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Javier E

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

  • Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the county has the highest concentration in the United States of computer engineers, designers, software developers and digital researchers – the skills essential for the tech wars. In 2012, Santa Clara County voted for Obama over Romney by a 70-27 margin, nearly 3 to 1.
  • The number two in high tech employment is Boulder County, in Colorado. How did it vote? The map shows a sea of blue:
  • Obama’s percentage of the vote in Boulder County, 70.28, was almost identical to what he won in Santa Clara County.
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  • the scientific community. Again, this is not a hotbed of Republican and conservative activism. Just the opposite.
  • A July 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that the partisan leaning of scientists was 55 percent Democratic, 32 percent independent and 6 percent Republican, compared to 35 Democratic, 34 independent and 23 Republican among the general public. Ideologically, 52 percent of scientists polled by Pew described themselves as liberal, 35 percent as moderate and 9 percent as conservative, compared to 20 liberal, 38 moderate and 37 conservative among all voters.
wgatti

Russia's military might: Putin's policy in numbers - CNN.com - 0 views

  • For the tens of thousands of spectators who cheered on Russia's spectacular military show on Monday, this was as much about looking to the past -- as preparing for the future
  • Over the past decade, billions have been spent modernizing and retraining a lumbering fighting force inherited from the Soviet Union.
  • Huge investments have been made in a new generation of nuclear missiles, tanks, and fighter jets. Even the military's uniforms have been given a slick new makeover
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  • The military is an important source of patriotism for Putin's government -- and one he is willing to invest billions in.
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    Interesting to see Russia building up its military more than it has since the Soviet Union was still around.
maxwellokolo

Trump's speech: Fashion police edition - 0 views

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    President Donald Trump gets a style makeover during his address to Congress.
Javier E

How Divorce Lost Its Cachet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.
  • “The shift in attitudes and behavior is very real. Among upper-middle-class Americans, the divorce rate is going down, and they’re becoming more conservative toward divorce.”
  • attributes the swing to multiple factors, among them, a generational makeover.
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  • It’s as if the children of Manhattan and Roslyn, N.Y., and Bethesda, Md., reflected on their parents’ sloppy divorces and said, “Not me.” For Ms. Thomas, whose parents separated when she was 12, “Divorce had pretty much defined everything in my life.” In her divorce memoir, “In Spite of Everything,” to be published this summer, Ms. Thomas recalls telling her ex-husband many times during their 16-year marriage, “Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.”
  • In a 2008 survey, only 17 percent of college-educated Americans agreed with the statement, “Marriage has not worked out for most people I know,” compared with 58 percent among the less educated.
  • “In the 1970s, when a woman got divorced, she was seen as taking back her life in that Me Decade way. Nowadays, it’s not seen as liberating to divorce. It’s scary.”
  • “Divorce was freedom. Many of these marriages in the ’70s were fundamentally unequal. With the women’s movements, they learned that there were alternatives, and that made divorce kind of a liberation.”
  • In the 1970s, “the feminists, the hippies, the protesters, the cultural elite all said, It’s O.K. to drop out.” In contrast, “We made up our minds, my brother and I and so many of the grown children of the runaway moms, that we would put our families first and ourselves second. We would be good, all the time. We would stay married, no matter what, and drink organic milk.”
  • “The notion of divorce has become one of failure again,” said Ms. Morrison, 42, a resident of Park Slope. “It used to be, ‘You’re free, rock on!’ Now it’s, ‘You couldn’t make it work, you failed.’ ”
  • Among a certain demographic, marriage is viewed as something that, like work-life balance, yoga and locavore cuisine, needs to be continually worked at and improved upon.
  • From the 1970s to the 2000s, the percentage of highly educated Americans who believe that divorce should be made more difficult rose from 36 to 48 percent.
  • “The condemnation of divorce is also coming from the group that is most confident it can make its marriages succeed, and that allows them to be dismissive of divorce.”
  • divorce actually is contagious: when close friends break up, the odds of a marital split among their friends increase by 75 percent.)
  • “There’s a tacit or explicit recognition among well-educated parents that their kids are less likely to thrive if Mom and Dad can’t be together.”
  • today’s splitting couples are viscerally aware of how divorce feels to a 7-year-old.
  • both her lawyer and therapist emphasized: “Divorce is completely different from when your parents split up. If your kids feel loved and they don’t see hideous behavior, they’ll be fine.”
Javier E

