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Javier E

Presidential mandates: A matter of perception | The Economist - 0 views

  • Mandates aren’t quite “myths”, as political scientist Robert Dahl argued in a 1990 article, but neither are they readily identifiable entities about which we can make confident assertions. Arguing whether Mr Obama has a mandate is like debating whether somebody has mojo, or whether basketball star LeBron James is "in the zone" on a given night: there’s a discussion to be had, but no way to come to a definite conclusion.
  • in claiming that President Obama “has” a mandate or “lacks” one, we are just giving voice to our conception of what a mandate is and whether we’d like to confer one on a given president. The mandate is in the eye of the beholder.
  • Patricia Conley, a political scientist at Northwestern University, examines the concept in terms of how mandates are used by presidents. Wittgenstein would approve of this approach; “the meaning of a word”, he wrote, “is its use in the language.”
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  • Here is Ms Conley’s explanation from her 2001 book:In the aftermath of an election, politicians try to figure out what the outcome signifies. In an environment of imperfect information, they must try to distinguish between idiosyncratic events like a weak nominee and long-term political trends like ideological change… They never have perfect information about voters, and yet they must decide on a policy agenda. The task of studying electoral mandates must therefore focus on explaining when presidents feel they have enough popular support to ask for major policy changes.
  • With Speaker Boehner’s assertion that “we’ll have as much of a mandate as [Obama] will...to not raise taxes”, it is clear that the GOP-controlled House of Representatives is not about to grant the president any kind of deference as he begins his second term in office. If Mr Obama is able to push his tax proposals through Congress it will not be because he was given a mandate or because he claimed one. Legislative success will come if Mr Obama is skillful politically and is able to wrangle support from key legislators at key moments in the process
hannahcarter11

Biden's Call for 'National Mask Mandate' Gains Traction in Public Health Circles - The ... - 0 views

  • public health experts are coalescing around Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s call for a “national mask mandate,” even as they concede such an effort would require much more than the stroke of a presidential pen.
  • Research also shows that states that have passed mask mandates have had lower growth rates of Covid-19, beginning on the day the mandate was passed
  • Mr. Trump is opposed to a mandate, and Mr. Biden has conceded that a presidential order for all Americans to wear masks would almost certainly face — and most likely fall to — a legal challenge.
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  • Mr. Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, echoed the “dark winter” language during the most recent presidential debate, and he is already using his bully pulpit to promote and reinforce a culture of mask wearing.
  • He could use his authority under federal transit law to require masks on public transportation. He could also prod governors who are resisting mask mandates to at least require masks in public buildings in their states.
  • Instead of making it about the president’s coercive authority under law it should be about whether the president can support a norm that supports public health, which is in people’s self interest
  • Experts say there is growing scientific evidence that face masks can considerably reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses like the one that causes Covid-19.
  • it is time to seriously consider a national mandate to curb the spread of the virus.
  • the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated that “universal mask use” — when 95 percent of people wear masks in public — could prevent nearly 130,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the coming months, though those numbers are based on certain assumptions and could change if people alter their behavior
  • any hint of a sweeping federal requirement would “go over like a lead balloon” and “divide and harden areas of the country in opposition,”
  • that has not produced the kind of compliance that public health experts say is necessary to reduce the spread of the virus
  • Some public health experts fear that Mr. Trump — who routinely mocks Mr. Biden for wearing masks and whose aides often forgo them even as the White House has become its own coronavirus hot spot — has so poisoned the discussion around masks that wearing them will always be construed as a political statement.
  • She also suggested that insurance industry executives might be persuaded to adjust their policies to require that businesses mandate mask wearing by customers and employees in order to receive coverage.
  • “There’s a presumption that a mask mandate would have to be backed up with fines and set off scuffles with law enforcement,
  • There is some evidence that norms are changing.
Javier E

The Employer Mandate News | National Review Online - 0 views

  • a delay won’t fix the real problem or unwind the consequences already seen: a pile-up in lost hours worked for modest-wage earners.
  • A delay to 2015 is not long at all, since many employers acted to curb hours in the spring of 2013, well before the original 2014 start date. Thus, the delay is unlikely to provide comfort to workers already impacted — or to Democrats ahead of the 2014 mid-terms.
  • Obama needed the mandate to get Obamacare passed because it would reduce participation in the exchanges and therefore the law’s overall costs. One of his key selling points for the law was that it would cut the deficit. Now that the law has passed, his administration is freer to pursue changes that will raise Obamacare’s cost to taxpayers but improve its effects on the economy.Delaying the employer mandate, perhaps indefinitely, is one way to do that.
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  • the delay might accelerate the unraveling of employer-sponsored health coverage:If you like Obamacare, and you want it to work, you don’t need the employer mandate. Democrats put the employer mandate in Obamacare because the President was worried that, without a mandate, employers would dump coverage, violating his oft-repeated promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.
  • (the “American Job Protection Act”) is that one can very easily imagine it being taken up by left-wing Democrats as well as right-wing Republicans, albeit for different reasons.
  • delaying the employer mandate could lead, ultimately, to its repeal, which would do much to transition our insurance market from an employer-sponsored one to an individually-purchased one.
  • If the employer mandate were to ultimately be repealed, or never implemented, today’s news may turn out to be one of the most significant developments in health care policy in recent memory.
  • Even if the Obama administration’s delay lasts for only one year, that delay will give firms time to restructure their businesses to avoid offering costly coverage, leading to an expansion of the individual insurance market and a shrinkage of the employer-sponsored market.
  • If we transition from employer-provided coverage to tightly-regulated state-based insurance markets, it is possible that the insurance business will become even more rigid than it already is — this is why I’ve called for a national exchange as a kind of escape hatch. And of course if the private insurance market becomes more dysfunctional, a single-payer, Medicare-for-all alternative will become more politically attractive. 
anonymous

