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malonema1

Trump administration implements new restrictions on refugee program as ban comes to an ... - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

Terrorism US refugee

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration resumed the U.S. refugee program Tuesday after a 120-day ban, but there will be severe new restrictions on admissions going forward. After the four-month review, the administration enhanced vetting for all refugee applicants and determined that an additional 90-day review was needed for 11 countries.
  • During the ban, the Departments of State and Homeland Security, in consultation with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), were tasked with determining whether additional security procedures identified during the review process were sufficient to ensure the security and welfare of the United States and whether the program should be reinstated. Those 11 nationalities were deemed to have a higher risk to the U.S. by the interagency review. Those countries are not being identified because of "law enforcement sensitivities," according to a senior DHS official.
  • At the end of January, one week into President Donald Trump's term, he signed an executive order banning all citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days, indefinitely banning all Syrian refugees and stopping all refugee admissions for 120 days.
knudsenlu

Transitional Brexit deal must be agreed this year, City warns government | Politics | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...be-agreed-soon-chancellor-says

Britain Brexit economics politics

shared by knudsenlu on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The City of London has warned that businesses will start activating Brexit contingency plans unless there is a transitional deal by the end of 2017, as Philip Hammond tried to calm fears that a final agreement may not be reached for another year.
  • In a letter to Hammond before next month’s budget, McGuinness said the UK was facing a “historically defining moment” and warned that the timetable for business to prepare for transition was “tightening very rapidly”.
  • “We must have agreement with the EU on transition before the end of 2017,” she added.
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  • The City of London Corporation added its warning on Wednesday in McGuinness’s letter to the chancellor. She said some businesses were already activating contingency plans and more would do so without more substance from the UK and EU on the length and nature of a transitional period to smooth the path to a future relationship after Brexit in March 2019.
  • John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said: “The prime minister yesterday sowed more confusion in her statement, giving the impression that a transition is to be negotiated only after we have settled on what the future partnership will be. Businesses cannot wait. They need to plan now. Jobs are in jeopardy now.
  • What the prime minister said is that the implementation period is about building a bridge and obviously in order to do that you need to know what the future relationship is going to look like. But what we would also say is that in terms of the broad outline of an implementation period, we believe that we can agree that quickly.
runlai_jiang

Donald Trump Pushes Staff to Implement Tariffs Plan This Week - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...-after-cohn-departs-1520432598

US Trade War Resignation

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
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  • WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump is pushing his staff to draft a proclamation as soon as Thursday that would begin implementing his proposed tariffs on aluminum and steel, White House officials said, despite concerns from trade partners and lawmakers over the sweeping nature of the proposa
  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that it was possible the White House would issue waivers for certain countries but that no decisions had been made by Mr. Trump. Speaking to lawmakers on Tuesday, Mr. Mnuchin said that Mexico and Canada probably would be exempted from the tariffs if a new North American Free Trade Agreement is negotiated.
  • Mr. Mnuchin has publicly supported the tariffs but has privately argued in favor of more targeted measures. That has put him alongside National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, who said Tuesday he would resign from the White House after Mr. Trump blindsided his senior staff by announcing the tariffs last week.
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  • The departure will put pressure on other advisers, especially Mr. Mnuchin, to make the case for preserving the post-World War II trade architecture the U.S. helped construct and to speak credibly to financial markets.
  • We’re going to manage through this so that it is not detrimental” to economic-growth gains.
  • “He’s not afraid to get into a trade war although that’s not what we want,” said Mr. Mnuchin. “Let’s be very clear. We’re not looking to get into trade wars.”
  • Critics have said the tariffs, issued under the guise of national-security considerations, will damage relationships with Canadian and European allies, slow economic growth and harm American metal-consuming industries.
  • On CNBC, Mr. Ross said the steps were needed to target China, which is a major steel producer but doesn’t account for a large share of U.S. imports, because China makes significant transshipments through other countries.
  • big benefits for the U.S. steel industry, but caused “some harm” to U.S. firms that use steel and faced higher costs.
  • White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday there may be “potential carveouts” for Mexico, Canada and possibly other countries. But officials said it was unclear whether that would be addressed on Thursday; Mr. Trump may take additional action later to give national-security exemptions on a country-by-country basis
Javier E

There's No Such Thing As 'Sound Science' | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...d-science-demand-sound-science

science method research trade-off values fact objectivity

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.
  • The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.
  • Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.
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  • they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.
  • The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.
  • “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”
  • alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.
  • What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.
  • Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”
  • While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.
  • “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since
  • Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,
  • In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?
  • But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.
  • Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research
  • which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”
  • these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.
  • in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.
  • Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.
  • It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’
  • ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.
  • objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”
  • The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.
  • Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it
  • While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”
  • These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.
  • For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations
  • the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?
  • But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.
Javier E

American and German Approaches to Energy-Climate Policy - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...aches-to-energy-climate-policy

american germany energy policy

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • The challenges and concerns that have arisen in Germany should not be taken as indicators that the Energiewende is failed policy, or more specifically, to dismiss the importance of renewable energy.
  • 2022, it is expected that Germany will have 220 GW of total capacity, of which 90 GW will be from conventional sources and 130 GW from renewables, with wind and solar accounting for 90 percent of the added renewable power capacity.
  • German policymakers also point to robust investment in the country’s energy sector, job creation, a burst of renewable energy technology innovation and Germany’s status as a global leader in the renewable energy sector as positive outcomes of the Energiewende.
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  • U.S. utility industry representatives expressed skepticism regarding the efficacy and viability of the Energiewende, reflected in the following issues and questions raised during the meeting:
  • Cost Impact on Households. Would rising household rates evidenced in Germany be acceptable in the United States?
  • mplications for the Economy and Industrial Competitiveness. How do the costs of renewable energy policy affect long-term economic growth and competitiveness? 
  • Impact on utilities. Will traditional utilities be driven out of business? Or are new business models emerging
  • Fairness and equity. Would a policy in which one sector (households) bears most of the costs be politically or socially viable in the United States? 
  • Technical barriers. How is Germany overcoming technical challenges in integrating large shares of variable renewable energy, including impacts on neighboring countries? 
  • we can see that Germany’s Energiewende provides several useful lessons for the U.S. as it thinks strategically about the future of its electricity industry.
  • “With the Renewable Energy Act that we created in 2000, we financed a learning curve that was expensive. But the good news is that we have learned in only 13 years to produce electricity with wind power and solar facilities at the same price as if we were to build new coal or gas power stations.”
  • In spite of high costs, and despite the realization that elements of the Energiewende need to be reworked, Germany has rolled out a sweeping and effective suite of policies and legislation successfully, supported by a remarkable political and social consensus.
  • Gaining a consensus on a clear policy direction is critically important and should precede and inform debates about which specific policy mechanisms to implement and how
  • Monitoring and course corrections are required, with solutions tailored to local conditions. Policymakers should be prepared not only to monitor continually the effectiveness of policy, but also to alter the policy as technology and market conditions change. Importantly, fine-tuning policy or market design should not be viewed as a failure.
  • Setting objectives and developing national policy are important. If a country can agree politically on fundamental objectives, designing and implementing effective policy mechanisms is easier
  • electricity consumption of the average American household is significantly greater than the average German family of four which uses about 3,500 kWh/year, while the U.S. average is 10,800 kWh/year,
  • making a U.S. ratepayer much more sensitive to price increases.
  • despite the Energiewende’s costs, German households and politicians remain ideologically committed to the goal of emissions reduction and highly tolerant of the associated costs
  • The fact that alarm over climate change and its impacts have not penetrated American politics or society in the same way may be the most significant cultural difference between the two countries and may explain American disbelief that Germans could remain supportive of an increasingly costly policy.
  • Germany has demonstrated that high levels of renewable energy penetration are possible, with limited to no impact on reliability and system stability
Javier E

