the school as he arrived after the strike, about 8 a.m. local time Monday.
  • "Everyone was trying to find his children."
  • Um Sultan said she hears every day of someone too sick to leave the bed.
  • "My husband is now one of them,
  • "Grass for the old man," she replies.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Nick Paton Walsh - CNN
drewmangan1

Tension between ranchers and federal officials is dangerously high in Nevada - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...nchers-blm-20160114-story.html

federal

shared by drewmangan1 on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • He wishes ranchers would see the benefit of limited grazing, which will help the grasses recover and sustain their herd in the long run."I just don't see it ending that way here," he said. "The people who abuse the public lands the worst are the ones who will fight the hardest."
Javier E

This Is What the Trump Abyss Looks Like - 0 views

nymag.com/...he-trump-abyss-looks-like.html

trump demagogue politics Culture authoritarian mob Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • there is a credible argument that, given soaring inequality, and globalization’s disproportionate impact on the middle classes and working poor, tax relief for many in the lower half of the earning population is a good idea. I agree. So why not give it to them, rather than the obscenely wealthy? And why not make it revenue-neutral or even debt-reducing as well as helpful to social stability?
  • You could indeed pay for big middle class tax cuts or an increase in tax credits for the working poor if you doubled the estate tax, or adding a new tax bracket - say, 45 percent - for those earning over $1 million a year. This would be a political master-stroke for the Trump administration (which is why Steve Bannon was rumored to favor something on these lines). It would instantly rebrand the GOP. It might even get buy-in from the Democrats. It could pass without using reconciliation rules in the Senate, thus helping entrench it in the system. It would help defuse our dangerous tribalism. It would do a lot to restore generational fairness, and counter the emergence of a rich caste of people who are fabulously wealthy for doing nothing. It would support work rather than privilege, a meritocracy rather than an oligarchy.
  • If the Democrats were smart, they would propose something like this themselves - and get ahead of the GOP, using it as a platform for 2018. And if the Republicans could abandon zombie Reaganism, they could rescue themselves from the electoral oblivion they so richly deserve. There’s a win-win here for both parties and the country.
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  • The key is to sustain a sense of the urgency of the moment, a resolute refusal to accept this descent into an illiberal authoritarianism, and a decision to put all our differences aside for a year in order to mobilize a turnout next year that eclipses Obama’s. We have to turn the mid-terms into a presidential election. Sane Republicans need to vote for the Democrat. Leftists have to put aside their divisive identity politics. Liberals need to coalesce around a simple strategy - not impeaching but checking Trump decisively.
  • the only reliable and sane solution is a massive mobilization of the anti-Trump majority at the polls next year. The huge Democratic fundraising advantage is encouraging; as are the new grass roots organizations that are going in strength. Maybe an unexpected leader from the left or center might emerge. Maybe a strong Democratic message that can somehow keep its minority edge and simultaneously re-engage the white Obama-Trump voters in the midwest.
  • He is the total master of an enormous mob that, so far, has completely overcome the elites. He achieves this mastery through incendiary oratory, hourly provocations, and relentless propaganda. His rallies are events of mass hysteria and rage. His propaganda machines - Fox News, Limbaugh, Breitbart, Drudge - rarely crack
  • And there is no one in our political life capable of matching this power. Name one, if you can. And when you look at the Democratic field of 2020, no one seems up to it at all. Among the few responsible Republicans left, what we see is either utter cowardice in the face of an enraged base, or the kind of courage that manifests itself too late to make a difference, which is to say no real courage at all.
  • this base support is unshakable. It is not susceptible to reason. No scandal, however great, will dislodge it - because he has invaded his followers’ minds and psyches as profoundly as he has the rest of ours. He is fused with them more deeply now, a single raging id, a force that helps us understand better how civilized countries can descend so quickly into barbarism.
  • In a country led by a swirling void, all sorts of inhibitions slowly slip away. Nativism, racism, nationalism: these are very potent catalysts of human darkness
  • by far the most important development in all this, the single essential rampart, is how, through all this, Trump has tightened his grip on 35 percent of the country. He has done this when he has succeeded but also critically when he has failed, because he has brilliantly turned his incapacity to be president into an asset with his base. No wall? Congress’ fault. Obamacare in place? The GOP’s fault. No tax cut? Ditto. The only way forward? A deeper and deeper trust in him. Only he can fix the Congress by purging it. Only he can fix the Courts through nominees who will never stand up to him.
  • And we know something after a year of this. It will go on. This is not a function of strategy or what we might ordinarily describe as will. It is because this president is so psychologically disordered he cannot behave in any other way. His emotions control his mind; his narcissism overwhelms even basic self-interest, let alone the interest of the country as a whole. He cannot unite the country, even if, somewhere in his fathomless vanity, he wants to. And he cannot stop&nbsp;this manic defense of ego&nbsp;because if he did, his very self would collapse.
  • This is why he lies and why he cannot admit a single one of them. He is psychologically incapable of accepting that he could be wrong and someone else could be right. His impulse - which he cannot control - is simply to assault the person who points out the error, or blame someone else for it.
  • Yes, the forms of the Constitution remain largely intact after nine months. But the norms that make the Constitution work are crumbling. The structure looks the same, but Trump has relentlessly attacked their foundations
anonymous

