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ethanmoser

ISIS Hotbed Looms as Risk in Mosul Fight - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...risk-in-mosul-fight-1477571117

hotbed us crisis isis hawija terrorism

shared by ethanmoser on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • ISIS Hotbed Looms as Risk in Mosul Fight
  • Iraqi forces closing in on Islamic State-held Mosul are bypassing pockets controlled by militants such as the strategic town of Hawija, leaving the extremists free to launch counterattacks elsewhere in Iraq.
  • But just days into the Mosul offensive, Islamic State mounted a massive coordinated attack on oil-rich Kirkuk,
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • the fighters were all originally from the Kirkuk area and Hawija.
  • Islamic State has been pushed in recent months out of places closer to Baghdad, such as Ramadi, Fallujah and Beiji.
  • Instead, Iraqi forces went straight for the high-profile prize of Mosul.
  • There is tension between Baghdad and the Kurdistan regional government over the future of the province and whether it will become part of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region.
  • Sunni Arabs are the majority in Hawija, as well, though it is unclear whether the local population will back the Sunni extremists of Islamic State, who failed to rally residents of Kirkuk to their side in the recent attack.
  • Hawija is now one of Islamic State’s last remaining hubs for assembling car bombs and roadside explosive devices that have devastated cities and towns throughout Iraq and proved to be the militants’ deadliest weapon against allied Iraqi forces pushing into Mosul, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.
  • “It’s like a knife sticking in the side of northern Iraq,”
  • “We believe the government hurried up to liberate Mosul before Hawija for political reasons,”
  • “Military plans are being made now about how to liberate Hawija and where the operation will start.”
  • Gen. Qadr shared photos he said were taken from a dead militant’s tablet computer after the recent Kirkuk assault that showed a GPS-marked trail he took to get to Kirkuk from Mosul. It included a stop in Hawija.
Javier E

US is hotbed of climate change denial, major global survey finds | Environment | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ange-denial-international-poll

climate change denial survey environment us

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • A total of 13% of Americans polled in a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project agreed with the statement that the climate is changing “but human activity is not responsible at all”. A further 5% said the climate was not changing.
  • despite these views, the great majority of US citizens do accept the science of climate change, with nearly four in 10 saying human activity was at least partly responsible, potentially with other factors, and a further third taking the stronger view that human activity is the dominant cause.
  • Americans also appear unusually prone to climate-related conspiracy theories, the YouGov data suggests. A total of 17% of those polled agreed that “the idea of manmade global warming is a hoax that was invented to deceive people”.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Belief in this conspiracy theory, which was previously invoked by Donald Trump, who falsely claimed climate change was made up by China, increases with age and also conservative political ideology. A total of 52% of Americans who described themselves as “very rightwing” to YouGov insisted global warming was a hoax.
  • In Europe, fewer than one in 10 people across the major countries surveyed thought the climate was not changing or not changing owing to human activity, with only Poland showing a slightly higher number, with 12% taking one of these views
Javier E

The G.O.P.'s Digital Makeover - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-g-o-ps-digital-makeover

republicans science voters trends demographics

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the county has the highest concentration in the United States of computer engineers, designers, software developers and digital researchers – the skills essential for the tech wars. In 2012, Santa Clara County voted for Obama over Romney by a 70-27 margin, nearly 3 to 1.
  • The number two in high tech employment is Boulder County, in Colorado. How did it vote? The map shows a sea of blue:
  • Obama’s percentage of the vote in Boulder County, 70.28, was almost identical to what he won in Santa Clara County.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the scientific community. Again, this is not a hotbed of Republican and conservative activism. Just the opposite.
  • A July 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that the partisan leaning of scientists was 55 percent Democratic, 32 percent independent and 6 percent Republican, compared to 35 Democratic, 34 independent and 23 Republican among the general public. Ideologically, 52 percent of scientists polled by Pew described themselves as liberal, 35 percent as moderate and 9 percent as conservative, compared to 20 liberal, 38 moderate and 37 conservative among all voters.
Javier E