The coronavirus isn't another Hurricane Katrina. It's worse. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html

hurricane pandemic emergency federal government

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the United States again faces a circumstance in which the problem may be larger than the institutions that normally deal with it.
  • Public health is mainly the responsibility of states and localities. Americans may think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is leading a national response to the coronavirus. It isn’t. The CDC has a weak role in setting and implementing policy, and it is not sufficiently staffed to do the job people think it is doing.
  • The working group headed by Vice President Pence — while needed and helpful — only has the power of cajoling. In a public health emergency, there is no national coordinating function.
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  • some problems have a scope — say, fighting a war or constructing a national highway system — that overwhelms the theory of local control.
  • As America moves to the mitigation stage of the outbreak, social distancing measures — such as closing schools, ending mass gatherings and restricting travel — are the next line of defense. But the problem with such measures is that they tend to be imposed too late and/or lifted too early. And the current implementation of social distancing by states and localities can best be called spotty.
  • Dangerously and absurdly, political leaders have been using the low number of confirmed cases as the evidence of success when it is actually a measure of our blindness.
  • if sickness begins to come in a sudden rush, it will swamp the health-care system, leading to shortages of masks, hospital beds, ventilators and personnel (as it has in northern Italy).
  • “The glaring risk today,” as J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me, “is that the elderly and those with fragile health suffer extreme illness but are unable to access life-sustaining care and die in large numbers.”
Javier E

States and experts begin pursuing a coronavirus national strategy in absence of White H... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-tracing-coronavirus-strategy

pandemic rseponse strategies US government

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging — but not from the White House.
  • a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits are pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control:
  • Ramp up testing to identify people who are infected.
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  • Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before.
  • focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.
  • Instead, the president and his top advisers have fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak
  • Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, say the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.
  • without substantial federal funding, states’ efforts will only go so far
  • The next failure is already on its way, Frieden said, because “we’re not doing the things we need to be doing in April.”
  • In recent days, dozens of leading voices have coalesced around the test-trace-quarantine framework, including former FDA commissioners for the Trump and George W. Bush administrations, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and top experts at Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Harvard universities.
  • On Wednesday, former president Barack Obama weighed in, tweeting, “Social distancing bends the curve and relieves some pressure … But in order to shift off current policies, the key will be a robust system of testing and monitoring — something we have yet to put in place nationwide.”
  • And Friday, Apple and Google unveiled a joint effort on new tools that would use smartphones to aid in contact tracing.
  • What remains unclear is whether this emerging plan can succeed without the backing of the federal government.
  • “It’s mind-boggling, actually, the degree of disorganization,” said Tom Frieden, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director. The federal government has already squandered February and March, he noted, committing “epic failures” on testing kits, ventilator supply, protective equipment for health workers and contradictory public health communication.
  • In South Korea, Taiwan, China and Singapore, variations on this basic strategy were implemented by their national governments, allowing them to keep the virus in check even as they reopened parts of their economy and society
  • In America, testing — while still woefully behind — is ramping up. And households across the country have learned over the past month how to quarantine. But when it comes to the second pillar of the plan — the labor-intensive work of contact tracing — local health departments lack the necessary staff, money and training.
  • Experts and leaders in some states say remedying that weakness should be a priority and health departments should be rapidly shored up so that they are ready to act in coming weeks as infections nationwide begin to decrease
  • In a report released Friday, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials — which represents state health departments — estimate 100,000 additional contact tracers are needed and call for $3.6 billion in emergency funding from Congress.
  • “We can’t afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission,” he said in the interview.
  • Unless states can aggressively trace and isolate the virus, experts say, there will be new outbreaks and another round of disruptive stay-at-home orders.
  • “All people are talking about right now is hospital beds, ventilators, testing, testing, testing. Yes, those are important, but they are all reactive. You are dealing with the symptoms and not the virus itself,”
  • “You will never beat a virus like this one unless you get ahead of it. America must not just flatten the curve but get ahead of the curve.”
  • Testing on its own is useless, Nyenswah explained, because it only tells you who already has the virus. Similarly, tracing alone is useless if you don’t place those you find into quarantine. But when all three are implemented, the chain of transmission can be shattered.
  • Until a vaccine or treatment is developed, such nonpharmaceutical interventions are the only tools countries can rely on — besides locking down their cities.
  • to expand that in a country as large as the United States will require a massive dose of money, leadership and political will.
  • “You cannot have leaders contradicting each other every day. You cannot have states waiting on the federal government to act, and government telling the states to figure it out on their own,” he said. “You need a plan.”
  • When Vermont’s first coronavirus case was detected last month, it took two state health workers a day to track down 13 people who came into contact with that single patient. They put them under quarantine and started monitoring for symptoms. No one else became sick.
  • He did the math: If each of those 30 patients had contact with even three people, that meant 90 people his crew would have to locate and get into quarantine. In other words, impossible.
  • Since 2008, city and county health agencies have lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce. Decades of budget cuts have left the them unable to mount such a response. State health departments have recently had to lay off thousands more — an unintended consequence of federal officials delaying tax filings until July without warning states.
  • In Wuhan, a city of 11 million, the Chinese had 9,000 health workers doing contact tracing, said Frieden, the former CDC director. He estimates authorities would need roughly one contact tracer for every four cases in the United States.
  • “In the second wave, we have to have testing, a resource base, and a contact-tracing base that is so much more scaled up than right now,” he said. “It’s an enormous challenge.”
  • Gov. Charlie Baker (R) partnered with an international nonprofit group based in Boston
  • The nonprofit Partners in Health quickly put together a plan to hire and train 1,000 contact tracers. Working from their homes making 20 to 30 calls a day, they could cover up to 20,000 contacts a day.
  • The group is paying new hires roughly the same salary as census takers, more than $20 an hour. As of Tuesday — just four days after the initial announcement — the group had received 7,000 applicants and hired 150.
  • “There’s a huge untapped resource of people in America if we would just ask.”
  • “There needs to be a crash course in contact tracing because a lot of the health departments where this is going to need to happen are already kind of flat-out just trying to respond to the crisis at hand,”
  • Experts have proposed transforming the Peace Corps — which suspended global operations last month and recalled 7,000 volunteers to America — into a national response corps that could perform many tasks, including contact tracing.
  • On Wednesday, the editor in chief of JAMA, a leading medical journal, proposed suspending the first year of training for America’s 20,000 incoming medical students and deploying them as a medical corps to support the “test, trace, track, and quarantine strategy.”
  • The national organization for local STD programs says $200 million could add roughly 1,850 specialists, more than doubling that current workforce.
  • Technology could also turn out to be pivotal. But the invasive nature of cellphone tracking and apps raises concerns about civil liberties.
  • Such technology could take over some of what contact tracers do in interviews: build a contact history for each confirmed patient and find those possibly exposed. Doing that digitally could speed up the process — critical in containing an outbreak — and less laborious.
  • In China, authorities combined the nation’s vast surveillance apparatus with apps and cellphone data to track people’s movements. If someone they came across is later confirmed as infected, an app alerts them to stay at home.
  • In the United States, about 20 technology companies are trying to create a contact tracing app using geolocation data or Bluetooth pings on cellphones
Javier E