Obamacare's Individual Mandate: On Its Way Out, or Already Gone? - WSJ - 0 views

  • Senate Republicans included a measure to repeal the mandate in their recently passed tax overhaul
  • “We’re getting rid of the individual mandate,” Mr. Trump said. “That individual mandate where you pay a lot of money for the privilege of not having to have insurance or health care. So you pay for the privilege of not getting taken care of. Isn’t that a wonderful thing? And we’re going to repeal it.”
  • experts say the impact of undoing the so-called individual mandate might not be as devastating to the ACA as was thought a few years ago
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  • the penalty was never big enough to persuade a critical mass of people to buy insurance, so repealing it might not cripple the individual health-insurance market
  • Many Democrats say repealing the mandate would shred the ACA as younger, healthier people decline to get coverage, raising costs for older and sicker individuals
  • more experts are concluding that rising premiums next year would exempt many more people from the mandate.
  • a recent study that in the 15 most-expensive states, premiums would exceed the affordability threshold for a person with an income of $50,000
  • “Premiums for Obamacare policies next year will be so high that millions will be exempt from the tax penalty whether Congress repeals it or not.”
hannahcarter11

Fauci: Texas inviting another virus surge by lifting mask mandate | TheHill - 0 views

  • Texas officially repealed its mask mandate on Wednesday and allowed businesses to reopen at full capacity. The changes came even as public health experts cautioned against reopening too soon, despite declining cases.
  • “We understand people’s need to get back to normal, and we’re going in that direction. But when you start doing things like completely putting aside all public health measures as if you’re turning a light switch off, that's quite risky,”
  • Fauci last week called the states’ moves “inexplicable” and suggested that it could lead to another surge.
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  • More than a dozen states currently do not have a mask mandate in effect, though Texas is now the largest without rules for face coverings.
  • Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) defended his decision against bipartisan criticism last week, saying that lifting the mask mandate “isn’t going to make that big of a change in the state of Texas.”
clairemann

Supreme Court Blocks Biden's Vaccine Mandate for Large Employers - The New York Times - 0 views

  • blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers, dealing a blow to a key element of the White House’s plan to address the pandemic as cases resulting from the Omicron variant are on the rise.
  • allowed a more modest mandate
    • clairemann
       
      are fears of a conservative court overstated?
  • 6 to 3, with liberal justices in dissent.
    • clairemann
       
      possibly the new normal...
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  • The employer mandate would have required workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or to wear masks and be tested weekly, though employers were not required to pay for the testing.
  • The administration estimated that it would cause 22 million people to get vaccinated and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations.
  • the court’s conservative majority seemed doubtful that the administration had congressional authorization to impose the requirements.
  • It would affect more than 17 million workers, the administration said, and would “save hundreds or even thousands of lives each month.”
  • The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld state vaccine mandates in a variety of settings against constitutional challenges. The new cases are different, as they primarily present the question of whether Congress has authorized the executive branch to institute the requirements.
  • most “likely lacks congressional authority” to impose the vaccine-or-testing requirement.
    • clairemann
       