Why the white working class votes against itself - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html

whitelash white working class government benefits redistribution policies

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • there seems to be universal agreement, at least among the Democratic politicians and strategists I’ve interviewed, that the party’s actual ideas are the right ones.
  • Democrats, they note, pushed for expansion of health-insurance subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans; investments in education and retraining; middle-class tax cuts; and a higher minimum wage. These are core, standard-of-living improving policies. They would do far more to help the economically precarious — including and especially white working-class voters — than Donald Trump’s top-heavy tax cuts and trade wars ever could.
  • Here’s the problem. These Democratic policies probably would help the white working class. But the white working class doesn’t seem to buy that they’re the ones who’d really benefit.
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  • Across rural America, the Rust Belt, Coal Country and other hotbeds of Trumpism, voters have repeatedly expressed frustration that the lazy and less deserving are getting a bigger chunk of government cheese.
  • More broadly, a recent YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that Trump voters are five times more likely to believe that “average Americans” have gotten less than they deserve in recent years than to believe that “blacks” have gotten less than they deserve. (African Americans don’t count as “average Americans,” apparently.)
  • We’ve known for a long time, through the work of Martin Gilens, Suzanne Mettler and other social scientists, that Americans (A) generally associate government spending with undeserving, nonworking, nonwhite people; and (B) are really bad at recognizing when they personally benefit from government programs.
  • Rhetoric this election cycle caricaturing our government as “rigged,” and anyone who pays into it as a chump, has only reinforced these misperceptions about who benefits from government programs and how much.
  • It’s no wonder then that Democrats’ emphasis on downwardly redistributive economic policies has been met with suspicion, even from those who would be on the receiving end of such redistribution. And likewise, it’s no wonder that Trump’s promises — to re-create millions of (technologically displaced) jobs and to punish all those non-self-sufficient moochers — seem much more enticing.
maddieireland334

Kenya tells longtime refugees living in camps to go home - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...84873092

Kenya Refugees Crisis

shared by maddieireland334 on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • Yussuf, who has lived here most of his life, has to leave by November because Kenya is shutting all its refugee camps, displacing 600,000 people. The government said the camps have become infiltrated by terrorists
  • Now the Kenya government wants to repatriate Dadaab refugees to Somalia. The government also wants to close another camp, Kakuma, that houses refugees from South Sudan, where a fragile cease-fire has taken hold in that country’s civil war.
  • Kenya announced in May that it would will shutter the camps by November and send refugees back to Somalia and elsewhere after numerous attacks staged by al-Shabab, a Somalia terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Al-Shabab militants also attacked Kenyan peacekeeping troops in Somalia, where the central government in Mogadishu is weak. Al-Shabab, hoping to establish a radical Islamic theocracy, claims it wants Kenyan forces to leave Somalia.
  • Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said Kenyan security forces have thwarted numerous al-Shabab terrorism attempts over the years by arresting terror suspects at the Dadaab refugee complex and recovering caches of arms there.
  • Dadaab and Kakuma are also hotbeds for poaching, human trafficking, illegal arms sales and other criminal activities, he added.
  • But refugees at the camp say the government is punishing them for the mistakes of others.
  • Others said they could not afford to leave the camp.
  • The United States has  joined the United Nations and human rights groups in urging Kenya to rescind its decision to shut down the refugee camps.
  • Meanwhile, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights urged the international community to help Kenya shoulder the burden of hosting the refugees to avoid closing the camps.
Javier E

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Te... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...256046

technology startups future innovation

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?
  • There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don't invalidate, my thesis. The first -- The Rise of the Cloud -- was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.
  • we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.
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  • We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower
  • Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.
  • On the mobile side, we're working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That's the palette that everyone has been working with -- and I hate to say it, but we're at the end of the line.
  • despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most
  • more than the bandwidth or the stagnant hardware, I think the blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of the business model. The dominant idea has been to gather users and get them to pour their friends, photos, writing, information, clicks, and locations into your app. Then you sell them stuff (Amazon.com, One King's Lane) or you take that data and sell it in one way or another to someone who will sell them stuff (everyone). I return to Jeff Hammerbacher's awesome line about developers these days: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." 
  • The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean.
Javier E