For Republican Leaders in Congress, the Headaches Keep Mounting - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ray-trump-senate-congress.html

republican party US politics

shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • For Republican Leaders in Congress, the Headaches Keep Mounting
  • Republican leaders in Congress are under attack from all sides of their own party, battered by voters from the right and left, spurned by frustrated donors and even threatened by the Trump White House for ineffective leadership and insufficient loyalty.
  • Republicans are increasingly mystified by their own grass roots, an electorate they thought they knew, and distressed that a wave of turnover in their ranks could fundamentally change the character of Congress. They fear that the inchoate populism that Mr. Trump personifies, and which Mr. Bannon is attempting to weaponize against incumbents, is on the march.
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  • Mr. Trump is not helping.
  • To maintain their grip on the party, Republican leaders and their supporters are scrambling to recruit new allies and pleading with their loyalists to remain in Washington — not always with success.
  • 2018 could bring back the ferocious infighting of the Tea Party insurgency.
  • The pressure is mounting for Republicans to secure real victories, he said, with tax reform now the overwhelming goal.
  • Asked if the White House or congressional leaders had reached out to reassure him that things were under control, Mr. Pope shot back: “No. It is not under control.”
anonymous

The Daily 202: Throwing a bomb into the insurance markets, Trump now owns the broken he... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...59dff67a30fb041a74e75d48

trump insurance politics US history crisis

shared by anonymous on 13 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Throwing a bomb into the insurance markets, Trump now owns the broken health-care system
  • THE BIG IDEA:&nbsp;President Trump took two giant steps Thursday to disembowel the Affordable Care Act.
  • The administration announced late last night that he will immediately halt cost-sharing reductions. These $7 billion in annual subsidies to health insurers allow around 7 million low-income Americans to afford coverage.
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  • This is not “letting” Obamacare fail. Many nonpartisan experts believe that these active measures are likely to undermine the pillars of the 2010 law and hasten the collapse of the marketplaces.
  • “Critics, who include state insurance commissioners, most of the health-insurance industry and mainstream policy specialists, predict that a proliferation of these other kinds of coverage will have damaging ripple effects, driving up costs for consumers with serious medical conditions and prompting more insurers to flee the law’s marketplaces.”
  • No matter how much it might be the previous guy’s fault, many voters won’t buy it. People have very short attention spans.
  • The uncertainty about what Trump would do has already driven premium prices higher for 2018. Now it’s going to get worse.
  • The Pottery Barn rule comes to mind: You break it, you own it
  • Beyond yesterday’s directives, Trump has been personally involved in undercutting the system.
  • Trump thinks his latest gambit will bring Democrats and Republicans to the table: The president suggested on Twitter this morning that he wants to negotiate now:&nbsp;
  • He has just created an artificial political crisis by ending another Obama-era program. He believes that Congress will swing into action so that millions of vulnerable people are not harmed by his decision. Instead of undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children, this time it’s the poor and chronically ill who are pawns.
  • Even if a deal was reached in the Senate, conservatives in the House won’t want to vote for anything that their grass-roots supporters will see as protecting the status quo.
  • Democrats believe they are the ones with leverage.
  • “Make no mistake about it, Trump will try to blame the Affordable Care Act, but this will fall on his back and he will pay the price for it.”
Javier E

