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anonymous

In Canary Islands, Tensions Are High Over African Migration : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...re-high-over-african-migration

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In a sunlit courtyard, volunteers at a church soup kitchen are handing out lunch bags and cups of fruit juice. Arcadina Dámaso, the coordinator, says demand has shot up. "Until December, a maximum of 50 people would come here," she says. "Now, we're serving 75. Most of the new ones are Senegalese and Moroccan."
  • Stricter controls across the Mediterranean have led more migrants to choose this longer, treacherous route to Europe. Nearly all who reach the islands want to end up in mainland Spain, to find jobs or join relatives, which is more than 1,000 miles away.
  • The bottleneck has angered some locals, while for migrants it's causing misery. Younes Rida, 30, is getting a meal at the soup kitchen.
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  • Through an interpreter, Rida says that he used his share of his family's land to pay his passage to the islands — 2,000 euros ($2,380). But the people smuggler tricked him, taking his money and leaving him stranded.
  • "They eat in the camp, breakfast lunch and dinner. And us? We're hungry. Hungry and ashamed, because it can't go on like this," he says. Pockets of xenophobia have bubbled here since the crisis began. There have been anti-migrant marches and reports of organized groups attacking Moroccans.
  • As the Spanish government struggled to accommodate the surge of arrivals, hotels left empty because of the pandemic were used as temporary solution. Now it is opening six new migrant camps for 7,000 people on the islands.
  • Aday Arbelo, an out-of-work welder from Gran Canaria, is also eating at the soup kitchen. "We're all afraid!" he says. "Every day there's police around here, every day there are fights and robberies." "It's awful. One day this is going to explode because there's no solution at all. The government promises and promises and nobody helps."
  • Rida wants to earn money for his mom's diabetes medicine. He says the family is poor and there's no future for him in Morocco. He's not alone. Moroccans make up one of the largest immigrant groups in Spain. And according to a recent survey by Arab Barometer, an independent research group, 70% of young citizens consider emigrating due to frustrations over a lack of economic opportunities.
  • "The main problem is not the migrants arriving but the local authorities and the government," Carlsen adds, "the image they are giving in front of the Canarian people — they feel like they are abandoned."
  • "Life in Senegal is very hard. There's no work or money," he says. "We're fishermen, and the government has sold the sea to foreign boats. To European boats!"
  • Cristina Taisma Calderín, a 19-year-old student from Las Palmas, has come to offer food and friendship. "This country is not only for us, they are people!" she says. "They have the right to live well in good conditions. And if other people come, let them come."
  • Spain's Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has said that the government wants to minimize transfers to the mainland in order to "prevent irregular entry routes into Europe." The center-left government's junior coalition partner, the leftist United We Can party, demanded migrants urgently be allowed to travel, condemning what it considers the "repeated infringement of human rights" in the Canaries.
  • A spokesperson from Spain's Interior Ministry told NPR that all undocumented migrants without international protection under asylum law face deportation. After the pandemic halted repatriation flights for months, deportations to Morocco, Senegal and Mauritania are now underway.
brookegoodman

Millions to need food aid in days as virus exposes UK supply | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ays-as-virus-exposes-uk-supply

crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Millions of people in the UK will need food aid in the coming days, food charities are warning, as the coronavirus outbreak threatens to quickly spiral into a crisis of hunger unless the government acts immediately to reinvent the way we feed ourselves.
  • Supermarket distribution systems, based on “just in time” supply chains, are struggling to cope with a sudden surge in demand since Covid-19 took hold. The most pressing concern is finding a way to feed the country’s most vulnerable and isolated people.
  • Anna Taylor, the Food Foundation’s director, said that between 4 million and 7 million people in lower risk categories are also affected by severe food insecurity or loneliness, so having to self-isolate could tip them into crisis.
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  • Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London, and a former government adviser, said ministers have worked on the assumption that feeding Britain can be left to the market and big retailers. While ministers have been in discussion with supermarket chief executives during the pandemic, Lang argues they are failing to grasp the structural weaknesses in the food system and the scale of food poverty.
  • Lang added: “Borders are closing, lorries are being slowed down and checked. We only produce 53% of our own food in the UK. It’s a failure of government to plan.”
  • “Some £1bn extra food and groceries were bought by households in the last two to three weeks. That’s like Christmas but worse because it’s gone on for three times as long,” said Andrew Opie, director of food at the British Retail Consortium, the supermarket trade association.
  • Supermarkets have built supply chains of immense complexity and sophistication over the last four decades, affording customers a choice of more than 40,000 lines from around the world – from dozens of different kinds of pasta to a permanent global summertime of fresh fruits and vegetables.
  • The consequences of a disrupted supply chain will be most acute for the millions in households whose incomes are so low that they have depended on food banks or free meals at school or in daycare centres, which have now closed.
  • She added: “We may need the army to oversee biosecurity as caterers, for example in school kitchens, supply hubs and to enforce social distancing as people collect food from them.”
  • The government has also been working on a scheme for parents of the 1.6 million children who had been on free school meals, with vouchers which can be redeemed in supermarkets. Campaigners, however, argue the vouchers should be usable for nutritionally-balanced meals from school kitchens, which could be kept open.
  • The industry can see other threats on the near horizon. The British food system is largely built on a cheap and highly flexible labour force, which can be turned on and off like a tap. Now that is drying up as Brexit, travel restrictions and fear of illness are keeping away the migrants who have typically done that work.
  • It is creating around eight new hubs from which children in low-income families and isolated adults can have food delivered to their doors. “We have the data to identify people who are likely to be struggling and have mobilised staff,” said its director of public health, Jason Strelitz, but the council was still waiting for government to commit money.
nrashkind