The Disruption Myth - Justin Fox - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...379348

crisis economics progress innovation growth

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • economists can now track what they call “business dynamism” in ways they couldn’t before. As researchers have dug into these numbers, they’ve found that most metrics of dynamism and upheaval in American business have actually been declining for decades, with the downturn steepening after 2000. Fewer new businesses are being launched in the United States, the average age of businesses is increasing, job creation and job destruction are on the wane, industries are being consolidated, and fast-growth businesses are rarer.
  • There was in fact plenty of upheaval in the top ranks of the business world in the 1980s and ’90s, as newcomers crashed the Fortune 500 list with increasing frequency. And the high tech sector was, as widely perceived, a hotbed of entrepreneurship and growth. All of that activity seems to have peaked, however, a year or two after the stock market did in 2000. Measures of big-business volatility began to drop.High-tech start-up activity and what economists call the skewness of growth—how quickly the fastest-growing companies in a sector are outpacing the median company—declined below the levels of the mid-’90s and stayed there.
  • spectacular rise in living standards that began in Europe and North America just over 200 years ago is thus largely the work of disruptive innovations. Without a new burst of them, we may face “secular stagnation”—an extended period of slow growth.
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  • impetus.The
  • it’s also possible that a decades long accretion of regulation has come to weigh on new-business formation and growth; that for all the tales of Silicon Valley swashbuckling, most Americans have become more cautious and less entrepreneurial; or that—and this argument springs straight from Christensen’s keyboard—the pressures of the financial market and a preoccupation with corporate financial metrics have left most businesses “afraid to pursue what they see as risky innovations” and focused instead on cutting costs.
  • some companies are pursuing risky innovations and disrupting established industries. Business publications are full of stories about them: Google and Uber and Amazon and Salesforce and Workday and many more. They just haven’t had a measurable impact on the overall economy yet. One group of economists says to give it a few years— the adoption of new technologies has always affected productivity in fits and starts, and the rise of smartphones and cloud computing and Big Data will show up in the numbers eventually. The other view is that today’s technological innovations pale in significance beside electricity and the internal combustion engine—they’ll have some positive impact, but growth will be slower than it used to be.
Grace Gannon

Next Year in Havana - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...next-year-in-havana.html

Cuba Communism US foreign relations

shared by Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15
     
    Cuba is the idiosyncratic sister of the Caribbean, and a large part of its idiosyncrasy stems from having watched as the last half-century passed it by. What was once a cultural hotbed moldered under Communism.
Javier E

No Escape From History - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385352

history racism moral equivalence sin American idea morality

shared by Javier E on 12 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Jim Crow and slavery were not merely the sins of Southerners and the religious right, but the sins of America, itself. Enslavement was not merely a boon for the South, but for the country as a whole. (During the Civil War, New York City was a hotbed of secessionist sympathy mostly because of its economic ties to the South.) And there is simply no way to understand segregation in this country without understanding the housing policies of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the G.I. Bill signed by Democratic president Harry Truman.
  • There are now intelligent people going on television to tell us that the president should not use the word "crusade" to describe ... The Crusades.
  • The problem is history. Or rather the problem is that there is no version of history that can award the West a stable moral high-ground.
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  • Some of the most prominent Christian leaders in this country used their authority to burnish the credentials of South Africa's racist regime—not in the 1960s, in the 1980s.
  • In such a world, a certainty about which "side" is always good and which "side" is forever evil doesn't really exist. And in an uncertain world, Obama is making a wise appeal for vigilance—vigilance against the death cult of ISIS, and vigilance against the allure of death cults period—even those inaugurated in the name of one's preferred God.
alexdeltufo

In Sarajevo, Divisions That Drove an Assassin Have Only Begun to Heal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...incip-set-off-world-war-i.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • firing the shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and setting off World War I.
  • But for all the excited chatter among the tourists on the sidewalk where the 19-year-old Princip fired his Browning semiautomatic pistol, killing the 50-year-old heir to the Hapsburg throne
  • As Europe diligently promotes an ideology of harmony, broad areas of the continent, the Middle East and elsewhere continue to struggle
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  • The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began,
  • Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through.
  • The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt.
  • He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope
  • presenting Princip his victims at close range.
  • on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia,
  • As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines.
  • So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992
  • in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs,
  • which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.
  • Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.
  • Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense
  • Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe.
  • After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union
  • To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are
  • ommunities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines,
  • Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now.
  • Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions.
  • “Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    John F. Burns 
Javier E

The coronavirus shows how backward the United States has become - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...kward-united-states-has-become