At China's Grand New Museum, History Toes the Party Line - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • one tradition has remained firmly in place: China will not confront its own history. The museum is less the product of extensive research, discovery or creativity than the most prominent symbol of the Communist Party’s efforts to control the narrative of history and suppress alternative points of view, even those that exist within the governing elite
  • Officials rejected proposals for a permanent historical exhibition that would have discussed the disasters of early Communist rule — especially the Great Leap Forward, a political campaign and resulting famine that killed more than 20 million. Some organizers also wanted a candid appraisal of the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long attack on traditional culture and learning, but that effort was squashed.
  • Instead, the authorities decided that the exhibition on contemporary China should focus, as did the museum before its extensive makeover, on the party’s triumphs.
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  • Another permanent exhibit, on China’s ancient history, also presents an idealized version of the past. It tells the uplifting story of Chinese ethnic groups pulling together to create “brilliant achievements.”
  • The general story line, ingrained in every Chinese student, is that China was humiliated by Western powers. Then some well-meaning but misguided patriots took up the fight until they were properly led by the Communists, whose inevitable victory in 1949 started China’s recovery. After “building socialism” during the Communists’ first 30 years in power, the country took off during the past 30 years of reform. There is no discussion of why the party dropped central planning policies in the late 1970s, or even that such a momentous shift took place.
  • “Ancient China,” a mammoth survey of thousands of years of history scheduled to open April 15. The exhibition walks a delicate line. Organized by Chinese dynasties, it tries to show how all of the 56 ethnic groups in today’s China have always worked together harmoniously. Even the Mongolian empire, which conquered China in the 12th century, is made part of the story. It is referred to as a precursor of today’s multicultural China. “It ignores the conflicts, which real history shouldn’t do,” said an archaeology professor at Peking University who asked to remain anonymous because of the issue’s delicacy. “This is why I would not call this exhibition real history but propaganda.”
  • “The Road to Rejuvenation,” which recounts the history of China from the First Opium War of 1839 to the present day. This was the exhibit that in past years was fraught with the mos
  • few countries can compete with China in so completely suppressing the shades of gray about their past.
  • The Enlightenment show, although tantalizing, will also avoid overt mention of the political ideas — such as universal human rights — that drove that period of European history. “It’s an art exhibit and not a political show,”
katyshannon

How the Every Student Succeeds Act Will Really Change No Child Left Behind-Era Schools ... - 0 views

  • How does the Every Student Succeeds Act reverse the course of K-12 education in the United States? The headlines say it all: It “Restores Local Education Control.” It “continues a long federal retreat from American classrooms.” It “shifts power to states.”
  • According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, it represents “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century.”
  • But for all the breathless hype, the legislation seems unlikely to produce many changes that are actually visible on the ground.
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  • The Senate on Wednesday approved the Every Student Succeeds Act, the bill that will reauthorize the nation’s 50-year-old omnibus education law and make the “pretty-much-universally despised” No Child Left Behind obsolete.
  • The legislation, which has already gotten the Obama administration’s tacit approval, is being touted by observers and policymakers from both the right and left as a product of rare bipartisan compromise.
  • The most conspicuous manifestation of that bipartisan give-and-take is what’s being highlighted by news outlets and pundits across the country: Schools will still be held accountable for student performance, but states can determine the nuances of how that will take place.
  • They’ll have to use “college-and-career ready” standards and intervene when those expectations aren’t met, but states will get to design their own standards and intervention protocol.
  • They’ll still be required to administer annual testing in certain grades, ensure at least 95 percent of students participate, and disaggregate data based on students’ race, income, and disability status, but they can use other factors on top of testing to assess student performance, and the details of how the testing happens and how the scores are interpreted are up to states.
  • In many ways, what most conservatives seem to be rejoicing about the Every Student Succeeds Act is that it’s replacing Obama’s waiver system. At a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing in early 2013, Alexander was quoted as saying: “This simple waiver authority has turned into a conditional waiver with the [Education] Secretary having more authority to make decisions that in my view should be made locally by state and local governments.”
  • It was also loathed for its one-size-fits-all approach to education reform, its promotion of teaching-to-the-test, and its harsh system of sanctions. Republicans grew to despise it for how much it allowed the Department of Education to micromanage states and school districts (especially when Obama rose into office).
  • And given how little power the Every Student Succeeds Act gives to the federal government, it may feel, particularly among those on the right, as if the nation’s schools are about to experience a major makeover—as if the next era of public education will mark a major, much-anticipated divergence from the status quo.
  • But in reality, schools may not see much on-the-ground change. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia already have waivers from No Child Left Behind’s “most troublesome and restrictive requirements”—flexibility granted several years ago by the Obama administration in exchange for states’ commitment to “setting their own higher, more honest standards for student success.”
  • This means that most of the country’s students have already been learning under a system that eschewed much of No Child Left Behind’s most obvious and onerous aspects—and looks a lot like the system envisioned in Every Student Succeeds.
  • States with waivers were essentially allowed to set their own goals for raising achievement, come up with their own strategies for turning around struggling schools, and design their own methods of measuring student progress.
  • The overthrow of No Child Left Behind, which has been up for reauthorization for years, is certainly cause for excitement. The George W. Bush-era law required schools to administer annual tests in certain grades in an effort to identify and elevate the achievement of underperforming youth.
  • Indeed, some of the most controversial elements being overturned or prohibited by the Every Student Succeeds Act were implemented not under No Child Left Behind but through the waiver system. It was through the waivers (and the Race to the Top grant program) that the Obama administration mandated test-score-based teacher evaluations. And it was through the waivers (and the Race to the Top grant program) that the administration all but required participating states to adopt the Common Core. (The Every Student Succeeds Act makes it clear that the federal government can’t mandate teacher evaluations or standards.)
Javier E