Quarantine: How to prepare to isolate due to possible coronavirus infection - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • It's a scenario all too many of us are facing -- or will soon face.
  • You or a loved one has a mild fever, body aches, the start of a nagging, dry cough. Food doesn't taste good nor smell as it once did. Maybe you have shortness of breath or struggle to breath deeply.
  • The rest of us with symptoms but no additional known risk factors will also certainly be told to stay home, rest and drink plenty of fluids, all while keeping a close eye on how we feel.
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  • Preparation is the key to a good plan.
  • Hopefully, you've been following standard hygiene practices. These are behaviors we should be doing daily, automatically, to protect ourselves from germs, colds and flu:
  • Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands; cough and sneeze into elbows or tissues that you immediately throw away, and regularly wash, wash, wash those hands with warm water and lots of soapy bubbles.
  • Parents and guardians should plan well in advance by setting up a structure in which all kids and potential caregivers know their roles and expectations, said pediatrician Dr. Tanya Altmann, Editor-in-Chief of the American Academy of Pediatrics' book "Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5 and The Wonder Years."
  • A working thermometer to monitor fever, which is considered to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius), and a method to clean it, such as Isopropyl alcohol.
  • Fever reducing medications, such as acetaminophen.
  • Regular soap and 70% alcohol-based hand sanitizer (antibacterial soap isn't necessary if you wash properly, and that way you won't will contribute to the world's growing antibiotic-resistant superbugs).
  • Tissues to cover sneezes and coughs. But there's really no need to hoard toilet paper -- this is a respiratory disease.
  • Regular cleaning supplies, kitchen cleaning gloves and trash can liners.
  • Disinfectant cleaning supplies -- the CDC suggests picking from a list that meets the virus-fighting standards of the US Environmental Protection Agency, but says you can also make your own version by using 1/3 cup unexpired bleach per gallon of water or 4 teaspoons bleach per quart of water. Never mix bleach with ammonia or any other cleanser -- it produces toxic gases.
  • If you live alone, that's not difficult. Your challenge is to monitor your symptoms and care for yourself when you're not feeling well. Be sure to have a plan in place to deliver food and medications, and find someone who can be responsible for virtually checking in on you on a regular basis.
  • The rest of the family should practice isolation as well, Radesky added.
  • If you are running short on face masks, or don't have any because of hoarding, try to protect the caregiver as best you can, the CDC says.
  • Altmann stresses maximizing isolation and protective actions.
  • "You can have a healthy person leave the sick one food and drinks at the door, and then go wash their hands," Altmann explained. "Wear gloves to pick up the empty plates, take them back to the kitchen and wash them in hot water with soap, or preferably with a dishwasher, and wash your hands again."
  • One last, very important thing: Call 911 immediately if you or your loved ones have any of these symptoms: increased or sudden difficulty breathing or shortness of breath; a persistent pain or pressure in the chest; and any sign of oxygen deprivation, such as new confusion, bluish lips or face, or you can't arouse the sick person.
  • To be clear: Everyone in the house needs to isolate themselves from the outside world as much as possible.
anonymous

After two months in office, Kamala Harris is still living out of suitcases -- and she's... - 0 views