Behind The Scenes At The Earth Day Party Turned QAnon Freak Show - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...lifornia-earth-day-party-qanon

conspiracy theory alt-right crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 10 May 19 - No Cached
  • Believers of the conspiracy theory, which is based on the convoluted notion that a “deep state” within the government is trying to bring down President Donald Trump and his followers, latched onto an innocuous tweet from former FBI Director James Comey sent on Saturday, April 27. The conspiracists dissected the tweet, which was part of the hashtag trend #FiveJobsIveHad, somehow extracting “five Jihad(s)” and circling the first initial of every job Comey had listed: GVCSF — aka the Grass Valley Charter School Foundation
  • “These people were using words like massacre, bloodbath, not saying they’re gonna come do this but that’s what’s out there,” Willoughby said. “We know from recent events that these theories, though they can be proven false, with no factual or logical evidence to back them up, can motivate and mobilize unstable people to do dangerous things.
  • The Blue Marble Jubilee was cancelled. Thousands of dollars were lost on event planning with none recouped from the festival itself, leaving the small school in the red
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “It just continues to baffle me that these folks think they did some sort of good here. It’s not only horrendously sad but equally disturbing and frustrating,” Willoughby said of the QAnon believers who are celebrating their role in averting disaster. “You can’t speak to them in a logical, factual way, so how can you combat this? What they actually did was destructive and divisive and filled with fear and hate.”
Javier E

Opinion | Ryan, Republicans and the Republic - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ul-ryan-trump-republicans.html

trump politics Speaker compromise congress

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • it was the Faustian bargain he struck with the president, normalizing the abnormal and forgiving the unforgivable for the sake of a single mediocre policy win.
  • It will remember the alacrity and ease with which the supposedly likable face of pro-growth, family-friendly conservatism opportunistically played the sycophant to the congenitally mendacious and previously priapic nativist bigot who, through a bad fluke, captured the White House.
  • A conservative rejoinder to this critique is that the speaker had no choice; that Trump was the lemon with which he had to make lemonade. Nonsense. Congress and the White House are coequals, and Ryan and other Republicans who saw Trump for what he is never owed him obeisance
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  • They owed the country an alternative political vision, untainted by Trumpism, which could emerge from the debacle of this presidency with clean hands.
  • Is there an alternative?
  • There are also grass-root efforts, not all of them partisan or even particularly right-leaning, but committed to defending foundational liberal values globally in an era of creeping authoritarianism and debased populism.
  • “The center-right and center-left are still joined by a broad set of common values, including respect for free speech and dissent, a belief in the benefits of international trade and immigration, respect for law and procedural legitimacy, a suspicion of cults of personality, and an understanding that free societies require protection from authoritarians promising easy fixes to complex problems.”
  • “There is still a center in Western politics, and it needs to be revitalized intellectually, culturally, and politically,” reads a plank in its manifesto
  • the nonpartisan Renew Democracy Initiative, led by Garry Kasparov, which had its launch this month.
  • This may not be a strictly Republican position, certainly not in this administration. It is a republican one
  • it offers conservatives disgusted with what their former partisan home has become a different sort of base from which they can begin to build a better form of politics, free of both the corruptions of Trumpism and the capitulations of Ryanism.
  • Liberals who understand that our common political health requires a morally and intellectually sound conservative movement might consider getting aboard.
Javier E

Opinion | Baby Boomers Reach the End of Their To-Do List - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...baby-boomers-to-do-list.html

happiness American dream boomers history culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • now the boomers are approaching the other side. Not death necessarily (though the time has begun when no one will say we were cut down too early). We’re reaching the other side of striving.
  • ight, the way a Frenchman expects to have decent wine at a reasonable price, and the whole month of August on vacation.
  • Maybe it goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, our founding document. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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  • But happiness is the only word in the Declaration of Independence triad that doesn’t stand alone. Happiness is not, like life and liberty, a given. Happiness in the American credo is a job. It must be pursued
  • The essential American word isn’t happiness. It’s pursuit.
  • This is where the struggle is engaged, happiness as a national enterprise. Its pursuit is the loneliness coiled within the heart of the American dream.
  • But how about just giving up? What about wasting time? Giving up or perhaps giving over. To what? Perhaps what an earlier age called “the life of the mind,” the phrase that describes the sovereign self at ease, at home in the world
  • Other cultures labor, but what other nation implores each citizen to tackle happiness as a solo endeavor, a crazy paradox of a hunt for something that cannot, after all, be earned but can only be bestowed from the mysterious recesses of life?
  • Give it up. Waste the day.
  • That’s what that great American lounger Whitman did. “I loaf and invite my soul,” he wrote. “I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
  • Loafing is not a prudent business plan, not even a life plan, not a recognizably American project. But it begins to look a little like happiness, the kind that claims you, unbidden
  • Maybe this is what my father’s third stage of life is about — wondering, rather than pursuing. You look good — meaning, hey, you’re still alive, you’re still here, and for once you don’t really need to have a to-do list
malonema1