On Invincible Ignorance - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Ever since income inequality began its sharp rise in the 1980s, one favorite conservative excuse has been that it doesn’t mean anything, because economic positions change all the time. People who are rich this year might not be rich next year, so the gap between the rich and the rest doesn’t matter, right?
  • Well, it’s true that people move up and down the economic ladder, and apologists for inequality love to cite statistics showing that many people who are in the top 1 percent in any given year are out of that category the next year
  • a closer look at the data shows that there is less to this observation than it seems. These days, it takes an income of around $400,000 a year to put you in the top 1 percent, and most of the fluctuation in incomes we see involves people going from, say, $350,000 to $450,000 or vice versa
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  • “The majority of economic mobility occurs over fairly small spans of the distribution.” Average incomes over multiple years are almost as unequally distributed as incomes in any given year, which means that tax cuts that mainly benefit the rich are indeed targeted at a small group of people, not the public at large
  • you shouldn’t grieve over Marco Rubio’s epic political failure. Had Mr. Rubio succeeded, he would simply have encouraged his party to believe that all it needs is a cosmetic makeover — a fresher, younger face to sell the same old defunct orthodoxy. Oh, and a last-minute turn to someone like John Kasich would, in its own way, have similar implications.
  • What we’re getting instead is at least the possibility of a cleansing shock — of a period in the political wilderness that will finally force the Republican establishment to rethink its premises. That’s a good thing — or it would be, if it didn’t also come with the risk of President Trump.
Javier E