US decline pandemic dystopia system problems politics history trump culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Our self-confidence, verging on hubris, should be shaken by the coronavirus. The United States has been a laggard, not a world leader, in confronting the pandemic
  • self-confidence has been bolstered by a century of achievements: We saved Western civilization from German and Soviet militarism, built the most prosperous society in history, and landed a man on the moon.
  • a German company shipped more than 1.4 million diagnostic tests for the World Health Organization by the end of February. During that same time, U.S. efforts to produce our own test misfired. By Feb. 28, only 4,000 tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been used
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • “Losing two months is close to disastrous, and that’s what we did,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Bloomberg.
  • if we are being honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that the United States has long been failing. We remain one of the richest countries in the world, but by international standards we look more like a Third World nation.
  • we lag in almost every measure of societal well-being among the wealthy nations (now 36) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
  • we had the second-highest poverty rate, the highest level of income inequality and the highest level of obesity.
  • We were also below average on renewable energy, infrastructure investment and voter turnout.
  • We spent the most on education but produced less-than-average results
  • We are the only OECD nation that doesn’t mandate paid family leave.
  • One area where we do lead is gun violence. Our homicide rate is nearly 50 percent above the OECD average.
  • We spend more on health care than any other country in the world, but we are the only OECD country without universal medical coverage (27.9 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2018)
  • Child mortality in the United States is the highest in the OECD, and life expectancy is below average
  • We have far fewer hospital beds per 1,000 people than other advanced democracies (2.4 compared to 12.2 in South Korea), which makes us particularly vulnerable to a pandemic.
  • Why has America become so backward? That is a complex topic. I would direct readers to the work of analysts such as Jonathan Rauch, Francis Fukuyama, and Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann
  • I would ascribe a lot of what’s wrong to growing partisan polarization that makes it almost impossible to address our most pressing needs. Republicans are getting more conservative and Democrats more liberal — although not to the same degree. The GOP is far more extreme than the Democratic Party.
  • President Trump has exacerbated the problem, but he didn’t start it. He is himself the product of decades of right-wing revolt against government and increasingly against reason itself.
  • America is unusual in having a major party — and a major television network — devoted to climate denialism and protecting the “right” of everyone to own an assault rifle. The GOP and the right-wing media have long been a hotbed of nutty conspiracy theories, and their reluctance to face the reality of the new coronavirus set back efforts to save lives.
  • The Republicans’ decades-long demonization of government has consequences
  • the federal civilian workforce has fallen as a percentage of total nonfarm employment from 18 percent in 1980 to 15 percent today, and their salaries top out at just under $200,000 — “only slightly more than an entry-level engineer makes at Google.”
  • There are still plenty of high-quality civil servants, but their ranks are too thin, and they are too much at the mercy of political yahoos.
  • “When a typical European parliamentary government changes hands from one party to another, the ministers and a handful of staffers turn over,” Fukuyama notes. “In the U.S., a change of administration (even within the same party) opens up some 5,000 ‘Schedule C’ job positions to political appointees.”
  • We must not only beat this pandemic; we must also address a host of other ills that have been festering for decades. In recent years, America has been “exceptional” mainly in the scale of our governmental failures compared with those of other industrialized democracies.
Javier E

A Book Recommendation | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...a-book-recommendation

internet connection tech manipulation power abuse

shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The book is really about the process of reporting the story, which is a tale about NBC News and their on again, off again efforts to kill or declaw story and Weinstein’s army of lawyers, PR people, private investigators and private intelligence operatives effort to disrupt or kill the stories being written about him.
  • It is about the sheer power, resources and weapons an enormously wealthy and powerful person can bring to bear to prevent exposure.
  • Lisa Bloom, the crusading feminist lawyer (daughter of Gloria Allred), shows up to help in his work. He takes her partly into his confidence. She’s actually working for Harvey Weinstein. He really is being surveilled – not just with traditional tails and stakeouts. But his movements are being tracked electronically – probably illegally. (Another tantalizing part of the narrative is the number of operatives he’s eventually able to turn against the private intelligence firm.)
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Through the writing he and those he’s talking to are being crowded around by people working for or controlled by Harvey Weinstein. But he and they don’t know it. As the reader you can feel their presence crowding around you – a weird mix of claustrophobia and second-guessing.
  • There’s a second layer to this part of the narrative. Not only is Farrow involved in a multi-domain war with Weinstein and his lieutenants, which he doesn’t know about until most of the way through the story. NBC also has numerous executives and stars who have their own #MeToos issues, if seldom at Weinstein’s level
  • One of the many revelations, though never quite stated explicitly, is that the eventual downfall of Matt Lauer at the Today Show seems to have been helped along, if not caused, by National Enquirer stories which were themselves part of Weinstein’s effort to bully NBC News into dropping Farrow’s story. Like President Trump, Weinstein was thick as thieves with The National Enquirer, as both a defensive and offensive weapon. It is a pattern.
  • The story is basically about Harvey Weinstein and how even industries that are purportedly modern and cosmopolitan were and certainly still to a great degree are hotbeds of predation where power means secrecy and impunity.
  • Mostly it was another story of the ways in which the ubiquity of global interconnectivity, the Internet and mass entertainment, once welcomed as liberatory have become tools in the hands of the powerful.
Javier E

Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia: Students who beat and raped ensla... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...slaved-servants-historians-say

slavery jefferson university virginia students culture

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Last year, the university produced a 96-page report that concluded slavery was “in every way imaginable . . . central to the project of designing, funding, building, and maintaining the school.”
  • U-Va.’s efforts come as dozens of universities across the country undertake similar examinations — and as America marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown. The dark milestone has spurred a reckoning with the awful reality of slavery and the myriad ways it shaped the nation.
  • Jefferson — who by then had served as both U.S. president and vice president — envisioned U-Va. as a breeding ground for the next generation of the country’s political elite, beneficiaries of his educational program molded in his image, Taylor said. Still, he wanted students to differentiate themselves in at least one important way: He wanted them to end slavery in America.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “The central paradox at the heart of U-Va. is also the central paradox of the nation, the unresolved paradox of American liberty,” McInnis said. “How is it that the nation that defined the natural rights of humankind did so within a system that denied those same rights to millions of people?”
  • The vast majority of the student body — numbering between 100 and 150 people each year — hailed from wealthy, Southern slaveholding families. Plantation-owning parents clamored to send their sons to U-Va., lauded as a prestigious alternative to the Northern schools they feared as dangerous hotbeds of anti-slavery sentiment, according to Taylor.
  • Instead, early U-Va. graduates became “leading voices in the pro-slavery movement, soldiers in the Confederate Army, and political leaders in the Confederate States of America,” McInnis wrote in “Educated in Tyranny.”
  • efferson insisted, the up-and-coming generation should fix the problem by “emancipating the enslaved and deporting them to Africa,” Taylor said
  • Ultrarich Southerners were also some of the only Americans able to afford tuition at U-Va., then “the most expensive college” in the country, Taylor said.
  • “Jefferson physically designed a campus that internalized everything he had learned living on plantations,” McInnis said. “It is architecturally set up to be a landscape of slavery.”
  • Enslaved people also catered to students’ daily whims. “Every afternoon, an enslaved servant called on his assigned student,” Taylor wrote in “Thomas Jefferson’s Education.” The enslaved person then “[took] orders for errands on the grounds or in town.”
  • At U-Va. — as at every Southern university in America during this era — bullying the enslaved formed “part of daily existence,” McInnis said. It was also performance art, Taylor added: a way for rich young men to prove their mettle to their peers.
  • “The episodes we do know of, other students are watching and applauding,” Taylor said. “This was a whole generation of men who just behaved monstrously.”
  • There’s a broad understanding that 'slavery is bad, people got whipped,’ but there’s also an urge to compartmentalize it: ‘That was bad, but it’s over with, and we should focus on the good stuff like U-Va.’s cutting-edge education and science,’ ” he said.“We’re not trying to ruin people’s day — but if you want to understand society, you’ve got to understand how everything is woven together, the good with the bad.”
clairemann

GOP Tries To Save Its Senate Majority, With Or Without Trump | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ity_n_5f9f0d9ec5b6bef9f18ea6d0