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

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It has been more than two months since Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president of the United States, a historic moment for the country, as Harris is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold the second highest office in the land. Yet, Harris -- along with her husband, Georgetown Law professor Douglas Emhoff -- is still, ostensibly, living out of suitcases, unable to move into the private residence reserved for the vice president because it's still undergoing renovations.
  • It's unclear why the renovations are taking so long, said one administration official, but it's a situation that has left Harris increasingly and understandably bothered, according to several people who spoke to CNN about her situation. "She is getting frustrated," said another administration official, noting with each passing day the desire to move in to her designated house -- a stately, turreted mansion two-and-a-half miles from the White House -- grows more intense.
  • CNN has looked at various government contracts, awarded for myriad issues at the vice president's residence over the last few years, many of which detail intensive foundational work. From recently wrapped projects on a retention pond to a replaced tank system for $164,000 from last September, repairs and upkeep appear constant. There's also an ongoing $3.8 million contract for "plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors," according to the contract on the United States government spending website.
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  • The contracts, while substantial, aren't overtly egregious in terms of cost and expectation, considering the home is 9,000-plus square feet and was built in 1893. Tax records from 2018 indicate $119,000 in expenses were used to provide updates and improvements in and around the grounds of the residence, for example. However, the current contracts do not address specifically why the vice president is still not living there, which is leading to growing questions -- and agitation -- about the pace of the work.
  • Harris has recently been spotted at her future home, popping in for an hour-long visit three weeks ago, per CNN. Two administration staff with knowledge of the ongoing updates told CNN that Harris -- who likes to cook -- requested work be done on the kitchen.
  • It is not unusual for there to be at least a couple of weeks between residents, so the Naval staff who operate the home can refresh, said Elizabeth Haenle, who served as vice president residence manager and social secretary for former Vice President Dick Cheney. "From time to time, the Navy will ask the vice president and their respective families to delay moving in so that they have time for maintenance and upgrades that are not easy to perform once the vice president takes up residence," Haenle said.
  • Shortly after inauguration, a Harris aide told CNN the vice president wouldn't be immediately moving in, citing the need for some repairs to the home "that are more easily conducted with the home unoccupied." A move-in date was still to be determined at the time. Another administration official told CNN some of the work included renovating the home's chimneys -- there are seven working fireplaces -- as well as other updates.
  • Although Blair House provides comfortable, even luxurious, accommodations, Harris and Emhoff's current surroundings lack the creature comforts of a home. Antiques and museum-quality pieces of American history deck each of the 100-plus rooms, which include a gym and a private hair salon. And although the professional, full-time staff of more than a dozen provide amenities as accommodating as a luxury hotel, Blair House does not offer the laid-back vibe Harris and Emhoff are said to prefer when they are home. The couple enjoy a more casual, West Coast informality, with frequent visits from family and large Sunday suppers, the former California senator has said.
  • The main bedroom suite at Blair House was redecorated by celebrity interior designer Thomas Pheasant, brought on in 2012 to make updates to overall décor, and includes a massive, canopied bed draped in luxe fabrics and furnishings that are more reminiscent of Mount Vernon than a California modern mood. Her condo in Washington, DC, which she moved out of to live at Blair House, was inside a sleek, eco-chic, minimalist building in the city's West End neighborhood.
  • When the second couple does finally move into One Observatory Circle, where the vice president's residence is located on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, they will find a home quite unlike their city condo or Blair House, but also very different from the White House. There are far fewer formalities, fewer staff and more freedom.
  • The dozens of acres that make up the grounds of the Naval Observatory offer privacy and the ability to move about with more leisure than can the President and first lady at the White House. Biden last month at a CNN Town Hall referred to the White House as a "gilded cage," and lamented not having the same accoutrements at his disposal as when he lived at the vice president's residence for eight years.
  • It was former Vice President Dan Quayle who had the heated pool installed, and it became Biden's treasured refuge. While vice president, Biden would throw raucous summer pool parties for staff and their families, bringing out water cannons and partaking in drenching shoot-outs with the children who attended. In 2017, shortly after moving in, then-second lady Karen Pence shared in an interview Biden's parting words to her just after her husband, Mike Pence, was sworn in: "That's the thing that Joe Biden said to us as he got into the limo and left the Capitol on Inauguration Day — he said, 'You're gonna love the pool.'"
  • Harris, who early in her vice presidency was spotted running up and down the steps at the Lincoln Memorial for her workout, Secret Service agents nearby, will have the outdoor space to jog, swim and workout at her new home -- without the public spotting her and posting videos on social media. Harris has said she works out every morning, and swimming can sometimes be a part of her routine -- another reason the vice presidential pool is a perk.
  • Should she wish to add her personal signature to the residence or its grounds -- such as Quayle did with the pool or George H.W. Bush did with an outdoor horseshoe pit or the Bidens did with a garden where the names of all the home's occupants, pets included, are engraved -- updates and tweaks can circumvent the elaborate process of approvals that any changes at the White House must go through.
  • However, as with the White House, a separate foundation has been established to cover most updates with government-provided funds. Also like the White House, the vice president has at her disposal roomfuls of historic furnishings and decorative arts from which to choose from as part of a private collection reserved for the President and vice president to make their temporary homes feel homey and to their personal tastes. Karen Pence once said she left the residence rooms set up in much the same way as the Biden's had it before them, since the Pences liked the layout and saw no reason to upend it.
  • Harris is known to derive satisfaction from cooking, and she's no doubt hungering for the personal space to do that. She once said in an interview with New York Magazine's "The Cut," "If I'm cooking, I feel like I'm in control of my life." Harris and Emhoff are fond of their nights in, and enjoy sharing time in the kitchen and good food. The couple, separately and together, are frequent patrons of Stachowski's Market, a butcher shop and mini-gourmet provisions store located on a quaint corner in Georgetown.
  • For at-home entertaining, the residence offers "a wrap-around veranda that faces away from the busy streets of Northwest Washington," notes Haenle. "It is a special place and makes for great Sunday afternoon family gatherings," while still being formal enough to welcome heads of state.
Javier E