The Right's Climate Change Shame - 0 views

  • a dinosaur looking up into the heavens at night, at all the twinkling stars. His smiling face utters the words: “The dot that gets bigger and bigger each night is my favorite.”
  • The most striking thing about Bret Stephens’s inaugural column in the New York Times was not its banal defense of the principle of scientific skepticism, but its general lameness. Rereading it this week, it is striking how modest its claims were. They essentially came to this: “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”
  • The denialists, in other words, have nothing left
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  • But no serious scientist claims “total certainty” about the future of climate, just a range of increasingly alarming probabilities; no one is demanding “abrupt and expensive” changes in public policy, just an intensification of efforts long underway with increasingly reliable and affordable new technologies; and, yes, treating your opponents as evil morons is rarely a good political strategy
  • The same blather can be found in this week’s column by Jonah Goldberg, lamenting Max Boot’s sudden volte-face on the issue. Jonah has a point about Boot’s somewhat too instant makeover into a resistance icon (I’ve made it myself), but on the substance of climate change, what defense of the American right does Goldberg have? Zippo. He argues that “there are a lot of different views on climate change on the right.” I find that about as convincing as the argument that there are a lot of different views on race among Harvard’s faculty.
  • More to the point, the hypothesis of carbon-created climate change doesn’t just have “some legitimate science” on its side, as Goldberg puts it, but a completely overwhelming majority of the science
  • You should, of course, retain some skepticism always. It’s possible, for example, that natural selection may be replaced as the core scientific consensus about how life on Earth evolved. Possible. But do we have to express skepticism every time new science based on that hypothesis emerges
  • The kicker, of course, is that the current GOP is not just skeptical of climate science and dragging its feet on doing anything about climate change. It is actively pursuing policies aimed at intensifying environmental devastation. Trump’s EPA is attempting to gut the regulation of carbon; it has tried to sabotage the only most prominent global agreement on the matter; it celebrates carbon-based energy and rhapsodizes about coal; it has slapped a 30 percent tariff on solar panels; its tax reform hurt solar and wind investment
  • Inaction because of uncertainty only makes sense if the threat is distant and not too calamitous. But when there’s a chance of it being truly catastrophic, and the evidence in its favor keeps strengthening, a sane person adjusts
  • A conservative person — someone attuned to risk — will take out insurance, in case the worst happens.
  • Why is every other government on Earth committed to tackling this (rhetorically at least) and every other center-right party on Earth taking this very seriously? (Check out this page about environmental policy in the British Conservative party — aimed getting to zero carbon emissions by 2050 — and see if you even recognize the debate on the right in the U.S.)
  • I honestly can’t see how the science of this can be right or left. It’s either our best working hypothesis or not.
  • For allegedly intelligent conservatives like Stephens and Goldberg to devote energy toward climate skepticism while turning a blind eye to vigorous Republican climate vandalism is, quite simply contemptible. I am not reading their minds here. I’m reading their columns. On this question — as on fiscal policy — they’re not skeptics or conservatives; they are dogmatists, sophists, and enablers of environmental vandalism. They reveal Republicanism’s calculated assault on the next generations — piling them with unimaginable debt and environmental chaos. This isn’t the cultural conservatism of Burke; it’s the selfish nihilism of Rand.
  • a quote. It was the first time a major global leader spoke to the U.N. on the question: “It is life itself — human life, the innumerable species of our planet — that we wantonly destroy. It is life itself that we must battle to preserve … The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so we may not live at the expense of future generations. That prospect is a new factor in human affairs. It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom, indeed its results could be even more far-reaching … We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their object if by their output they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the well-being they achieve by the production of goods and services.”
  • That leader also made a core moral argument: “No generation has a freehold on this Earth; all we have is a life tenancy with a full repairing lease.
  • Those words were Margaret Thatcher’s in 1989. She devoted her entire U.N. speech to conservation and climate change. If the subject was real enough in 1989 to make sacrifices and changes, how much more so almost 30 years later?
  • The difference between Thatcher and today’s Republicans is quite a simple one. She believed in science (indeed was trained as a scientist). She grasped the moral dimensions of the stewardship of the Earth from one generation to another. She did not engage in the cowardice of sophists. And unlike these tools and fools on today’s American right, she was a conservative.
  • The real question, it seems to me, is therefore an almost philosophical one: Do these exceptions prove or disprove a general rule?
  • I’d argue that, by and large, they prove it
  • The number of people with a mismatch between chromosomes and hormones, or with ambiguous genitalia, is surpassingly small. Well under one percent is a useful estimate.
  • Similarly with a transgender identity: It absolutely exists but is also very rare — some estimates put it at around 0.7 percent of the population
  • Does this mean that general assumptions about most people being either male or female and heterosexual and cisgendered are misplaced or even offensive? Hardly. I’m gay but usually assume that everyone I meet is straight until I know otherwise
  • Gay men and lesbians who have unambiguous male and female sex organs and identity but an attraction to their own sex are also pretty rare (whatever we’d like to think). Maybe 2 to 5 percent, with some outliers
  • And I don’t mind the hetero assumption applying to me either. It’s a reasonable statistical inference, not bigotry. And I can always set them, er, straight.
  • My preferred adjective for sex and gender is bimodal, rather than binary. What bimodal means is that there are two distinct and primary modes with some variations between them
  • Think of it as two big mountains representing, in sex matters, well over 95 percent of humans, with a long, low valley between them, representing the remaining percent.
  • Everyone is equally human. But clearly the human experience of sex is one thing for almost everyone and a different thing for a few.
  • Do we infer from this that we need to junk the categories of male and female altogether, as many critical gender theorists argue? That seems insane to me
  • These two modes actually define the entire landscape of sex (the exceptions are incomprehensible without them), and the bimodal distribution is quite obviously a function of reproductive strategy (if we were all gay, or intersex, we’d cease to exist as a species before too long)
  • Ditto the transgender experience: Does the fact that less than one percent of humans feel psychologically at odds with their biological sex mean that biological sex really doesn’t exist and needs to be defined away entirely? Or does it underline just how deep the connection between sex and gender almost always is?
  • We are not a threat to straights; we’re a complement. Transgender people do not threaten the categories of male and female; they pay, in some ways, homage to them.
  • On the left, there’s too much defensiveness about being in a minority
  • But being in a minority — even a tiny one — need not be demoralizing, if we have self-confidence. I’d argue it can lead, through struggle and challenge, to a more deeply examined self — and to a resilience that can only be earned and is no one else’s to give.
  • And the fact that this society is run overwhelmingly on heterosexual lines makes sense to me, given their overwhelming majority. As long as the government does not actively persecute or enable the persecution of a minority, who cares
  • It’s stupid to pretend they are entirely normal, because it gives the concept of normality too much power over us. Their abnormality is a neutral thing, like left-handedness: a fact, not a judgment. And why on earth should we feel defensive about that?
  • But what surprised me was the positive response to a single, minor point I made about intersectionality.
  • In some ways, I argued, the intersectional move on the hard left is a good thing — because it complicates things. It’s no longer enough just to consider race, for example, as a signifier of oppression without also considering gender or orientation or gender identity, national origin, immigrant status, etc. When society is made up entirely of various intersecting oppressions, as the social-justice left believes, it’s vital not to leave any potential grievance out.
  • By the same token, of course, an oppressor can also be identified in multiple, intersectional ways
  • It can get very complicated very fast.
  • Let’s push this to its logical conclusion. Let’s pile on identity after identity for any individual person; place her in multiple, overlapping oppression dynamics, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed; map her class, race, region, religion, marital status, politics, nationality, language, disability, attractiveness, body weight, and any other form of identity you can
  • After a while, with any individual’s multifaceted past, present, and future, you will end up in this multicultural world with countless unique combinations of endless identities in a near-infinite loop of victim and victimizer.
  • You will, in fact, end up with … an individual human being!
  • In the end, all totalizing ideologies disappear up their own assholes. With intersectionality, we have now entered the lower colon
Javier E