Historians Have Long Thought Populism Was a Good Thing. Are They Wrong? - POLITICO Maga... - 0 views

www.politico.com/...trump-populism-history-216320

US history culture

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Imagine, if you will, that millions of hard-working Americans finally reached their boiling point. Roiled by an unsettling pattern of economic booms and busts; powerless before a haughty coastal elite that in recent decades had effectively arrogated the nation’s banks, means of production and distribution, and even its information highway; burdened by the toll that open borders and free trade imposed on their communities; incensed by rising economic inequality and the concentration of political power—what if these Americans registered their disgust by forging a new political movement with a distinctly backward-looking, even revanchist, outlook? What if they rose up as one and tried to make America great again?
  • To clarify: This scenario has nothing whatsoever to do with Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party. Rather, it is a question that consumed social and political historians for the better part of a century. They clashed sharply in assessing the essential character of the Populist movement of the late 1800s—a political and economic uprising that briefly drew under one tent a ragtag coalition of Southern and Western farmers (both black and white), urban workers, and utopian newspapermen and polemicists.
  • But does that point of view hold up after 2016? The populist demons Trump has unleashed—revanchist in outlook, conspiratorial in the extreme, given to frequent expressions of white nationalism and antisemitism—bear uncanny resemblance to the Populist movement that Hofstadter described as bearing a fascination with “militancy and nationalism … apocalyptic forebodings … hatred of big businessmen, bankers, and trusts … fears of immigrants … even [the] occasional toying with anti-Semitic rhetoric.” A year into Trump’s presidency, the time is right to ask whether Hofstadter might have been right after all about Populism, and what that possibly tells us about the broader heritage of such movements across the ages.
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  • In response to these hardships, farmers in the South and Midwest formed a wide variety of self-help organizations, like the Grange, to pool capital and farm output and exert pressure on railroads. They created third-party organizations, like the short-lived Greenback Party, to advocate an expansion of paper currency and silver specie. Ultimately, they coalesced in 1892 under the banner of the People’s Party—aka, the Populist Party—and adopted a wide-ranging platform advocating progressive tax reform; free coinage of silver; government-backed credit facilities for small farmers; limitations on public subsidies to corporations; and the nationalization of railroads, to ensure equal freight rates for all producers. They forged wobbly but, for a time, effective coalitions with urban labor organizations.
  • Studying the Populists from the vantage point of the mid-1950s, Hofstadter saw something different. The Civil War, he noted, had catalyzed a global information revolution: By the 1870s, railroads spanned the American continent and submerged oceanic telegraph lines bound Europe, North America and South America in real time, allowing them to integrate their markets for agricultural, mineral and finished goods. The era saw a massive movement of internal migrants from farms to cities, and immigrants from one continent to another. To invoke a more modern term, globalization was drawing people in closer proximity. It also bound markets together, compelled a global drop in commodity prices and created a boom-and-bust cycle that was normally outside the ability of local or even national governments to control.
  • Populists also showed antipathy toward immigrants, Jewish and otherwise. “We have become the world’s melting pot,” wrote Tom Watson, a leading Georgia populist. “The scum of creation has been dumped on us. Some of our principal cities are more foreign than American. The most dangerous and corrupting horde of the Old World have invaded us. The vice and crime they planted in our midst are sickening and terrifying. What brought these Goths and Vandals to our shores? The manufacturers are mainly to blame. They wanted cheap labor; and they didn’t care a curse how much harm to our future might be the consequence of their heartless policy.”
  • or these scholars, Populism was of a piece with America’s sunnier grass-roots tradition—a heritage that included first- and second-wave feminism, the post-war Civil Rights movement, organized labor and the environmental and consumer rights movements. It was about ordinary people banding together to make a difference. They weren’t all perfect; not every activist was a paragon of tolerance. But in the main, they represented some of the best instincts in American political culture.
  • ut if a historian 100 years hence were to read in its entirety Trump’s Twitter feed—or watch five years’ worth of Fox News and comb through a full run of Infowars and Breitbart—it seems likely he or she would want to take a second look at Hofstadter.
  • Should that move us to reconsider other populist movements? Looking back on Huey Long and Father Coughlin, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan through the lens of Trumpian politics, the ugly, unhinged strain to American populism that meets at the intersection of the far right and far left appears in sharp relief. Hofstadter observed this underbelly of mass politics and warned against it. But Hofstadter is most useful when we scratch below that surface. His goal wasn’t to establish that populists, who over time have pursued a wide variety of ideological and policy ends, are bad people. His larger point was that populist eyes are often cast in the wrong direction—backward. At critical junctures in history, they prove unreconciled to economic and cultural change and to globalization, both in the form of open markets and open borders. They endeavor to reestablish lost worlds—a Jeffersonian republic of small farms and independent shops, or a latter-day utopia of tidy suburbs and unionized factories and mines, that have no hope of survival in a changing world. They bitterly but understandably resist acknowledgment that the country in which they grew up has irrevocably changed.
manhefnawi