What Housework Has to Do With Waistlines - NYTimes.com - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...work-has-to-do-with-waistlines

exercise housework historical research weight

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The study, published this month in PLoS One, is a follow-up to an influential 2011 report which used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine that, during the past 50 years, most American workers began sitting down on the job. Physical activity at work, such as walking or lifting, almost vanished, according to the data, with workers now spending most of their time seated before a computer or talking on the phone. Consequently, the authors found, the average American worker was burning almost 150 fewer calories daily at work than his or her employed parents had, a change that had materially contributed to the rise in obesity during the same time frame, especially among men
  • Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.
  • pulled data from the diaries about how many hours the women were spending in various activities, how many calories they likely were expending in each of those tasks, and how the activities and associated energy expenditures changed over the years.
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  • Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy.
  • Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.
  • In 1965, women typically had spent about eight hours a week sitting and watching television
  • By 2010, those hours had more than doubled, to 16.5 hours per week.
  • According to the authors’ calculations, American women not employed outside the home were burning about 360 fewer calories every day in 2010 than they had in 1965, with working women burning about 132 fewer calories at home each day in 2010 than in 1965.
  • we should start consciously tracking what we do when we are at home and try to reduce the amount of time spent sitting. “Walk to the mailbox,” he said. Chop vegetables in the kitchen. Play ball with your, or a neighbor’s, dog. Chivvy your spouse into helping you fold sheets.
Javier E

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

www.salon.com/...o_flavor_lets_make_it_in_a_lab

food flavor additive research industry

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • “If you take a fresh strawberry after processing, it’s nothing. It tastes like nothing,” said Wright, as a way of explaining why the food industry is so reliant on the $12 billion global flavoring industry.
  • When I asked Dave Adams, the food scientist who founded Savoury Systems, why actual meat is such an inferior source for the chicken flavor that, strangely enough, goes into chicken, he gave me the same answer Wright did. Modern chicken, he grumbled, has no flavor. “They grow them so fast, they don’t have time to develop flavor,” he said. And chicken — even tasteless, scrap stuff — is more expensive than soy.
  • The flavoring game wasn’t always so sophisticated. When it began in Europe in the 19th century, companies imported spices and procured plants such as lemongrass, which yielded citronella oil, ideal for concentrating into lemon flavor. These essential oils went mostly into fragrances, medicines and candies. As the field of chemistry progressed in the latter half of the century, European scientists, particularly Germans, figured out how to synthesize flavors and fragrances from chemicals instead of having to wrench them from natural materials.
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  • World War II forced transformative market changes when supplies from Europe and elsewhere were cut off. Many companies expanded and moved across the Hudson to set up new factories
  • One of the newer breakthroughs to come along in the science of flavor is called taste modulation. About a decade ago, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego named Charles Zuker isolated, for the first time, the receptors on the tongue that are responsible for our perception of taste. He did this using tastebud cells from laboratory mice. What he found was that each cell was incredibly specific, containing receptors for just one taste — either sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory (also called umami
  • Coupled with mass spectrometers, which identify what’s been isolated, this technology opened up a vast world of possibilities, allowing for a much more thorough (though still incomplete) map of nature’s aromas. The number of flavor chemicals known in orange peels, for instance, has gone from nine in 1948 to 207 today. In spearmint leaves, it’s leapt from 6 to 100, and in black peppercorns, from seven to 273.
  • In nature, flavor comes as a sophisticated mix of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals, each with its own unique taste and smell. Using early-20th-century chemistry tools, scientists could hope to identify perhaps a handful of these in any given plant
  • Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.
Javier E

Used to Hardship, Latvia Accepts Austerity, and Its Pain Eases - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...terity-and-its-pain-eases.html

latvia austerity crisis history economics orthodox policy

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.
  • Now its abrupt turn for the better has put a spotlight on a ticklish question for those who look to orthodox economics for a solution to Europe’s wider economic woes: Instead of obeying any universal laws of economic gravity, do different people respond differently to the same forces?
  • in Latvia, where the government laid off a third of its civil servants, slashed wages for the rest and sharply reduced support for hospitals, people mostly accepted the bitter medicine. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who presided over the austerity, was re-elected, not thrown out of office, as many of his counterparts elsewhere have been. The cuts calmed fears on financial markets that the country was about to go bankrupt, and this meant that the government and private companies could again get the loans they needed to stay afloat. At the same time, private businesses followed the government in slashing wages, which made the country’s labor force more competitive by reducing the prices of its goods. As exports grew, companies began to rehire workers.
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  • Economic gains have still left 30.9 percent of Latvia’s population “severely materially deprived,” according to 2011 data released in December by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, second only to Bulgaria. Unemployment has fallen from more than 20 percent in early 2010, but was still 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012
  • “I’m always asking people here, ‘How can you put up with this?’ ” said Juris Calitis, a Latvian-born Anglican chaplain whose family fled Soviet occupation in the 1940s and who returned when the Soviet empire crumbled. “It is really shocking,” added Mr. Calitis, who runs a soup kitchen at his church in Riga’s old town. Latvians, he said, “should be shouting in the streets,” but “there is an acceptance of hard knocks.”
  • In contrast to much of Europe, Latvia today has no tradition of labor activism. “What can you achieve in the street? It is cold and snowing,” said Peteris Krigers, president of the Free Trade Union Confederation of Latvia. Organizing strikes, he said, is nearly impossible. “It is seen as shameful for people who earn any salary, no matter how small, to go on strike.”
  • Also largely absent are the leftist political forces that have opposed austerity elsewhere in Europe, or the rigid labor laws that protect job security and wage levels. In the second half of 2010, after less than 18 months of painful austerity, Latvia’s economy began to grow again.
  • Since 2008, Latvia has lost more than 5 percent of its population, mostly young people, to emigration. The recent exodus peaked in 2010, when 42,263 people moved abroad, a huge number in a country of just two million now, according to Mihails Hazans, a professor at the University of Latvia.
  • Alf Vanags, director of the Baltic International Center for Economic Policy Studies here, is skeptical. “The idea of a Latvian ‘success story’ is ridiculous,” he said. “Latvia is not a model for anybody.”
  • A better and more equitable way out of Latvia’s troubles, he believes, would have been a devaluation of the currency, an option closed to Greece and 16 other countries that use the euro. Latvia kept its currency pegged to the euro, putting itself in much the same straitjacket as euro zone nations.
  • “You can only do this in a country that is willing to take serious pain for some time and has a dramatic flexibility in the labor market,” he said. “The lesson of what Latvia has done is that there is no lesson.”
Javier E