The Green New Deal isn't too big. It's not nearly big enough. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Every other rich country also needs to make similar cuts, immediately. The developed nations with large emissions (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Britain and others) can afford their own Green New Deals; perhaps they can be persuaded to do their parts, if we do.
  • developing nations — such as India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Malaysia — aren’t going to unilaterally constrain their own economies. If carbon-based energy sources help them compete in the global marketplace, that’s what they’ll use — unless, economists say, they get financial help to develop sustainably, with industrialization powered by renewable energy instead of oil, gas and coal. And there’s only one place they can get that help: from wealthy countries like ours. Giving them cash needs to be part of any Green New Deal.
  • In the poorest developing countries, where many people live without electricity or other basic necessities, it is unrealistic to expect emissions to drop from their already low rates in the next decade. Some of these countries, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are very populous, and their industrialization could cause emissions to skyrocket.
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  • The next president could go further and tell allies such as Germany, Japan and Canada that their status as major trading partners protected by the U.S. security umbrella is now contingent upon their making steep emissions cuts.
  • adaptation, which means preparing societies and their infrastructure for the effects of climate change, such as building flood walls to hold back higher sea levels or retrofitting buildings to withstand more severe heat waves.
  • Rich countries industrialized with fossil fuels, developing industries powered by coal, delivering fossil-fuel-based electricity and heat to homes, and building transportation systems that run on the internal-combustion engine. In following this path, these countries chewed through most of the planet’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas that could be spewed until global temperatures warmed by 2 degrees Celsius
  • The United States has contributed about 26 percent of the world’s cumulative emissions, and the 28 nations of the European Union are responsible for only slightly less.
  • if Americans had been restricted to emitting a proportional share of a global carbon budget that capped warming at 1.5 degrees, we would have blown through that limit in 1944.
  • Climate finance means foreign aid for three main purposes
  • mitigation: subsidies for renewable-energy deployment and storage, electrical-grid modernization, and other means of reducing emissions
  • In the Paris negotiations, developing nations were explicitly open to making more ambitious commitments if developed countries contributed to making them happen.
  • coverage for loss or damage: compensation for people whose homes become uninhabitable or whose livelihoods are destroyed by climate change.
  • “climate justice,” which also includes providing support to marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by climate change in rich countries.
  • Last year, at a climate summit in Poland, India reiterated its openness to doing more if it were adequately subsidized, and an organization of the 47 least-developed nations echoed that plea.
  • Nobody knows how big the ultimate U.S. number will need to be; it depends on how many rich countries pitch in, and how much they give, and how much help poorer countries need to modernize in eco-friendly way
  • to stay below 2 degrees of warming, by 2030 the global economy needs to give a “green” makeover to the $5 trillion per year spent worldwide on sectors such as agriculture, energy, transportation, construction and heavy industry.
  • his may be toxic for American voters. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change, are increasingly worried about it and in theory support the notion that the government should address it — but they are more divided in their willingness to actually pay for climate action
  • only 23 percent said they’d pay at least $40 per month to fight climate change
  • The United States may have a narrow opportunity to pay down some of its historical debts, stem the tide of future climate refugees and manage the political instability that extreme warming would cause. The last chance came in 2009-2010, but the Senate failed, in part thanks to Obama’s bungling of the negotiations, to pass even domestic climate legislation
  • The leaders of developing nations aren’t suckers, and they know how dire the problem is. They have something rich countries want (emissions reductions), and they’d be fools to just give it away for free, even if they could. If we want them to succeed, it’s going to cost us, and we’ll need to move quickly. The science is clear: We do not have another decade to waste.
g-dragon