Taiwan Is Beating the Coronavirus. Can the US Do the Same? | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...navirus-can-the-us-do-the-same

taiwan pandemic response strategies

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • it is natural enough to look at Taiwan’s example and wonder why we didn’t do what they did, or, more pertinently, could we have done what they did?
  • we keep seeing the culturally embedded assumption that East Asian-style state social control just won’t fly in the good old, individualist, government-wary, freedom-loving United States.
  • The New York Times: People in “places like Singapore … are more willing to accept government orders.” Fortune: “There seems to be more of a willingness to place the community and society needs over individual liberty.” Even WIRED: “These countries all have social structures and traditions that might make this kind of surveillance and control a little easier than in the don’t-tread-on-me United States.”
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  • we see the classic “Confucian values” (or “Asian values”) argument that has historically been deployed to explain everything from the economic success of East Asian nations to the prevalence of authoritarian single-party rule in Asia, and even, most recently, China’s supposed edge in AI research.
  • So, yeah, kudos to Taiwan for keeping its people safe, but here in America we’re going to do what we always do in a crisis—line up at a gun store and accuse the opposing political party of acting in bad faith. Not for us, those Asian values.
  • But the truth is that Taiwan, one of Asia’s most vibrant and boisterous democracies, is a terrible example to cite as a cultural other populated by submissive peons
  • Taiwan’s self-confidence and collective solidarity trace back to its triumphal self-liberation from its own authoritarian past, its ability to thrive in the shadow of a massive, hostile neighbor that refuses to recognize its right to chart its own path, and its track record of learning from existential threats.
  • There is no doubt that in January it would have been difficult for the US to duplicate Taiwan’s containment strategy, but that’s not because Americans are inherently more ornery than Taiwanese
  • It’s because the United States has a miserable record when it comes to learning from its own mistakes and suffers from a debilitating lack of faith in the notion that the government can solve problems—something that dates at least as far back as the moment in 1986 when Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
  • The Taiwan-US comparison is the opposite of a clash of civilizations; instead, it’s a deathly showdown between competence and incompetence.
  • To be fair, there are some cultural aspects of East Asian societies that may work in Taiwan’s favor
  • There is undeniably a long tradition in East Asia of elevating scholars and experts to the highest levels of government,
  • The country’s president Tsai Ingwen, boasts a PhD from the London School of Economics, and the vice president, Chen Chien-jen, is a highly regarded epidemiologist
  • The threat of SARS put Taiwan on high alert for future outbreaks, while the past record of success at meeting such challenges seems to have encouraged the public to accept socially intrusive technological interventions.
  • First, and most important was Taiwan’s experience battling the SARS outbreak in 2003, followed by the swine flu in 2009
  • “Taiwan actually has a functioning democratic government, run by sensible, well-educated people—the USA? Not so much.”)
  • Taiwan’s commitment to transparency has also been critical
  • In the United States, the Trump administration ordered federal health authorities to treat high-level discussions on the coronavirus as classified material.
  • In Taiwan, the government has gone to great lengths to keep citizens well informed on every aspect of the outbreak, including daily press conferences and an active presence on social media
  • “Do not forget that Taiwan has been under China’s threat constantly,” wrote Wang Cheng-hua, a professor of art history at Princeton, “which has raised social consciousness about collective action. When the collective will supports government, then all of the strict measures implemented by the government make sense.”
  • Over the past quarter-century, Taiwan’s government has nurtured public trust by its actions and its transparency.
  • The democracy activists who risked their lives and careers during the island nation’s martial law era were not renowned for their willingness to accept government orders or preach Confucian social harmony
  • some of the current willingness to trust what the government is telling the people is the direct “result of having experienced the transition from an authoritarian government that lied all the time, to a democratic government and robust political dialogue that forced people to be able to evaluate information.”
  • Because of the opposition of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations or the World Health Organization
  • “The reality of being isolated from global organizations,” wrote Tung, “also makes Taiwanese very aware of the publicity of its success in handling a crisis like this. The more coverage from foreign media, the more people feel confident in government policy and social mobilization.”
  • Given what we know about Taiwan’s hard-won historical experience, could the US have implemented a similar model?
  • The answer, sadly, seems to be no
  • it would be impossible for the US to successfully integrate a health care database with customs and travel records because there is no national health care database in the United States. “The US health care system is fragmented, making it difficult to organize, integrate, and assess data coming in from its various government and private-sector parts,”
  • more tellingly, continued Fidler, “the manner in which the United States has responded to Covid-19 demonstrates that the United States did not learn the lessons from past outbreaks and is struggling to cobble together a semblance of a strategy. ”
  • There’s where the contrast between the United States and Taiwan becomes most salient. The US is not only bad at the act of government but has actively been getting worse.
  • But Taiwan’s own success at building a functional democracy is probably the most potent rebuke to the Asian values thesis.
  • But over that same period, powerful political and economic interests in the US have dedicated themselves to undermining faith in government action, in favor of deregulated markets that have no capacity to react intelligently or proactively to existential threats.
  • And instead of learning from history, US leaders actively ignore it, a truth for which there could be no better symbolic proof than the Trump administration’s dismantling of the National Security Council pandemic office created by the Obama administration in the wake of the Ebola outbreak
  • Finally, instead of seeking to keep the public informed to the best of our ability, some of our political leaders and media institutions have gone out of their way to muddy the waters.
  • In Taiwan, one early government response to the Covid-19 outbreak was to institute a fine of $100,000 for the act of spreading fake news about the epidemic.
  • In the US the most popular television news network in the country routinely downplayed or misrepresented the threat of the coronavirus, until the severity of the outbreak became too large to ignore.
  • If there is any silver lining here, it’s that the disaster now upon us is of such immense scope that it could finally expose the folly of the structural forces that have been wreaking sustained havoc on American governmental institutions
  • So maybe we are finally about to learn that competence matters, that educated leaders are a virtue, and that telling the truth is a responsibility
  • Americans might have to learn this the hard way, like we did in Hong Kong and Singapore.”
  • We’re about to find out how hard it’s going to be. But will we learn?
katherineharron

Trump administration rejects CDC guidance on reopening US amid coronavirus - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

crisis

shared by katherineharron on 07 May 20 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration will not implement the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 17-page draft recommendation for reopening America, a senior CDC official confirmed to CNN Thursday.
  • A senior CDC official confirmed to CNN Wednesday night that it was clear that the White House was not going to implement their 17-page draft recommendation for reopening America -- after it asked for it. The White House's decision to not use the guidance was first reported by The Associated Press.
  • "The 17-page report represents an ask from the White House Task Force to come up with these recommendations. That's our role. To put together this guidance."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • An administration official told CNN that CDC leadership had not seen the draft document before it was leaked, and there were two concerns when it reached the task force. It was "overly prescriptive" because "guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn't be the same guidance for urban New York City," and the recommendations in the document did not fit the "phases" that had already been outlined by the task force.
  • The draft document included specific guidance for six categories: child care programs; schools and day camps; communities of faith; employers with vulnerable workers; restaurants and bars; mass transit administrators. For each category, the draft document notes reopening in phases.
  • "This is a governor-led effort. The President has said that governors make the decisions as to move forward and we encourage them to follow our phased approach," McEnany said.
  • "The CDC, the White House task force and White House principles were in disagreement on how strongly a public health response should still be in place," said the official.
  • "In the absence of law, it's regulation, and in the absence of regulation, it's recommendations. They think it's left too much open to be interpreted by the courts if something happens on the job. It doesn't matter if (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is playing ball or not," the CDC source said.
Javier E