History News Network | Which Country Has Better High Ed System - China or the USA? - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...162494

university education trends china excellence investment

shared by Javier E on 16 May 16 - No Cached
  • Since 1978, the Chinese Communist Party has built the largest higher educational system in the world with upwards of 30 million students; its 2,400 institutions of higher learning produce roughly eight million graduates per year, about five million more than American colleges and universities.
  • A thirty-year run of neoliberalism (a universalized logic of competition that justifies the transformation of institutions established for the public good into business enterprises) is depleting the American academy of its intellectual capital. The symptoms of that deterioration include the influx of corporate managerialism, administrative bloat, the erosion of shared governance, the near-disappearance of the tenure system, skyrocketing tuitions, the diminution of the humanities in favor of vocationally oriented STEM programs, and the deprofessionalization (or adjunctification) of the faculty as a cost-saving measure to compensate for exorbitant executive salaries.
  • the American academy has lost its way by jettisoning key features of its own historical and cultural heritage, including the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, academic freedom protected by tenure, and the importance of faculty oversight of the curriculum.
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  • Before long, international students will realize that the majority of their American professors are part-time faculty members, paid wages that impoverish, who toil in environments that resemble factory floors or fast-food kitchens more than traditional institutions of higher learning. American scholars of note will also “vote with their feet” as universities in other countries offer higher salaries, better resources, superior infrastructure, the freedom to pursue pure (disinterested) research—and the students will follow.
  • Simultaneously, English-speaking countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, are siphoning off students and attracting faculty members—and rapidly industrializing nations are investing in infrastructure and human resources to create international (English-speaking) hubs of higher learning containing world-class institutions
  • For this reason, the current supremacy of American colleges and universities on the world stage is largely a consequence of lingering perceptions of excellencethat no longer accord with reality
  • one of the most striking features of the Chinese situation, is a “strong commitment by both institutions and governments to the quest for world-class universities, something rarely found in most Western societies.”
  • too many Americans are failing to receive the necessary educational training essential to personal and national advancement, because families cannot afford the high cost of tuition. As income determines access to higher education, social mobility will further decline.
marleymorton

LGBT Community Worries Extend Beyond Itself To Other, More Vulnerable People - 0 views

www.npr.org/...o-other-more-vulnerable-people

politics US lgbt+ trump

shared by marleymorton on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 15 Jan 17
     
    This story is part of Kitchen Table Conversations, a series from NPR's National Desk that examines how Americans from all walks of life are moving forward from the presidential election. The election of Donald Trump has many LGBT people worried that recent civil rights strides will be erased.
Javier E

The danger of Steve Bannon on the National Security Council - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html

NSC trump foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The NSC is effectively the central nervous system of the U.S. foreign policy and national security apparatus.
  • Trump’s memorandum described the structure of his NSC — not unusual given that the exact composition shifts in modest ways from administration to administration. The problem lies in the changes that he made.
  • First, he essentially demoted the highest-ranking military officer in the United States, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the United States, the director of national intelligence.
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  • In previous administrations, those positions or their equivalent (before the creation of the director of national intelligence, the CIA director occupied that role) held permanent positions on the NSC.
  • Now, those key officials will be invited only when their specific expertise is seen to be required. Hard as it is to imagine any situation in which their views would not add value, this demotion is even harder to countenance given the threats the United States currently faces and the frayed state of the president’s relations with the intelligence community
  • A president who has no national security experience and can use all the advice he can get has decided to limit the input he receives from two of the most important advisers any president could have.
  • Even as he pushed away professional security advice, Trump decided to make his top political advisor, Stephen K. Bannon, a permanent member of the NSC.
  • The executive order on immigration and refugees was un-American, counterproductive and possibly illegal.
  • Worse still, it is a sign of other problems to come. Organizing the NSC this way does not reflect well on national security advisor Michael Flynn — whether the bad decision is a result of his lack of understanding of what the NSC should do or because he is giving in to pressure from his boss.
  • Moreover, elevating Bannon is a sign that there will be more than one senior official in Trump’s inner circle with top-level national security responsibility, an arrangement nearly certain to create confusion going forward.
  • rumors are already circulating that Bannon and senior adviser Jared Kushner are the go-to people on national security issues for the administration, again despite the lack of experience, temperament or institutional support for either.
  • Combine all this with the president’s own shoot-from-the-lip impulses, his flair for improvisation and his well-known thin skin. You end up with a bad NSC structure being compromised by a kitchen cabinet-type superstructure and the whole thing likely being made even more dysfunctional by a president who, according to multiple reports, does not welcome advice in the first place — especially when it contradicts his own views.
  • Bannon’s role as chairman of Breitbart.com, with its racist, misogynist and Islamophobic perspectives, and his avowed desire to blow up our system of government, suggests this is someone who not only has no business being a permanent member of the most powerful consultative body in the world — he has no business being in a position of responsibility in any government.
  • The restructuring of the NSC, and the way in which this White House is threatening to operate outside the formal NSC structure, all but guarantees that it will not be the last bad decision to emerge from the Trump administration.
maddieireland334