Did Neanderthals Create World's Oldest Cave Paintings? - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Once considered intellectually inferior to modern humans, Neanderthals have enjoyed an image makeover in recent years thanks to new research.
  • Experts now think the stocky hunters crafted complex tools, buried their dead, spoke a language and expressed themselves artistically.
  • most individuals alive today are part Neanderthal
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  • Cave painting represents one of the most concrete examples of symbolic behavior, but experts have struggled to establish ages for these important prehistoric creations.
  • To calculate more accurate dates, the researchers tested a variety of abstract images from Spanish cave walls, including hand stencils and red disks at the El Castillo site.
  • The Neanderthal authorship theory is sure to raise a few eyebrows, Zilhão admitted, but it supports a growing body of evidence that the species was no less modern or human than modern humans.
Javier E

Nazis Killed Her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Peter Harf, who joined the company in 1981 and became chairman this year, and whose own father was a Nazi, said he never really bought the idea that the organization had nothing to hide.“I knew the stories they told,” he said. “It didn’t smell right.”
  • 12, as JAB was acquiring high-profile coffee brands and drawing global attention, Mr. Harf pressed the family to open its archives to an independent scholar. By 2016, Paul Erker, an economic historian at the University of Munich, took on the task.
  • Only now, 74 years after World War II, are the family and the company grappling with their dark and complicated history.
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  • starting in late 1940, the Reimanns routinely took advantage of forced labor: men and women taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories, as well as prisoners of war, who were allocated by the Nazis to farms and industrial companies across Germany.
  • Mr. Harf noted that he lived in three places — New York, London and Milan — where nationalism and ethnic division were on the rise. For most of his long career, he said, he considered shareholder capitalism to be value neutral. No longer. In the age of Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini, he said, businesses can no longer pretend that they are operating in a “value-free space.”
  • “This is once again a time when everybody needs to take a stance,” Mr. Harf said. “I’m very scared of what’s happening.”
  • the men gave the company a makeover in keeping with Nazi principles. By the time Hitler took over, Benckiser already housed a Nationalist Socialist Company Organization — a worker council that sought to uphold Nazi ideology. It later became a “model NS plant.”
  • “Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were not just opportunistic followers of the regime,” Mr. Harf said. “They were fully signed up to the Nazi project.”
  • In 1933, it employed 181 people. As an important supplier to the food industry, Benckiser benefited from the Nazi system, more than tripling sales over the next decade. Mr. Reimann Sr. served as president of the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which helped orchestrate the Aryanization, expropriation and expulsion of Jewish businesses
  • Its employees — there are 180,000 around the world — have reported that customers accuse them of “working for Nazis
  • It was around this time that Emilie Landecker started working in the accounting department as a clerk
  • According to Mr. Harf, Benckiser’s use of forced laborers grew so fast that she would surely have been aware of the abuses.
  • By 1943, 175 people, or a third of the total work force, were forced laborers, most of them from France and Eastern Europe. Benckiser operated two labor camps, one of them overseen by a brutal foreman, Paul Werneburg, who had been with the company since 1910. On his watch, female workers were forced to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse. Workers were kicked and beaten, among them a Ukrainian woman who also cleaned in the Reimanns’ private villa.
  • During a bomb raid on Jan. 7, 1945, Werneburg threw dozens of workers out of a camp bomb shelter. Thirty were injured, and one died. As word of Werneburg’s brutality spread, even the local Nazi office in charge of allocating forced laborers reprimanded the Reimanns for mistreating their workers.
  • Ms. Landecker would have witnessed it all, said her son, Wolfgang Reimann, in an email. “She lived through the horror show happening in our own company,” he said. “She probably sat in the very bunker when Werneburg threw out the workers.”
  • Mr. Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to the commanding officer on Sept. 22, dismissing allegations that he had been an “early and enthusiastic Nazi” as mere “denunciations” — and insisting that he was in fact a victim of the Nazis.
  • It worked. While the French initially barred Mr. Reimann Jr. from continuing his business activities, American officials overturned the judgment, classifying him as a “follower” of Nazism, rather than an active Nazi himself.