Charles III of Spain: an Enlightened Despot, Part II | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...ain-enlightened-despot-part-ii

Charles 16-18THC Spain Political Reforms

shared by manhefnawi on 13 May 18 - No Cached
  • Hercules for his brave struggle with the hydra of the Inquisition
  • With him in charge of the government, Charles was able to get into his stride as an enlightened despot: schools were founded to fill the void left by the expulsion of the Jesuits; the currency was reformed; a census was taken; and Madrid became, for the first time, a city worthy of Europe
  • He did not like it, but he believed that the Spaniards wanted it, and the events of 1766 had taught him the danger of offending national prejudices
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • During Aranda’s administration, an ambitious project was adopted for colonizing a depopulated area in the South of Spain, the Sierra Morena, with colonists from abroad, mostly from Germany
  • Charles certainly tried to reduce the authority and privilege of the Church, but he was pious and his intervention was moderate.
  • It was not merely what the Inquisition did, but what it deterred men from doing
  • it is an absolute principle always to do what has been done the day before and to do it in absolutely the same way
  • Charles issued a decree declaring officially that the trades of tanner, blacksmith, tailor and shoemaker did not degrade the person exercising them, or his family. To carry the point further, he worked from time to time with his hands in his own factories, and he was proud of having made the boots and main items of a soldier’s equipment
  • It is difficult to exaggerate the darkness of the intellectual climate in which Charles and the men of the enlightenment had to work
  • It is impossible to understand Charles’ reign or the achievement of the men of the enlightenment in Spain without keeping constantly in mind how widespread and entrenched were the forces of conservatism, intolerance and privilege, and how few were the men who believed that the only hope for the country lay in the introduction of new ideas—in the acceptance of reason rather than tradition as the lode-star of human activity
  • has never produced a speculative scientist of great renown
  • Few people here discover any love for the sciences. Books are little read
  • Much was done to reform the universities
  • There was a revulsion against war and a condemnation of militarism. ‘This peninsula,’ wrote Cadalso, ‘has not enjoyed anything that can be called peace for nearly 2,000 years. It is a marvel that there is any grass in the fields or water in the fountains
  • In 1771 he created a new order that opened the doors of the nobility to the bourgeoisie
  • Along with the embourgeoisement of the Spanish central government went a fresh broom in local affairs that swept away many of the old hereditary offices, opened them up to anyone who was qualified regardless of birth, and even introduced elections for certain posts
  • He also encountered the deep-seated conservatism of the people who feared the slightest change
  • He established royal factories for clocks and porcelain; infant industries were protected, and some of the restrictive practices of the enormously powerful guilds were curtailed
  • The first national bank of Spain was founded, and economic societies were established in many parts of the country to spread technical knowledge
  • Trade with the colonies was encouraged; new highways were built
  • Charles was also a considerable patron of the arts and sciences. He founded an astronomical observatory and an immense hospital.
  • Napoleon remarked to his brother, Joseph, when he gave him the crown of Spain
  • But Charles’s struggle for internal reform was partly stultified by his failure to spare the country the cost of further war. In 1775 an expedition was undertaken against Algiers which failed ignominiously
  • The 1733 family Compact between the Kings of France and Spain contained an article committing His Most Christian Majesty to do everything, if necessary using force, to compel the British to restore Gibraltar to Spain
  • It bound Madrid to Paris and prevented Spain from making common cause with Britain
  • the main source of five Anglo-Spanish wars in seventy-five years and was the prime objective for which Spain joined France in the War of American Independence
  • Spain’s participation in the war led at first to a joint French-Spanish plan to invade England, but this soon had to be abandoned and, after the failure of secret peace talks, Spanish activity came to be concentrated more and more upon the capture of the Rock
  • as if all the ingenuity of Europe was combined against the Rock
  • From all over France and Spain spectators flocked to see the 7,000 British defenders under General George Elliot defeated by the 40,000 men under the command of the renowned Spanish general
  • The battle was over, and with it Spain’s chance of recovering the Rock by force
  • But George III was in favour of giving it up since he was convinced that ‘this proud fortress’, to use his own words, would be ‘the source at least of a constant lurking enmity between England and Spain’
  • He so arranged things that the British offer never reached the court of Madrid
  • The French Minister did not want to make the sacrifice of territory necessary to accomplish the exchange; nor did he wish to weaken the ties that bound the Bourbon powers by removing the greatest single obstacle to a reconciliation between Spain and England
  • In the light of history, it looks as if a golden opportunity was missed for resolving the problem. Spain recovered Minorca and acquired the whole of Florida. But the source of enmity continued to lurk
  • The war had brought serious consequences for Spain’s internal economy. But it had also not been without its effect on the problems of the Spanish-American colonies which now had a Republic on their doorstep
  • the movement for separation. The development of trade led to more prosperity among many of the creoles and, hence, to in-dependent-mindedness
  • the propagation of the ideas of the enlightenment
  • He insisted on every detail of every new idea being thrashed out in one or other of the various councils of state
  • like his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, that punctuality is the courtesy of kings
  • He was not out for himself, but for the welfare and happiness of his subjects
  • There could be no attenuation of his absolute authority. It was government for the people, certainly, but without the people
  • If the hopes were not entirely fulfilled and if Spain before long slipped backwards again into the darkness from which Charles had tried to lift her, the causes were hardly his responsibility.
  • The French Revolution spread such fears amongst the reforming rulers of Spain that they panicked and suspended all progress
  • Charles simply did not reign long enough to establish for all time the climate of change he had introduced
Javier E