Senator Mike Lee Fears Enrolling Women in the Selective Service Could Lead to Mandatory... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...484571

Mike Lee Women Military US Policy

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • (a) Lord, save us from this herd of retrograde, sexist swine; (b) Thank heavens a few leaders are still willing to stand up to such PC nonsense; (c) Wait! There hasn’t been a draft since 1973.
  • Back in February, after White House contenders Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio voiced support for the move, National Review denounced this “step toward barbarism.” “Men should protect women,” the magazine asserted. “They should not shelter behind mothers and daughters.”
  • And presidential wannabe Ted Cruz was aiming straight at his base’s paternalistic gut when—after calling Christie, Bush, and Rubio “nuts”—he raised the specter of his own wee daughters being forced into military fatigues and decried the very notion as “immoral.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Specifically, the senator has become convinced that the push to register every young American for the draft, women included, is in fact a stalking horse for Big Government’s push to establish a system of compulsory national service.
  • One is the move (championed by Senator John McCain) to open the draft to women. The other aims to create a “National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service” that would “consider methods to increase participation in military, national, and public service in order to address national security and other public service needs of the nation.”
  • Today, more funding is made available to create additional Americorps jobs; tomorrow, 18-year-olds are being forced to man soup kitchens in the name of patriotism.
Javier E

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...nology-wrecks-the-middle-class

economics employment trends technology middle-class

shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly
  • the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.
  • Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Economists have historically rejected what we call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do. While intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false.
  • Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers performing certain tasks — that’s where the gains in productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and services that raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor.
  • The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor.
  • Computers excel at “routine” tasks: organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information, or executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes. These tasks are most pervasive in middle-skill jobs
  • Logically, computerization has reduced the demand for these jobs, but it has boosted demand for workers who perform “nonroutine” tasks that complement the automated activities
  • At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity.
  • On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction.
  • Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined.
  • overall employment rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid polarization.
  • So computerization is not reducing the quantity of jobs, but rather degrading the quality of jobs for a significant subset of workers. Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging.
  • Spurred by growing demand for workers performing abstract job tasks, the payoff for college and professional degrees has soared; despite its formidable price tag, higher education has perhaps never been a better investment.
  • The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are not slated to disappear completely. While many middle-skill jobs are susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take advantage of human flexibility
  • we predict that the middle-skill jobs that survive will combine routine technical tasks with abstract and manual tasks in which workers have a comparative advantage — interpersonal interaction, adaptability and problem-solving.
  • this category includes numerous jobs for people in the skilled trades and repair: plumbers; builders; electricians; heating, ventilation and air-conditioning installers; automotive technicians; customer-service representatives; and even clerical workers who are required to do more than type and file
  • Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, memorably called those who fruitfully combine the foundational skills of a high school education with specific vocational skills the “new artisans.”
  • The outlook for workers who haven’t finished college is uncertain, but not devoid of hope. There will be job opportunities in middle-skill jobs, but not in the traditional blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs of the past
  • we expect to see growing employment among the ranks of the “new artisans”: licensed practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers, tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen designers, construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert repair and support technicians; and the many people who offer personal training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal trainers, coaches and guides
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Letter to My Son' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...397619

race racism American dream American idea youth slavery white supremacy history culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
  • When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
  • you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body
  • There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies
  • It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth
  • ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
  • And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.
  • The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
  • I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood
  • The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
  • But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
  • still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party
  • I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies
  • I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
  • Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed
  • When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.
  • Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
  • the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.
  • erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped
  • this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
  • now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.
  • “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.
  • I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons
  • here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
  • Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.
  • I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.
  • American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.
  • I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
  • Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.
  • It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.
  • “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.
  • There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.
  • I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.
  • I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have
  • I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.
  • “I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
  • the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.
  • You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life
  • I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
  • I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
  • I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Javier E