The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...540393

software programming failure design

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing.
  • Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”
  • This is the trouble with making things out of code, as opposed to something physical. “The complexity,” as Leveson puts it, “is invisible to the eye.”
  • ...52 more annotations...
  • Code is too hard to think about. Before trying to understand the attempts themselves, then, it’s worth understanding why this might be: what it is about code that makes it so foreign to the mind, and so unlike anything that came before it.
  • Technological progress used to change the way the world looked—you could watch the roads getting paved; you could see the skylines rise. Today you can hardly tell when something is remade, because so often it is remade by code.
  • Software has enabled us to make the most intricate machines that have ever existed. And yet we have hardly noticed, because all of that complexity is packed into tiny silicon chips as millions and millions of lines of cod
  • The programmer, the renowned Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, “has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.” Dijkstra meant this as a warning.
  • As programmers eagerly poured software into critical systems, they became, more and more, the linchpins of the built world—and Dijkstra thought they had perhaps overestimated themselves.
  • What made programming so difficult was that it required you to think like a computer.
  • The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as “integrated development environments,” or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word’s grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation—the fact that the programmer didn’t work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine.
  • “The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work.
  • “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.” When you’re writing code that controls a car’s throttle, for instance, what’s important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. “There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.”
  • a nearly decade-long investigation into claims of so-called unintended acceleration in Toyota cars. Toyota blamed the incidents on poorly designed floor mats, “sticky” pedals, and driver error, but outsiders suspected that faulty software might be responsible
  • software experts spend 18 months with the Toyota code, picking up where NASA left off. Barr described what they found as “spaghetti code,” programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being woven around
  • Using the same model as the Camry involved in the accident, Barr’s team demonstrated that there were actually more than 10 million ways for the onboard computer to cause unintended acceleration. They showed that as little as a single bit flip—a one in the computer’s memory becoming a zero or vice versa—could make a car run out of control. The fail-safe code that Toyota had put in place wasn’t enough to stop it
  • . In all, Toyota recalled more than 9 million cars, and paid nearly $3 billion in settlements and fines related to unintended acceleration.
  • The problem is that programmers are having a hard time keeping up with their own creations. Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little.
  • “Visual Studio is one of the single largest pieces of software in the world,” he said. “It’s over 55 million lines of code. And one of the things that I found out in this study is more than 98 percent of it is completely irrelevant. All this work had been put into this thing, but it missed the fundamental problems that people faced. And the biggest one that I took away from it was that basically people are playing computer inside their head.” Programmers were like chess players trying to play with a blindfold on—so much of their mental energy is spent just trying to picture where the pieces are that there’s hardly any left over to think about the game itself.
  • The fact that the two of them were thinking about the same problem in the same terms, at the same time, was not a coincidence. They had both just seen the same remarkable talk, given to a group of software-engineering students in a Montreal hotel by a computer researcher named Bret Victor. The talk, which went viral when it was posted online in February 2012, seemed to be making two bold claims. The first was that the way we make software is fundamentally broken. The second was that Victor knew how to fix it.
  • Though he runs a lab that studies the future of computing, he seems less interested in technology per se than in the minds of the people who use it. Like any good toolmaker, he has a way of looking at the world that is equal parts technical and humane. He graduated top of his class at the California Institute of Technology for electrical engineering,
  • in early 2012, Victor had finally landed upon the principle that seemed to thread through all of his work. (He actually called the talk “Inventing on Principle.”) The principle was this: “Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.” The problem with programming was that it violated the principle. That’s why software systems were so hard to think about, and so rife with bugs: The programmer, staring at a page of text, was abstracted from whatever it was they were actually making.
  • “Our current conception of what a computer program is,” he said, is “derived straight from Fortran and ALGOL in the late ’50s. Those languages were designed for punch cards.”
  • WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzywig”) came along. It stood for “What You See Is What You Get.”
  • Victor’s point was that programming itself should be like that. For him, the idea that people were doing important work, like designing adaptive cruise-control systems or trying to understand cancer, by staring at a text editor, was appalling.
  • With the right interface, it was almost as if you weren’t working with code at all; you were manipulating the game’s behavior directly.
  • When the audience first saw this in action, they literally gasped. They knew they weren’t looking at a kid’s game, but rather the future of their industry. Most software involved behavior that unfolded, in complex ways, over time, and Victor had shown that if you were imaginative enough, you could develop ways to see that behavior and change it, as if playing with it in your hands. One programmer who saw the talk wrote later: “Suddenly all of my tools feel obsolete.”
  • hen John Resig saw the “Inventing on Principle” talk, he scrapped his plans for the Khan Academy programming curriculum. He wanted the site’s programming exercises to work just like Victor’s demos. On the left-hand side you’d have the code, and on the right, the running program: a picture or game or simulation. If you changed the code, it’d instantly change the picture. “In an environment that is truly responsive,” Resig wrote about the approach, “you can completely change the model of how a student learns ... [They] can now immediately see the result and intuit how underlying systems inherently work without ever following an explicit explanation.” Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.
  • The ideas spread. The notion of liveness, of being able to see data flowing through your program instantly, made its way into flagship programming tools offered by Google and Apple. The default language for making new iPhone and Mac apps, called Swift, was developed by Apple from the ground up to support an environment, called Playgrounds, that was directly inspired by Light Table.
  • “Everyone thought I was interested in programming environments,” he said. Really he was interested in how people see and understand systems—as he puts it, in the “visual representation of dynamic behavior.” Although code had increasingly become the tool of choice for creating dynamic behavior, it remained one of the worst tools for understanding it. The point of “Inventing on Principle” was to show that you could mitigate that problem by making the connection between a system’s behavior and its code immediate.
  • In a pair of later talks, “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” and “Drawing Dynamic Visualizations,” Victor went one further. He demoed two programs he’d built—the first for animators, the second for scientists trying to visualize their data—each of which took a process that used to involve writing lots of custom code and reduced it to playing around in a WYSIWYG interface.
  • Victor suggested that the same trick could be pulled for nearly every problem where code was being written today. “I’m not sure that programming has to exist at all,” he told me. “Or at least software developers.” In his mind, a software developer’s proper role was to create tools that removed the need for software developers. Only then would people with the most urgent computational problems be able to grasp those problems directly, without the intermediate muck of code.
  • Victor implored professional software developers to stop pouring their talent into tools for building apps like Snapchat and Uber. “The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems,” he wrote. Instead, they should focus on scientists and engineers—as he put it to me, “these people that are doing work that actually matters, and critically matters, and using really, really bad tools.”
  • “people are not so easily transitioning to model-based software development: They perceive it as another opportunity to lose control, even more than they have already.”
  • In a model-based design tool, you’d represent this rule with a small diagram, as though drawing the logic out on a whiteboard, made of boxes that represent different states—like “door open,” “moving,” and “door closed”—and lines that define how you can get from one state to the other. The diagrams make the system’s rules obvious: Just by looking, you can see that the only way to get the elevator moving is to close the door, or that the only way to get the door open is to stop.
  • Bantegnie’s company is one of the pioneers in the industrial use of model-based design, in which you no longer write code directly. Instead, you create a kind of flowchart that describes the rules your program should follow (the “model”), and the computer generates code for you based on those rules
  • “Typically the main problem with software coding—and I’m a coder myself,” Bantegnie says, “is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”
  • On this view, software becomes unruly because the media for describing what software should do—conversations, prose descriptions, drawings on a sheet of paper—are too different from the media describing what software does do, namely, code itself.
  • for this approach to succeed, much of the work has to be done well before the project even begins. Someone first has to build a tool for developing models that are natural for people—that feel just like the notes and drawings they’d make on their own—while still being unambiguous enough for a computer to understand. They have to make a program that turns these models into real code. And finally they have to prove that the generated code will always do what it’s supposed to.
  • tice brings order and accountability to large codebases. But, Shivappa says, “it’s a very labor-intensive process.” He estimates that before they used model-based design, on a two-year-long project only two to three months was spent writing code—the rest was spent working on the documentation.
  • uch of the benefit of the model-based approach comes from being able to add requirements on the fly while still ensuring that existing ones are met; with every change, the computer can verify that your program still works. You’re free to tweak your blueprint without fear of introducing new bugs. Your code is, in FAA parlance, “correct by construction.”
  • . In traditional programming, your task is to take complex rules and translate them into code; most of your energy is spent doing the translating, rather than thinking about the rules themselves. In the model-based approach, all you have is the rules. So that’s what you spend your time thinking about. It’s a way of focusing less on the machine and more on the problem you’re trying to get it to solve.
  • The bias against model-based design, sometimes known as model-driven engineering, or MDE, is in fact so ingrained that according to a recent paper, “Some even argue that there is a stronger need to investigate people’s perception of MDE than to research new MDE technologies.”
  • “Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second,” he wrote in a paper. “That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.”
  • Newcombe was convinced that the algorithms behind truly critical systems—systems storing a significant portion of the web’s data, for instance—ought to be not just good, but perfect. A single subtle bug could be catastrophic. But he knew how hard bugs were to find, especially as an algorithm grew more complex. You could do all the testing you wanted and you’d never find them all.
  • An algorithm written in TLA+ could in principle be proven correct. In practice, it allowed you to create a realistic model of your problem and test it not just thoroughly, but exhaustively. This was exactly what he’d been looking for: a language for writing perfect algorithms.
  • TLA+, which stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions,” is similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements—TLA+ calls them “specifications”—of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy
  • Programmers are drawn to the nitty-gritty of coding because code is what makes programs go; spending time on anything else can seem like a distraction. And there is a patient joy, a meditative kind of satisfaction, to be had from puzzling out the micro-mechanics of code. But code, Lamport argues, was never meant to be a medium for thought. “It really does constrain your ability to think when you’re thinking in terms of a programming language,”
  • Code makes you miss the forest for the trees: It draws your attention to the working of individual pieces, rather than to the bigger picture of how your program fits together, or what it’s supposed to do—and whether it actually does what you think. This is why Lamport created TLA+. As with model-based design, TLA+ draws your focus to the high-level structure of a system, its essential logic, rather than to the code that implements it.
  • But TLA+ occupies just a small, far corner of the mainstream, if it can be said to take up any space there at all. Even to a seasoned engineer like Newcombe, the language read at first as bizarre and esoteric—a zoo of symbols.
  • this is a failure of education. Though programming was born in mathematics, it has since largely been divorced from it. Most programmers aren’t very fluent in the kind of math—logic and set theory, mostly—that you need to work with TLA+. “Very few programmers—and including very few teachers of programming—understand the very basic concepts and how they’re applied in practice. And they seem to think that all they need is code,” Lamport says. “The idea that there’s some higher level than the code in which you need to be able to think precisely, and that mathematics actually allows you to think precisely about it, is just completely foreign. Because they never learned it.”
  • “In the 15th century,” he said, “people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d allow anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.”
  • Programmers, as a species, are relentlessly pragmatic. Tools like TLA+ reek of the ivory tower. When programmers encounter “formal methods” (so called because they involve mathematical, “formally” precise descriptions of programs), their deep-seated instinct is to recoil.
  • Formal methods had an image problem. And the way to fix it wasn’t to implore programmers to change—it was to change yourself. Newcombe realized that to bring tools like TLA+ to the programming mainstream, you had to start speaking their language.
  • he presented TLA+ as a new kind of “pseudocode,” a stepping-stone to real code that allowed you to exhaustively test your algorithms—and that got you thinking precisely early on in the design process. “Engineers think in terms of debugging rather than ‘verification,’” he wrote, so he titled his internal talk on the subject to fellow Amazon engineers “Debugging Designs.” Rather than bemoan the fact that programmers see the world in code, Newcombe embraced it. He knew he’d lose them otherwise. “I’ve had a bunch of people say, ‘Now I get it,’” Newcombe says.
  • In the world of the self-driving car, software can’t be an afterthought. It can’t be built like today’s airline-reservation systems or 911 systems or stock-trading systems. Code will be put in charge of hundreds of millions of lives on the road and it has to work. That is no small task.
katherineharron

Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

georgia

shared by katherineharron on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {
  • "This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."
  • as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy
  • The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden
  • Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchang
  • After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.
  • the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates
  • Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.
  • The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.
  • The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.
  • "In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.
  • Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.
  • The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.
aidenborst

Brazil coronavirus variant and surging second wave are overwhelming hospitals - CNN - 0 views

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

politics Brazil pandemic-recovery Pandemic vaccine covid-19

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In 22 of Brazil's 26 states, ICU occupancy has surpassed 80%. In the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, hospital patients must line up to wait for beds as occupancy rates in intensive care units soar past 103%. The neighboring state of Santa Catarina has already surpassed 99% occupancy and is on the verge of collapsing, as cases surge throughout the state.
  • "I was here during the first wave and it wasn't like this. We are completely overwhelmed, with our occupancy rate at over 100%. Many of those patients who are waiting for an ICU don't make it," Molina told CNN during a telephone interview.
  • Last week, Rio de Janeiro's Mayor Eduardo Paes announced a new curfew for bars and restaurants throughout the city, limiting hours of operation from 6:00 am to 5:00 pm. But hundreds of people stayed out anyway -- 230 curfew-related fines and closures were issued from Friday to Saturday alone, according to the city government. At one bar, more than 200 mostly-maskless partygoers were found at a party that had been going for seven hours, reported CNN affiliate CNN Brasil.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Many municipal and state health officials and lawmakers blame Bolsonaro's government for undermining their efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And the country's National Council of Health Secretaries (CONASS) has asked the federal government to adopt stricter measures to support hospitals and enforce social distancing.
  • "The health system in Brazil is on the verge of collapse," Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria told CNN's Becky Anderson during a recent interview. "There is no national coordination to combat the pandemic in Brazil. It would be important for the President and the governors to send the same message to the population, but this unfortunately, doesn't happen in Brazil.
  • He has made disobeying health guidance a point of pride, congratulating agricultural workers at an event last week for not staying home "like cowards."
  • "The emergence of new variants, which combine both the potential to be more transmissible and the absence of broad and articulated mitigation and suppression measures, are highly worrisome," the study's authors wrote, urging Brazil to encourage behaviors that limit the viral spread.
  • "The data showing the prevalence of this variant in several states and its ample spread throughout the country, as well as the challenges presented due to its high level of transmission, reinforce the immediate need to adopt non-pharmaceutical measures in order to reduce the speed or its spread and the increases in cases."
  • "This is what viruses do: They evolve, they get stronger. The only way to stop it is to contain its spread, which is why we need restrictive measures -- there is no other solution. Even if the Government decrees a national lockdown, we need the population to adhere. The action of each one of us will impact everyone as a whole," Naveca said.
  • Hope could be on its way, in the form of vaccines. But Brazil's vaccination rollout was slow in comparison to other countries, including others in the region, like Chile and Mexico.
  • Since then, roughly 4% of Brazil's 211 million citizens have received at least one vaccine dose, according to data from the Brazilian Health Ministry, and 2.3 million have had two doses.
  • "Pfizer says this very clearly on the contract, 'we are not responsible for any collateral side effects' - if you turn into an alligator it's your problem," Bolsonaro said in December. "If you become Superman, or grow a beard as a woman, or a man's voice becomes high pitched, they say they have nothing to do with that."
  • "I thank you for this meeting and we recognize Pfizer as a great world company," Bolsonaro said, during an excerpt of the meeting posted to his official Twitter account. "We would like to close these deals with you, even more given the aggressiveness of this virus in Brazil."
  • "The story in Brazil can be and will be repeated elsewhere if we stop implementing the measures as we need to implement them," he said. "Countries are going to lurch back into third and fourth surges if we're not careful."
  • "Unfortunately, I don't think we've learned our lesson," Molina said. "We [health workers] are tired, exhausted and are getting sick. We feel powerless. We need a more coordinated action if we're going to keep this from happening again.
mimiterranova

GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ams-ahead-of-expected-2022-run

Politics Georgia targets

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run By Julia Manchester - 02/01/21 09:19 AM EST 863 17,083 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookFacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterTwitter Share   Just In... Fauci: CDC will release new guidance for vaccinated Americans 'very soon' Healthcare — 2m 39s ago Veteran PAC slams Tucker Carlson for comments on female service members BriefingRoom BlogRoll — 24m 3s ago US officials debating sending millions of AstraZeneca doses awaiting clearance overseas: report Administration — 48m 11s ago Biden denounces hate, violence against Asian Americans: 'It must stop' News — 1h 29m ago Biden administration to implement testing programs in schools as part of reopening effort field
  • publican strategists aligned with Georgia Gov. Brian KempBrian KempGeorgia Senate votes to repeal no-excuse absentee voting Two Republicans can stop voter suppression Trump fires back at WSJ editorial urging GOP to move on MORE (R) on Monday launched an outside group aimed at stopping a potential 2022 gubernatorial run by Democrat Stacey Abrams.
  • "We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her — and her left-wing candidates — at the ballot box," the group's senior strategist, Jeremy Brand, said in a statement. "There is no time to waste: We must stand up, fight back, and Stop Stacey.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the two years since Abram's first run, her group Fair Fight has registered tens of thousands of voters in the Peach State and raised $100 million.
anonymous

Cyber Week in Review: April 23, 2021 | Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views

www.cfr.org/...yber-week-review-april-23-2021

cybersecurity russia

shared by anonymous on 25 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • the Russian government announced that it would expel ten U.S. diplomats and blacklist eight former and incumbent U.S. officials that were “involved in drafting and implementing anti-Russia policy.” The expulsions come after the Biden administration attributed the SolarWinds breach to Russia and implemented economic sanctions.
  • The UK government has launched a security campaign this week meant to educate domestic audiences on strategies used by foreign spies to steal sensitive or classified information. The campaign, titled “think before you link,” is a response to an increasing number of British nationals being targeted by malicious state actors masquerading as online recruiters
  • The new campaign is meant to combat these foreign actors by giving “practical advice on how to identify a malicious online profile, how to respond if approached, and how to minimize the risk of being targeted in the first place.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced legislation on Wednesday that would bar government and local law enforcement agencies from purchasing the location data of U.S. citizens without a warrant. The “Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act” [PDF] would also criminalize the police use of “illegitimately obtained” data from technology brokers such as Clearview AI, a biometrics firm that has scraped and sold billions of photos from social media and other websites
  • Facebook announced that it had broken up two separate Palestinian hacker groups—one with alleged ties to the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS), the intelligence service of the Palestinian Authority, and the other, known as Arid Viper, with reported links to the Hamas militant group.
  • the PSS-backed hackers are believed to be based in the West Bank and target entities primarily in Palestine and Syria, with a lesser focus on Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. Their targets include journalists, critics of the Palestinian government, human rights activists, and military groups such as the Syrian opposition and Iraqi military.
carolinehayter

In Poland, Protests As Near-Total Ban On Abortions Goes Into Effect : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-on-abortions-goes-into-effect

protests Politics Culture policy abortion

shared by carolinehayter on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Protesters gathered in the streets of Warsaw and other cities on Wednesday night after Poland's government announced a near-total ban on abortion had suddenly gone into effect.
  • The country's Constitutional Court had ruled in October to ban terminations of pregnancies with fetal defects – nearly the only abortions that occur in Poland, which already had strict limits on the procedure. Abortion will now only be permitted in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother's health or life is in danger.
  • The implementation of the ruling was delayed after weeks of huge protests in the fall.
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  • "This idiotic ruling will not prevent abortions," Cezary Jasinski, a 23-year-old student, told Reuters in central Warsaw. "But for every woman who will experience pain because of this ruling, or will be forced to give birth to a child with Down syndrome, they (court judges) will be to blame."
  • The months-long delay between the ruling and its implementation appears to be a result of the large protests that ensued. Last October, a planned "women's strike" drew more than 400,000 protesters across more than 400 Polish cities and towns.
  • "In cases when the fetus doesn't have a skull or has no chance to live outside the womb, there should be a choice. We will work on this," Suski told Polish public radio, according to Reuters.
  • Clement Beaune, France's European Affairs minister, wrote on Twitter: "A sad day that reminds us that rights can recede if they are not defended. The fight goes on."
  • There were 1,100 abortions performed last year in Poland; of those, 1,074 were due to fetal abnormalities, The New York Times reports.
  • Doctors in Poland can be jailed for performing illegal abortions.
lmunch

Opinion | We Came All This Way to Let Vaccines Go Bad in the Freezer? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...navirus-vaccines-expiring.html

crisis policy pandemic culture

shared by lmunch on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • America did not sufficiently plan for how to get millions of people vaccinated.
  • How poorly? Untold numbers of vaccine doses will expire before they can be injected into American arms, while communities around the country are reporting more corpses than their mortuaries can handle.
  • Operation Warp Speed has failed to come anywhere close to its original goal of vaccinating 20 million people against the coronavirus by the end of 2020.
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  • That’s an astonishing failure — one that stands out in a year of astonishing failures. The situation is made grimmer by how familiar the underlying narrative is: Poor coordination at the federal level, combined with a lack of funding and support for state and local entities, has resulted in a string of avoidable missteps and needless delays.
  • The implementation of these shots is complicated by a number of factors, including cold-storage requirements, which in turn necessitate special training for nurses and doctors. Training takes time and money, both of which are in short supply in most states. Some hospitals have said they don’t know which vaccine they are going to receive, or how many doses, or when.
  • Of the 14 million vaccine doses that have been produced and delivered to hospitals and health departments across the country, just an estimated three million people have been vaccinated.
  • It’s been two weeks since U.S. officials launched what ought to be the largest vaccination campaign in the nation’s history. So far, things are going poorly.How poorly? Untold numbers of vaccine doses will expire before they can be injected into American arms, while communities around the country are reporting more corpses than their mortuaries can handle.
  • The rest of the lifesaving doses, presumably, remain stored in deep freezers — where several million of them could well expire before they can be put to use.
  • The vaccine has been billed as the solution to this crisis — an incredible feat of science that would ultimately save us from the government’s widespread incompetence. But in the end, vaccines are a lot like other public health measures. Their success depends on their implementation.
  • In state after state, the results have been chaotic. In one Kentucky community, doses were nearly wasted when one nursing home ordered more than it needed. (Pharmacists saved the shots from the garbage bin by offering them to lucky customers on the spot.) In Palo Alto, Calif., faulty algorithms initially excluded frontline hospital residents from getting vaccinated. In New York and Boston, doctors who are at low risk have been caught cutting ahead of those at high risk. In Wisconsin, some 500 doses were deliberately wasted by a hospital employee. In Florida, seniors are waiting in line overnight in some cases.
  • Other countries are trying to offer the vaccine to as many people as possible. In Britain and Canada, for example, officials are planning to deploy all of their current vaccine supply immediately, rather than reserve half of it so those who get a first shot can quickly get their booster.
  • Whatever the solutions are to the vaccine challenge, the root problem is clear. Officials have long prioritized medicine (in this instance, developing the coronavirus vaccines) while neglecting public health (i.e., developing programs to vaccinate people). It’s much easier to get people excited about miracle shots, produced in record time, than about a dramatic expansion of cold storage, or establishment of vaccine clinics, or adequate training of doctors and nurses. But it takes all of these to stop a pandemic.
tsainten