  • In 1947, the wealth of the Reimann family totaled 686,000 Reichsmark, or approximately $2.4 million in today’s money. Over the decades, the fortune grew in step with Benckiser and its successor companies, and today the family’s worth is estimated at €33 billion. On one recent list of the wealthiest families in Germany, the Reimanns ranked second.
  • Ms. Landecker was at work at Benckiser when the Gestapo came for her father.It was April 24, 1942
  • A few weeks later, one last letter arrived from Mr. Landecker, but only the envelope has survived. It shows that he was interned in block III 416/2 in Izbica, a ghetto serving as a transfer point for the deportation of Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
  • Mr. Harf said it made him think that not enough voices in business were speaking up against the re-emergence of nationalism and populism in Europe and the United States.
  • “We fought for five years only to have an age like this,” he wrote, referring to World War I. “I hope you, my dear children, remain well-behaved and good, and keep loving me, even if you suffer because of me.”
  • he had a brother and sister-in-law. “Aunt Pauline has written from America,” he wrote that December. “She is trying for us, maybe things will work out.” But there wasn’t enough money. Mr. Landecker was not allowed to work, which meant that Emilie, still a teenager, became the family’s only earner.
  • he wrote his last letter to Bavaria.“My dear Gerdele,” he wrote. “As you can see, I’m still here, but not for long. Today I learned that my departure is on the 24th of the month — in two days. So this is the last letter that you receive from me from here or perhaps ever. We don’t know what is waiting for us.”
  • “You won’t be able to marry here in Germany,” he continued. “Learn languages!! You have your future ahead of you — don’t waste it.”
  • No one knows when exactly their love affair started. But in 1951, their first child was born
  • Two more followed. Twice a week, every Sunday and Wednesday, Mr. Reimann Jr. would leave his wife and visit Ms. Landecker.
  • years later, she admitted in a letter to Mr. Reimann Jr. that she always missed not being his wife — and not having a regular family
  • Ms. Landecker was a quiet woman. She did not speak much. But her children say that despite everything, she loved their father. “I never understood why,” said Wolfgang Reimann. “He was not very lovable from my perspective.”
  • “My mother never said anything,” Wolfgang Reimann said. “For the longest time, I believed it was her personality.” But he has changed his mind. “If I had to live with the love of my life, as my mother did, and this person was also responsible for the terrible things that happened during the war, I would not have spoken much, either, I guess,
  • the Reimanns channeled much of their wealth into JAB. In recent years the holding company has spent billions to become a rival to the likes of Starbucks and Nestlé by buying chains including Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger. Last year, it also helped Keurig Green Mountain buy Dr Pepper Snapple for nearly $19 billion. JAB also controls the cosmetics giant Coty, the owner of Calvin Klein fragrances
  • “When I heard and read of the atrocities committed at Benckiser, sanctioned by my grandfather, I felt like throwing up,” said Martin Reimann, 30, who is a grandchild to Ms. Landecker and Mr. Reimann Jr. “I cannot claim that I was very interested in politics before. I was just living my life. But after what happened, I changed my mind. I have to do something. In our family council, the younger generation created a little bit of a rebellion.”
  • By renaming its foundation after Alfred Landecker, the Reimann family is bringing back one name from the millions killed by the Nazis. But it is also explicitly linking the memory of crimes past to today’s fight to preserve the values of liberal democracy.
  • “What we can learn from history and how we can learn from history is at the core of this foundation,”
  • “This is not just about researching and remembering the past,” he added. “It’s about stabilizing and maintaining democracy today.”
  • Mr. Harf, JAB’s chairman, agrees. He said he had recently read “The Order of the Day,” a historic novella by Éric Vuillard set in the years before World War II. One scene takes place in February 1933, when Hitler and the president of the Reichstag encourage 24 German industrialists to donate to the Nazi party. The businessmen — representing companies that are still prominent German corporate names, like Siemens, Bayer and Allianz — duly open their wallets.
  • Mr. Landecker did two things that would prove prescient. He made sure his children were baptized Catholic, like his late wife. And he officially transferred to them his main possessions, including the family apartment, so that they could not be expropriated.
  • Every time business leaders make decisions, he said, they should ask, “What does this mean for our children? What does it mean for the future?”
  • “In history, businesses have enabled populists,” he added. “We mustn’t make the same mistake today.” Then he quoted the Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal: “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”
  • He added, “As the successors and descendants of people who committed horrendous acts, it is vital that our generation accepts what has happened, that we do whatever we can to bring tolerance and equality to the communities in which we live
magnanma