In Los Angeles, a Nimby Battle Pits Millionaires vs. Billionaires - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lionaires-vs-billionaires.html

inequality rich conspicuous consumption

shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles
  • “Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.
  • Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the market for these Versailles knockoffs is “flight capital.” “It’s oligarchs, oilgarchs, people from Asia, people who came up with the next app for the iPhone,” he said. While global wealth is pouring into other American cities as well, Los Angeles is still a relative bargain, Mr. Hyland said, adding: “Here you can buy the best house for $3,000 a square foot. In Manhattan, you’re looking at $11,000 a square foot and you get a skybox.”
  • In a city traditionally as hostile to architectural preservation as it is hospitable to architectural innovation, the gigamansion trend is accelerating the decimation of residential gems. A midcentury modern home in Bel Air designed by Burton Schutt (best known as the architect of the Hotel Bel-Air) and furnished by the decorator Billy Haines for Earle Jorgensen, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” and his wife, Marion, was recently razed
  • In the Sunset Strip area, a geometric hacienda built by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for the actor Ricardo Montalbán was “remodeled” into a hulking glass spec house.
  • As the number of Los Angeles’s buildable lots dwindles and land values soar, houses that are out of scale with their surroundings are popping up everywhere. (
proudsa

An Open Letter to My Friends Who Support Donald Trump - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...er-to-my-frie_2_b_9293694.html

shared by proudsa on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • But I can't understand why you would support someone as hateful, sexist, racist and ignorant as Donald Trump.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 24 Feb 16
       
      Not necessarily related to our unit but an interesting  read
  • It's not okay to marginalize an entire race of people, saying things like all the Mexicans are lazy, that they are all stealing our jobs and bringing drugs into our country.
  • We're all human. Some humans are really bad people. Some are really good. And it doesn't matter what color they are, it makes no difference whatsoever
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Trump's supporters are angry, and anger is infectious.
  • We need the kind of leader that seeks to bring us together, not tear us apart.
  • Lucky for us, this isn't Grandma's house, so feel free to punch him in the mouth in the form of getting out and making your vote count.
  • but racism isn't one of them, neither is hate, neither is the belittling of women or the judgment of others based on their appearance or their disability, or their sexual preference.
  • Do you think empowered women will suddenly quit their jobs and go back to the kitchen ? Because electing Trump won't make any of that come true. We're past that as a nation, or at least I thought we were.
  • Whatever led you to believe that racism is okay can be unlearned if you open your mind. I'm sorry that you were raised to believe that you deserve better treatment than the rest of the people on the planet that have different views than yours, worship different gods than you and have skin that isn't white.
  • I implore you to get out and vote against him. Don't let the progress of this great nation be halted. We've come too far.
  • The idea that certain religions are more dangerous than others and the idea that people should be judged based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
  • And then there are just the plainly insane people who finally snap and go on shooting rampages for no discernible reason at all. They just went mad.
  • We're still healing from the damage inflicted by the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq and the War on Terror. And it isn't just ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
katyshannon