Fact check: Trump's policies for Black Americans - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...lack-americans-policies-433744

HBCU Trump Policy US

shared by tsainten on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters in 2016 and has talked more about criminals than criminal justice in the closing days of the campaign. He did, however, sign the bipartisan First Step Act and has granted 28 pardons and 16 sentence commutations.
  • Former President Barack Obama tapped two Black attorneys general to serve in his administration, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and he used his executive authority to create a task force on 21st century policing and granted clemency to more than 1,900 people, the highest figure since Harry Truman’s administration granted clemency to more than 2,000 people.
  • “Black voters are looking for a comprehensive agenda that will get at the structural barriers blocking Black mobility in this country,”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • the First Step Act would release more than 3,100 federal prison inmates and said its retroactive sentencing reform had led to nearly 1,700 sentence reductions. The Sentencing Project said last year that Black Americans made up 91 percent of everyone receiving reductions.
  • Trump reinstituted the federal death penalty. Seven people have been executed this year under the policy — five were white, one was Native American and the other was Black. And there are 55 federal death-row prisoners. Twenty-five are African Americans, 22 are white, seven are Latino and one is Asian.
  • Under the Trump administration, the Black unemployment rate steadily improved, dropping to 5.4 percent at its bottom in August 2019, compared to 7.5 percent when Trump took office in January 2017. But that achievement is attributable to economic growth that was already revving when Trump took office, economists say.
  • Black workers did not see employment levels ever go “above the trend.”
  • when the labor market is tight, like it was in first three years of the Trump administration, discrimination tends to decline.
  • Even with record-low unemployment rates in 2019, Black Americans still had fewer jobs than their white counterparts — even for those with college or advanced degrees — according to research by EPI.
  • In April, when unemployment peaked at 14.7 percent — the highest level seen since the Great Depression — the unemployment rate for Black workers was even higher, at 16.7 percent. By September, the share of unemployed Black workers still struggling to find a job only dropped to 12.1 percent.
  • Many banks limited their initial application pool for the small business rescue Paycheck Protection Program to previous customers, a staff report by the House coronavirus subcommittee found. Democrats and non-profits argue that shut out many minority-owned businesses that lacked business banking relationships from the program, which offered forgivable loans to companies that kept their workers on the payroll.
  • The bill is a 10-year renewal of funding. During Obama’s eight years in office, mandatory HBCU funding ranged from almost $80 million to $85 million per year. The same has been true during Trump’s administration.
  • The amount of funding for HBCUs is “the same thing that we had under President Obama.”
  • creating “more than 8,000 opportunities zones, bringing jobs and opportunities to our inner-city families.”
  • Opportunity zones “are tax incentives to encourage those with capital gains to invest in low-income and undercapitalized communities,” according to the Tax Policy Center.
  • A feature of the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, the program was intended to benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income communities. But there’s very little data about what’s actually happening in opportunity zones. There isn’t a full accounting of the number of opportunity zone projects, let alone basic information such as what those projects are, why they’re being pursued and who is benefiting from them.
  • the vast majority of opportunity zone capital appears to be going into real estate rather than operating businesses, meaning that the opportunity zones aren’t creating sustainable, long-term jobs.
  • he scrapped an Obama rule requiring localities to track patterns of segregation or lose federal funding.
  • The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development replaced the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act with a much weaker rule in July, using a waiver to exempt the new regulation from public-comment requirements. Public comments allow people to weigh in on proposed rules before they’re finalized. But by bypassing that critical step, the agency essentially expedited a months-long process without any public input.
  • baseless fear of crime and decreased property value as attempted triggers to get at white anxiety about living with people of color — and African Americans in particular — and the idea of integration itself,”
  • new rule in September overhauling the Obama administration’s 2013 “disparate impact” rule. The new rule would have required plaintiffs to meet a higher threshold to prove unintentional discrimination — known as disparate impact — and given defendants more leeway to rebut the claims.
  • A federal court intervened this month -- the day before the rule was set to take effect last week -- issuing a preliminary nationwide injunction to bar HUD from implementing the new regulation until the merits of a lawsuit brought by civil rights advocates have been decided.
Javier E

A Better Anti-Racism - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...a-better-anti-racism

persuasion anti-racism race

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Because these disagreements are typically framed as a battle over means—that is, how best to fight racism—one can easily miss that there is a deeper question at stake: What is the end goal for American race relations?
  • Across the American political spectrum, nearly everyone agrees that racism is evil. Yet there remain deep disagreements not only about what counts as racism, but also over how to fight it
  • For fifty years, the American left has been torn between two different answers. The first was best encapsulated by Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. King looked forward to a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”—a day when race would be seen as an insignificant attribute.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The competing vision—let’s call it race-consciousness—was best encapsulated by the Black Power movement
  • it was to demand that black people, understood as a collective, receive more recognition, more respect, and more resources. Underlying this vision was the assumption that society is a zero-sum power struggle between oppressed groups and oppressor groups—and that a win for the former requires a loss for the latter.
  • In the race-conscious vision, racial harmony is an afterthought. At times, it is actively shunned. Race-consciousness seeks to “problematize” relations between members of different ethnic groups in a variety of ways
  • For black people, race-consciousness seems to promise more status and more access to opportunity. For white people, it promises a way to act on, rather than simply brood over, feelings of guilt over their complicity (real or imagined) in America’s past sins. For the nation as a whole, it seems to promise solutions to ongoing problems like mass incarceration and police brutality.
  • Yet race-consciousness cannot deliver on its promises because its foundational assumptions are flawed. For one thing, it does not reject the old rigid racial categories so much as it transforms them, sneaking them in through the back door.
  • More fundamentally, race-consciousness misdiagnoses the problems facing our society and therefore prescribes the wrong cures. The preoccupation with electing black politicians (or politicians “of color” more broadly) is one example.
  • Cities such as Atlanta and Detroit, which have had five or six consecutive black mayors, see all the same problems as cities with mostly white leadership. As Bernie Sanders pointed out not long ago, caring about the skin color of politicians, as opposed to their policy proposals and qualifications, is just as wrong-headed as it sounds.
  • Where will race-conscious anti-racism of this kind lead in the long run?
  • We might get a clue from the work put forth by thought leaders within the movement. Consider Ibram X. Kendi, the bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, who has proposed a constitutional amendment that would enable actual authoritarianism. I do not use that word lightly: In Kendi’s ideal world, there would be a Department of Anti-Racism that would have the constitutional power to investigate private businesses, reject any local, state, or federal policy that is deemed to contribute to racial disparity, and discipline public officials “who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” (What counts as a racist idea would, of course, be determined by a panel of experts like Kendi.)
  • Thankfully, very few people would sign on to Kendi’s proposal right now. But it is still a useful document for one reason: it accurately summarizes what would be required in order to achieve the world that today’s race-conscious anti-racists want to see
  • A movement that defines any racially disparate outcome as white supremacy will inevitably tend toward policies that seek to erase such disparities by fiat—individual rights be damned. If, for instance, the fact that Asian-Americans are vastly over-represented in New York City’s elite high schools (which admit students on the basis of a single test) comes to be seen as a racist outcome, then Asian-American applicants may be discriminated against to eliminate that disparity.
  • The question is not whether a proposal like Kendi’s could gain enough support to be implemented wholesale today; it couldn’t.
  • The question is this: if Kendi’s proposal enters the political mainstream in, say, fifty years, will there be a robust, liberal anti-racist movement to provide an alternative? Or will liberal principles—such as individual rights and freedom of speech—have been so thoroughly stigmatized that Kendi-like proposals seem to be the only viable option for those who care about fighting racism?
  • Writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have done an excellent job of owning the term “anti-racist.”
  • Many people who are horrified by their illiberalism are thus tempted to give up on the label of anti-racism. That would be a mistake—for it is up to us whether anti-racism will continue to move in an illiberal direction
  • America has a long tradition of liberal anti-racism that reaches back to Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Frederick Douglass, and beyond. It is an anti-racism grounded in the idea that there is a single human race to which we all belong
  • Today, many feel that this principle represents the very status quo that we must depart from in order to begin making progress. The goal of getting past race, in this view, is precisely what has prevented us from implementing the race-conscious policies that would meaningfully address racial inequality.
  • But this underplays how much progress we have already made. Back in the early 1970s, the NYPD killed 91 people in a single year. In 2018, they killed five. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18-29 has been cut by more than half. Most people don’t know this
  • As a result, they imagine that the system must be overturned in order for progress to occur. But though there are, of course, still a lot of injustices in today’s America, they are wrong.
  • The current system, warts and all, has enabled huge progress for black people in recent decades. Overturning the liberal principles on which our institutions are based would not hasten progress towards racial equality; it would threaten the very stability that is required for incremental progress to occur.
  • It is time to restore Martin Luther King’s dream for American race relations—a dream that, even as it refuses to flinch from the injustices we still need to overcome, defiantly holds onto the idea that what we have in common is ultimately more important than what divides us. We must defend that principle even when it is unpopular, even when it marks you as “tone-deaf,” and even when it elicits eyerolls from those who imagine they have found more worthy principles. Our ability to remedy racial injustice depends on it.
katherineharron