US voting election trump pandemic gop

shared by clairemann on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Senate Republicans are fighting to save their majority, a final election push against the onslaught of challengers in states once off limits to Democrats but now hotbeds of a potential backlash to President Donald Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill.
  • Fueling the campaigns are the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, shifting regional demographics and, in some areas, simply the chance to turn the page on the divisive political climate
  • Without it, Joe Biden would face a potential wall of opposition to his agenda if the Democratic nominee won the White House.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Republican incumbents are straining for survival from New England to the Deep South, in the heartland and the West and even Alaska.
  • With the chamber now split, 53-47, three or four seats will determine Senate control, depending on which party wins the White House.
  • What started as a lopsided election cycle with Republicans defending 23 seats, compared with 12 for Democrats, quickly became a more stark referendum on the president as Democrats reached deeper into Trump country and put the GOP on defense.
  • Suddenly some of the nation’s better-known senators — Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Susan Collins in Maine — faced strong reelection threats.
  • Only two Democratic seats are being seriously contested, while at least 10 GOP-held seats are at risk.
  • Felkel added: “You’d be hard pressed to admit we don’t have a Trump problem.”
  • The political landscape is quickly changing from six years ago when most of these senators last faced voters. It’s a reminder of how sharp the national mood has shifted in the Trump era.
  • Younger voters and more minorities are pushing some states toward Democrats, including in Colorado, where the parties have essentially stopped spending money for or against GOP Sen. Cory Gardner because it seems he is heading toward defeat by Democrat John Hickenlooper, a former governor.
  • GOP senators must balance an appeal to Trump’s most ardent supporters with outreach to voters largely in suburbs who are drifting away from the president and his tone .
  • Arizona could see two Democratic senators for the first time since last century if former astronaut Mark Kelly maintains his advantage over GOP Sen. Martha McSally for the seat held by the late Republican John McCain.
  • In Georgia, Trump calls David Perdue his favorite senator among the many who have jockeyed to join his golf outings and receive his private phone calls. But the first-term senator faces a surge of new voters in the state and Democrat Jon Ossoff is playing hardball.
  • Ossoff called Pedue a “crook” over the senator’s stock trades during the pandemic. Perdue shot back that the Ossoff would do anything to mislead Georgians about Democrats’ “radical and socialist” agenda.
  • Democrats have tapped into what some are calling a “green wave” — a new era of fundraising —
  • Competitive races are underway in Republican strongholds of Texas, Kansas and Alaska where little known Al Gross broke state records, Democrats said, in part with viral ads introducing voters to the military-veteran-turned-doctor who once fought off a grizzly bear.
  • The COVID crisis has shadowed the Senate races as Democrats linked Trump’s handling of the pandemic to the GOP’s repeated attempts to undo the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, particularly its insurance protections for those with preexisting medical conditions.
  • “In more places in the country than not, the president is not getting good marks” on that, Flaherty said, and it’s damaging Senate GOP candidates, “especially those in lockstep with the president.”
Javier E

Australia almost eliminated the coronavirus by putting faith in science - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-ad53-4c1fda49907d_story.html