Flint mayor hopes to begin pipe replacement next month - 0 views

www.freep.com/...80049056

flint mayor pipe replacement US crisis lead water

shared by katyshannon on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Flint Mayor Karen Weaver on Tuesday outlined  an estimated $55-million public works project expected to begin within a month to remove Flint's lead-contaminated pipes from the water distribution system.
  • First priority will be given to high-risk households with pregnant women and children, Weaver said at a news conference at City Hall.
  • Last week, Weaver called for the immediate removal of the city's lead-contaminated pipes and announced a plan that included help from Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, who has offered technical assistance from the Lansing Board of Water and Light. Lansing has removed about 13,500 lead pipes in the city.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The Fast Start plan will require extensive coordination between city, state and federal officials,  Weaver said. She was joined Tuesday by retired National Guard Brig. Gen. Michael McDaniel, who said he thinks the project can be done within a year by 32 crews.
  • McDaniel — who is assisting in coordinating activities between the city, the Lansing Board of Water and Light, state and federal agencies, and other stakeholders -- said the project could begin within the next month. But McDaniel reiterated the plan is still in its early phases and much of it is based on "assumptions."
  • The preliminary project scope developed by the BWL shows that up to 15,000 lead pipes could be removed in one year "under optimal conditions," Weaver said.McDaniel noted that while it took the BWL 10 years to remove 13,500 pipes, he thinks they can move quicker in Flint because they've perfected the process. McDaniel and Weaver said Flint crews would also be involved in the project.
  • The project would be done in two phases, with the first targeting high-risk households of children under the age of 6, children with elevated blood-lead levels, pregnant women, senior citizens, residential day care facilities, people with compromised immune systems and households where water tests indicate high levels of lead at the tap.
  • The project will not immediately address schools, businesses and other locations in Flint, according to a document released by the city detailing the plan. The city said most large facilities are served by "high-capacity cast iron water services," and not the typical lines found in residential water services.
  • the document states. "For institutional entities like schools and businesses, bottled water can continue to provide for their short-term needs."
  • Phase two of the program would ramp up to a "full-scale operation" that would bring in 32 crews and a "robust administration and logistics support team to meet the one-year goal," Weaver said.
  • McDaniel said the costs in the projected $55-million effort could fluctuate because of  the architecture and condition of the water distribution system. The estimated cost per line is $3,670, according to a city document. Of the $55 million, about $1.5 million will go toward administration and logistics, according to the city, which said personnel costs are estimated at $900,000 and operations costs are projected to be $600,000. According to the city, the bulk of the cost — $36 million — will go toward the labor and about $9.7 million will go toward the materials.
  • According to the city, the Fast Start program will remove and replace the lines at no cost to the homeowner. However, homeowners will be required to sign an agreement that authorizes Flint to remove and replace the portions of the lines on their private property and allow access to the meter inside the home.Lead lines will be replaced with new copper lines and a water filter will be installed at the kitchen tap for three months as a precaution, city officials said.
  • Flint's drinking water became contaminated with lead in April 2014 after the city, while under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, switched its source to the Flint River as a temporary cost-cutting move and the state Department of Environmental Quality failed to require the addition of needed corrosion-control chemicals. As a result, corrosive water caused lead to leach from pipes, joints and fixtures, causing many citizens to receive water with unsafe lead levels. The state has told residents not to drink the water without filtering and says it is treating all Flint children as having been exposed to unsafe levels of lead
  • The FBI is now investigating the contamination of Flint’s drinking water amid a growing public outcry. U.S. Rep. Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township, proposed an emergency $1-billion grant to be authorized through the Environmental Protection Agency, and two Democratic U.S. senators and U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, proposed up to $400 million in dollar-for-dollar matching funds from the state to do much the same thing.
  • The U.S. Attorney's Office announced Jan. 5 that it was assisting the EPA in the investigation
  • Several lawsuits have been filed in connection with the crisis.
  • When asked at the news conference whether she thinks Snyder will support the plan, Weaver said the city can no longer afford to wait."We’re putting forward our plan and we cannot wait for that," Weaver said. "We don’t trust that and we deserve new pipes. That’s the only way this community is going to be confident and people will stay here and people will come. I cannot imagine that he would not support this plan. If he doesn’t, shame on him."
johnsonma23

What if Nixon beat JFK? Everything might be different - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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

nixon jfk US history

shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • What if JFK had lost? 5 things that might be different
  • If just a few thousand votes in a few key states had gone the other way that day, you could argue that Cuba might now be our 51st state.
  • By the time it was over, Kennedy had won and Nixon's camp was quietly accusing the other side of dirty tricks. The election was about much more than Washington bragging rights.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It ended up influencing events that would drive the next 20 years of the Cold War.
  • When it came to the Soviets, Nixon had more experience than Kennedy. Vice President Nixon had already faced off against Khrushchev in the famous "Kitchen Debate" during a visit to Moscow in 1959.
  • Nixon's language at the time was quite interventionist and hawkish. ... That makes me worry that he might have tried to invade Cuba."
  • A year later, it was discovered that the Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba — just 90 miles from the United States.
  • In 1961, two months after a failed invasion by CIA-backed Cuban exiles at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, Kennedy met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Austria.
  • If Nixon had made a stronger impression than Kennedy, perhaps the Soviets would never have put those missiles in Cuba. Then there never would have been a missile crisis at all.
  • "Kennedy allowed himself to be bullied by Khrushchev [in Vienna] and he regretted it," said Evan Thomas, an award-winning journalist, editor and author of "Being Nixon: A Man Divided."
  • f Nixon had won in 1960, it's likely Kennedy would not have been targeted for assassination -- and that means he might have lived long enough for his infamous sexual dalliances to become fodder for the news media.
  • It's hard to imagine a universe where Neil Armstrong did not walk on the moon. Would Nixon have called for a moon landing, as JFK did?
  • Nixon continued to support the lunar program during much of his presidency, which spanned all six moon landings.
  • "Under Nixon, NASA became just another domestic program, and the agency's budget decreased even as it retained ambitious goals," writes former NASA consultant Jason Callahan of the Planetary Society.
qkirkpatrick

Trump's Il Duce Routine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ld-trumps-il-duce-routine.html

trump europe history politics culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Europe, the soil on which Fascism took root, is watching the rise of Donald Trump with dismay. Contempt for the excesses of America is a European reflex, but when the United States seems tempted by a latter-day Mussolini, smugness in London, Paris and Berlin gives way to alarm.
  • It’s not just that Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.
  • Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Trump is a man repeatedly underestimated by the very elites who made Trumpism possible. He’s smarter than most of his belittlers, and quicker on his feet, which makes him only more dangerous.
  • He’s the anti-Obama, all theater where the president is all prudence, the mouth-that-spews to the presidential teleprompter, rage against reason, the backslapper against the maestro of aloofness, the rabble-rouser to the cerebral law professor, the deal maker to the diligent observer.
  • The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has tweeted that Trump “fuels hatred.” In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has attacked Trump’s proposed ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States, and more than half a million people have signed a petition urging that he be kept out of Britain. This weekend Britain's Sunday Times ran a page-size photo of Trump in Lord Kitchener pose with a blaring headline:
  • As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.
katyshannon

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

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

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

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