US Coronavirus: Daily deaths from Covid-19 just exceeded the deaths from 9/11 on this b... - 0 views

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

covid

shared by katherineharron on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The United States should be celebrating a day of great hope today, as a Covid-19 vaccine could get authorized for emergency use very soon.
  • Vaccine advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration are meeting Thursday to discuss the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
  • That's more deaths than those suffered in the 9/11 attacks.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • A new composite forecast from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects a total of 332,000 to 362,000 Covid-19 deaths by January 2.
  • Covid-19 hospitalizations also reached a new record high of 106,688 on Wednesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • more than 221,000 new infections were reported in just one da
  • "We are in a totally unprecedented health crisis in this country,"
  • Health care workers are exhausted. Hospitals are totally full."
  • "Unfortunately, with the volume of new cases that we are seeing and the implications it has on hospital utilization, during a period of widespread, community transmission, activities such as eating, drinking and smoking in close proximity to others, should not continue."
  • If the FDA grants emergency use authorization in the coming days, the first Americans outside of clinical trials could start getting inoculated this month.
  • in the coming months it's crucial that Americans stay vigilant and follow safety guidelines, like wearing face masks, social distancing and hunkering down in their social bubbles.
  • The daily death toll from Covid-19 reached a record high of 3,124 Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
  • "Let's say we get 75%, 80% of the population vaccinated. I believe if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer ... we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we could approach very much, some degree of normality that is close to where we were before,"
  • "We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that won't happen," Paul Ostrowski, who is leading supply, production and distribution for Operation Warp Speed, told "Good Morning America" Wednesday.
  • "Baltimore City has not had to implement such severe restrictions since the very earliest days of the pandemic and the implementation of the stay-at-home order," the city's health department tweeted.
  • But the country will likely not see any meaningful impact until well into 2021 -- and that's if enough people get vaccinated, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
  • Indiana's Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb ordered hospitals to postpone or reschedule non-emergency procedures done in an inpatient hospital setting from December 16 through January 3 to preserve hospital capacity.
  • In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey announced Wednesday she's extending the state's Safer at Home order, which includes a statewide mask mandate for another six weeks.
  • About 53% of respondents said they would get the vaccine promptly -- up from 51% before Thanksgiving and 38% in early October.
  • The first emergency use authorization for a vaccine is expected soon, and about 20 million people could likely get vaccinated in the next few weeks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Wednesday.
  • In the UK, "thousands" of people were already vaccinated Tuesday, the first day of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine rollout there, according to the National Health Service (NHS).
  • The FDA will not "cut any corners" when deciding whether to authorize the vaccine, Azar said, saying he was sure what happened in the UK would be "something the FDA looks at."
  • "For now, we need to double down on the steps that can keep us all safe."
Javier E

China pledge to stop funding coal projects 'buys time for emissions target' | China | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...buys-time-for-emissions-target

china funding coal projects emissions crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Xi Jinping’s announcement that China will stop funding overseas coal projects could buy the world about three more months in the race to keep global heating to a relatively safe level of 1.5C, experts say.
  • Ending Chinese coal financing has long been near the top of climate activists’ wishlists. For more than a decade, China has been the lender of last resort for overseas governments seeking finance for thermal power plants. That role has accelerated since the 2013 start of the country’s belt and road initiative (BRI).
  • Xi’s declaration is likely to affect at least 54 gigawatts of China-backed coal power projects,
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Lauri Myllyvirta, the centre’s lead analyst, said this was equivalent to about three months of global emissions. “These plants, if built and operated, would have emitted around 250-280 megatonnes of CO2 a year, which is roughly equal to the total emissions of Spain. Assuming an operating life of 35 years, the cumulative emissions would amount to 10 gigatonnes, or a year of China’s emissions, or three months of global emissions,”
  • there is evidence that 40% of the heavy equipment at new coal plants outside China and India comes from China
  • With coal now seemingly in terminal decline, climate activists are turning their sights towards oil, gas, and domestic coal power in China and India.
  • The immediate impact is likely to be felt in the countries that rely most heavily on Chinese funding for new coal projects: Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Pakistan
  • Depending on implementation, other possible beneficiaries of this announcement could be the rhinos, giraffes, cheetahs and other endangered species at Zimbabwe’s Hwange national park, where two Chinese companies had hoped to extract the fossil fuel.
  • Another positive knock-on effect would be to push Japan to follow suit. The government in Tokyo has already taken steps in this direction but left a door open for financing by its private-sector institutions. Their geopolitical reason had been that they did not want to leave China as the only option for regional energy projects.
  • Despite the uncertainties over implementation, Myllyvirta said China’s announcement would accelerate decarbonisation. “Countries now know that going forward, there is no financing on the table for coal. That should clarify things a lot. Chinese delegates are going to visit Indonesia or Vietnam or Pakistan and they will be saying, ‘We don’t do coal any more, but we can help with clean energy.’ That will make a difference.”
  • Close to 58% of its power comes from the country’s 1,058 coal plants, almost half the total in the entire the world. This makes China far the biggest carbon emitter, pumping more than one out of every four gigatonnes that enter the atmosphere.
  • oughly half the country’s plants will have to close if the government 2060 net-zero target is to be achieved.
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