australia pandemic response history culture politics Policy crisis

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • SYDNEY — The Sydney Opera House has reopened. Almost 40,000 spectators attended the city's rugby league grand final. Workers are being urged to return to their offices.
  • Australia has become a pandemic success story.
  • The nation of 26 million is close to eliminating community transmission of the coronavirus, having defeated a second wave just as infections surge again in Europe and the United States.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • America's daily new cases topped 100,000 on Wednesday, and its death toll exceeds 234,000, a staggering figure even accounting for its greater population than Australia, which has recorded 907 deaths.
  • Meanwhile, in the United States, 52,049 people are hospitalized and 10,445 are in an ICU
  • No new cases were reported on the island continent Thursday, and only seven since Saturday, besides travelers in hotel quarantine. Eighteen patients are hospitalized with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. One is in an intensive care unit. Melbourne, the main hotbed of Australia's outbreak that recently emerged from lockdown, has not reported a case since Oct. 30.
  • "We told the public: 'This is serious; we want your cooperation,' 
  • Several practical measures contributed to Australia's success
  • The country chose to quickly and tightly seal its borders, a step some others, notably in Europe, did not take.
  • Health officials rapidly built up the manpower to track down and isolate outbreaks.
  • And unlike the U.S. approach, all of Australia's states either shut their domestic borders or severely limited movement for interstate and, in some cases, intra­state travelers.
  • Perhaps most important, though, leaders from across the ideological spectrum persuaded Australians to take the pandemic seriously early on and prepared them to give up civil liberties they had never lost before, even during two world wars.
  • Australia provides a real-time road map for democracies to manage the pandemic. Its experience, along with New Zealand's, also shows that success in containing the virus isn't limited to East Asian states (Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) or those with authoritarian leaders (China, Vietnam).
  • A lack of partisan rancor increased the effectiveness of the message
  • The conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, formed a national cabinet with state leaders — known as premiers — from all parties to coordinate decisions
  • Political conflict was largely suspended, at least initially, and many Australians saw their politicians working together to avert a health crisis.
  • After a sick doctor in his 70s treated more than 70 people in the city before being diagnosed, Hunt accelerated a 10-year plan to phase in video consultations with physicians. Within 10 days, almost anyone in Australia could see a doctor over the Internet under Australia's highly subsidized health-care system, including psychiatrists.
  • Australians' willingness to conform — especially in Melbourne, where residents endured a lengthy state-ordered lockdown — reflects political attitudes that differ from those in parts of the United States
  • In a nation where compulsory voting produces conventionally center-left or center-right political leaders, governments tend to be regarded as the solution to society's problems rather than the cause.
  • Australia's national response was led by Health Minister Greg Hunt, a former McKinsey & Co. management consultant and a Yale University graduate. Hunt and Morrison worked with the state premiers, who hold responsibility for on-the-ground health policy, to develop a common approach to the pandemic.
  • The government closed Australia's borders to travelers from China on Feb. 1, the same day as the Trump administration in the United States. But unlike the Trump administration, which has criticized its primary infectious-disease adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, Hunt relied heavily on health experts from the start.
  • "In January and February, we were focused on containing the risk of a catastrophic outbreak," Hunt said in an interview. "We had a clear strategic plan, which was the combination of containment and capacity-building."
  • "We closed the border and concentrated on testing, tracing and social distancing," he added. "We built up our capacity to fight the virus in primary and aged care and hospitals. We invested in ventilators, and vaccine and treatment research."
  • Hunt's department oversaw the purchase of huge amounts of protective equipment and clothing, including masks, which became mandatory on Aug. 2 in the state of Victori
  • "Regardless of who you vote for, most Australians would agree their leaders have a real care for their constituents and a following of science," McLaws said. "I think that helped dramatically.
  • When private hospitals said they were in danger of going broke because non-urgent surgery had been canceled, the government stepped in with emergency funding, securing beds that could be used for coronavirus patients.
  • In private, Hunt swapped ­practical stories with his wife, Paula Hunt, a former infectious-diseases nurse who kept a 1995 bestseller by U.S. science journalist Laurie Garrett, "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance," on her bedside table, he said.
  • While opinion polls show strong support for the tough measures, many people have been badly affected. Australia entered its first recession in 29 years, small businesses have closed, and reports of depression are up. On Tuesday, an anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne turned violent. Police arrested 404 people.
  • for a time, it appeared Australia's early success was imperiled, after lax security at hotels in Melbourne that were housing returned travelers led to a second outbreak in July. By August, more than 700 cases a day were diagnosed. It looked like Australia could lose control of the virus.
  • Almost all public life in Melbourne ended. After 111 days of lockdown, the number of average daily cases fell below five. On Oct. 28, state officials allowed residents to leave their homes for any reason.
  • Australia currently bans its citizens and residents from overseas travel, a decision that has been particularly tough on its 7.5 million immigrants.
  • Most Australians will have access to a vaccine by the middle of next year, Hunt said, a major step toward allowing them to travel.
Javier E

The Sad Trombone Debate: The RNC Throws in the Towel and Gets Ready to Roll Over for Tr... - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...trombone-debate-the-rnc-throws

builder conserver media internet future forecast new content audience distribution creation

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Death to the Internet
  • Yesterday Ben Thompson published a remarkable essay in which he more or less makes the case that the internet is a socially deleterious invention, that it will necessarily get more toxic, and that the best we can hope for is that it gets so bad, so fast, that everyone is shocked into turning away from it.
  • Ben writes the best and most insightful newsletter about technology and he has been, in all the years I’ve read him, a techno-optimist.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.
  • Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.
  • In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.
  • The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.
  • We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.
  • What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.
  • what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?
  • Hellscape
  • At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.
  • What does that mean for news? Nothing good.
  • Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.
  • So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.
  • Two big takeaways:
  • (1) Ad-supported publications will not survive
  • Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.
  • Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.
  • (2) Size is determinative.
  • The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.
  • It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.
  • But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.
  • Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.
  • in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.
  • Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?
  • One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.
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