Eyebrow Shapes Throughout History and the Women Who Started Each Trend - 0 views

  • Ancient Egyptians used carbon and black oxide to form thick and black eyebrows to honor their god Horus. Some eyebrow styles dominated ancient China such as the Daimei, black brows, Emei, fine brows, and Guangmei, short and thick brows. The Olmecs painted humans with flamboyant eyebrows. This emulated a jaguar in which they believed is where their society descended from.
  • As proved by history, eyebrow shapes have been one of the most important beauty aspects for women. Their styles have evolved as much as hair removal products, especially during the past 100 years. The twentieth century has been particularly incredible thanks to the advent of film, mass advertising, computers, and social media.
  • After World War I, the success of silent films gave rise a new trend: pencil-thin eyebrows. While Charlie Chaplin's eyebrows were not particularly thin, the eyebrows of the actresses who appeared in his films were
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  • As the decades went by, brows remained thin, but their arches got higher.
  • 1950s–1960s – Audrey Hepburn: Hollywood under New Eyebrows The thick, flat-shaped, low-arch, short eyebrows of Audrey Hepburn marked the start of a new trend.
  • thin eyebrows mainly because that was how they naturally were. In Diana Ross' case, however, it was just to make room for more disco makeup. The hippie movement during these years also encouraged girls to pluck their eyebrows very little or not at all and embrace their natural beauty.
  • They promoted the idea of an unkempt and natural style unlike the thick but perfect brows of the 1950s.
  • Grunge music, supermodels, and minimalistic fashion ideas brought an old friend back: pencil-thin lines. In the 1990s, every girl wanted to look like Drew Barrymore, the actress whose short haircut, slick dresses, neck chokers, and incredibly thin eyebrows made her an icon of the decade.
  • Social media has changed so many aspects of our lives—even our perception of beauty. Eyebrows have become a powerful part of selfies, according to a researcher at Cardiff University, who told the Guardian that Kim Kardashian and young model Cara Delevigne are great examples of this phenomenon. Both celebrities are known for their Instagram selfies and for having and defending dense eyebrows.
  • Appointments for brow makeovers have increased to the point where specialized spas offer 45-minute services that include tinting, threading, waxing, and countering.
Javier E

Trump Chooses Lee Zeldin to Run E.P.A. as He Plans to Gut Climate Rules - The New York ... - 0 views

  • Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” E.P.A. rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.
  • In particular, Mr. Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.
  • Mr. Zeldin wrote on X. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
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  • Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.
  • Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C.,
  • “Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under the first Trump administration. She wrote a section on the E.P.A. for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for re-engineering the federal government. In it, she recommends slashing the E.P.A.’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water.
  • He was a member of the House’s Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and earned a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. It is a low mark from the environmental advocacy group, but it was nevertheless higher than nearly any other Republican.
  • When Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized Mr. Zeldin for opposing the climate law, he responded on social media, saying “I just voted NO because the bill sucks.”
  • “Being that it raises taxes, adds 87,000 new IRS agents, & spends hundreds of billions of dollars our country doesn’t have on far-left policies our country can’t afford, I’m not surprised you’d blindly endorse it,” he wrote.
  • During Mr. Zeldin’s tenure in the House, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.
  • Mr. Zeldin has also taken some votes that the group supported, including prohibiting oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He also voted in favor of a landmark conservation bill that passed with bipartisan support and was signed by Mr. Trump. It guarantees maximum annual funding for a federal program to acquire and preserve land for public use.
  • He voted for a bill that would require the E.P.A. to set limits on PFAS, which are a family of man-made chemicals that are persistent in the environment and the human body. The E.P.A. under the Biden administration has set strict limits on the chemicals in drinking water. In 2020, he voted against legislation that would have slashed E.P.A.’s budget.
  • “It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”
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