Ag Dept Conceals Studies About Impact Of Climate Change On Food - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...climate-change-food-crops-rice

climate change food impact effect crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture is concealing government-funded studies about the harms climate change will wreak on the farming and food production industry,
  • The studies have been conducted by scientists within the Ag Department and approved by the Agricultural Research Service. They focus specially on the negative impacts of&nbsp; increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the farming and cattle industry
  • the studies found that rice does not contain as many vitamins when grown in carbon-heavy environments and carbon dioxide increases can reduce the growth of grasses needed to raise cattle.
Javier E

How YouTube Radicalized Brazil - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...youtube-brazil.html

brazil right youtube recommendation engine radicalization crisis

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • “YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,”
  • Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.
  • New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.
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  • A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life
  • YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology.
  • Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.
  • And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation
  • Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors
  • But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism
  • As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest
  • The system now drives 70 percent of total time on the platfor
  • Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
  • Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data &amp; Society, attributed the disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer engagement, and the revenues it generates.
  • Maurício Martins, the local vice president of Mr. Bolsonaro’s party in Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube — including his own.
  • “Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Mr. Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.”
  • “It was like that with everyone,”
  • Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a Bolsonaro video,”
  • More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often citing as evidence YouTube stars like Mr. Moura, the guitarist-turned-conspiracist.
  • “If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”
  • In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Mr. Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely reflecting political trends.
  • Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.
  • By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels like Mr. Moura’s
  • Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown many more.
  • The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an audience for them
  • One of those channels belonged to Mr. Bolsonaro, who had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies
  • The conspiracies were not limited to politics. Many Brazilians searching YouTube for health care information found videos that terrified them: some said Zika was being spread by vaccines, or by the insecticides meant to curb the spread of the mosquito-borne disease that has ravaged northeastern Brazi
  • The videos appeared to rise on the platform in much the same way as extremist political content: by making alarming claims and promising forbidden truths that kept users glued to their screens.
  • Doctors, social workers and former government officials said the videos had created the foundation of a public health crisis as frightened patients refused vaccines and even anti-Zika insecticides.
  • Not long after YouTube installed its new recommendation engine, Dr. Santana’s patients began telling him that they’d seen videos blaming Zika on vaccines — and, later, on larvicides. Many refused both.
  • Medical providers, she said, were competing “every single day” against “Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube” — and they were losing
  • Brazil’s medical community had reason to feel outmatched. The Harvard researchers found that YouTube’s systems frequently directed users who searched for information on Zika, or even those who watched a reputable video on health issues, toward conspiracy channels
  • As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame
  • Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right
  • Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots.
  • As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together
  • However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
  • When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.
  • “The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.
  • “‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’
  • In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” — lynching. Mr. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012 that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.
  • Mr. Jordy, his tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had turned their lives upside down.One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.
  • Mr. Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted her to feel fear,” he said
  • The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”
  • Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
  • Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
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