      not an issue of constitutionality but rather an issue of authority
Javier E

A Hidden Consensus on Health Care - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The politicians’ consensus is that health care reform shouldn’t alter or disrupt the way the majority of Americans get their insurance today
  • The policy consensus, though, is that the status quo is actually the problem, and that it deserves to be threatened, undermined and replaced as expeditiously as possible. Wonks of the left and right disagree on what that replacement should look like. But they’re united in regarding employer-provided coverage as an unsustainable relic: a burden on businesses, a source of perverse incentives for the health care market and an obstacle to more efficient, affordable and universal coverage.
  • Obamacare has an unwieldy, Frankenstein’s monster quality in part because the law is trying to serve both consensuses at once. The core of the bill, the subsidies for the uninsured and the exchanges where they can purchase plans, is designed to offer a center-left alternative to the existing system. But much of the surrounding architecture is designed to prop up existing arrangements — and in the process, protect Obama from exactly the kind of criticisms he once leveled against McCain.
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  • If it dropped the employer mandate, the Obama White House would be fully committed to a more disruptive future, in which exchanges and subsidies gradually replaced the employer-based system.  And since those exchanges and subsidies are going to be implemented by this administration no matter what — barring a Martian invasion or a zombie apocalypse, at least — the sooner we find out if they really work and what they really cost the better.
  • “if you like Obamacare, and you want it to work, you don’t need the employer mandate.” And if you don’t like Obamacare (as Roy doesn’t), and don’t expect it to work, then all the mandate does is delay a necessary reckoning with the new system’s flaws.
  • Either way, the White House’s decision is a step toward honesty in policy-making. It takes us a little closer to a world where politicians of both parties actually level with the public, and acknowledge that employer-provided health insurance is an idea whose time has passed.
anonymous

Roberts, Kavanaugh appear skeptical of striking down Obamacare at Supreme Court: "Not o... - 0 views

  • The Supreme Court wrestled Tuesday
  • with the future of the 2010 landmark health care law championed by Democrats and attacked by Republicans
  • two justices on the conservative wing of the bench expressing skepticism toward arguments the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in its entirety.
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  • Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the three justices on the court appointed by President Trump, both signaled they disagree with arguments from Republican-led states that Obamacare should fall if its individual mandate is deemed unconstitutional.
  • It's hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire act to fall if the mandate were struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the act,
  • The chief justice added that he believes Congress wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the full law, "but that's not our job."
  • "Under the severability question, we ask ourselves whether Congress would want the rest of the law to survive if an unconstitutional provision were severed," Roberts said. "And here Congress left the rest of the law intact when it lowered the penalty to zero. That seems to be compelling evidence on the question
  • I tend to agree with you, this is a very straight forward case for severability under our precedents, meaning that we would excise the mandate and leave the rest of the act in place,"
  • it does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the act in place."
  • third attempt by Republicans for the Supreme Court to dismantle the 2010 health care law that has extended health insurance coverage to millions of Americans and provides protections to people with pre-existing conditions.
  • The states argue the rest of Obamacare should topple if the mandate is struck down, as it is "inextricably intertwined" with the remainder of the law and cannot be severed from it. 
  • Congress's change to the law "modified the terms of the choice presented by [the mandate] — by allowing individuals to freely decide whether to buy health insurance without facing any tax assessment if they do not."
  • "It would seem a big deal to say that if you can point to injury with respect to one provision and you can concoct some kind of inseverability argument, then it allows you to challenge anything else in the statute,
  • Isn't that something that the United States should be very worried about and isn't it something that really cuts against all of our doctrine?"
sidneybelleroche

New York City mayor announces COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers - ABC News - 0 views

  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday announced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all municipal workers -- a move that is likely to escalate tensions with unions and employees that have been resistant.
  • Nearly 150,000 of the city's workers -- teachers and school staff -- had already been required to be vaccinated, but the new announcement, applying to about 160,500 workers, took the push for vaccination one step further.
  • About 71% of employees have already have at least one shot of the vaccine. It’s up to 95% in the 11 city-run hospitals, and 96% in schools
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  • the police and fire departments, lag behind.
  • About 69% of NYPD employees and 60% of FDNY workers are vaccinated and both the fire and police commissioners have endorsed the mandate.
  • The mandate is expected to include all employees from sanitation workers to office workers and will require some 161,000 workers to have their first dose by Oct. 29.
  • Those who receive their first dose at a city-run vaccination site will receive a $500 bonus
  • Municipal employees who do not get vaccinated will be placed on unpaid leave
Javier E

Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Explore
  • The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.
  • What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew
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  • well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates
  • These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.
  • These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century Americ
  • the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity
  • I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.
  • The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting
  • the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”
  • I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control.
  • The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasur
  • I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.
  • the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?
  • My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature
  • Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.
  • “Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)
  • The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.“Normal,” a girl said.“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”
  • the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum
  • The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t
  • Then there was the word normal. More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.
  • the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum
  • Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them.
  • When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators.
  • First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into i
  • Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock
  • She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.
  • Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?
  • Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips
  • it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.
  • Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,
  • In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.
  • I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience
  • Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.
  • I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution
  • Here I am in a boxcar, I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation
  • I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever
  • Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center, which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.
  • As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”
  • t the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.
  • Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”)
  • It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.
  • I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.
  • the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank?
  • weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?
  • The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”
  • Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”
  • Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened
  • I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.
  • In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.
  • The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design
  • the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.
  • The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic?
  • by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?
  • Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,”
  • (Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.
  • One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder.
  • This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past
  • When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.
  • If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grow
  • One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same
  • One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society
  • To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist
  • To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.
  • one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”
  • There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,”
  • “We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”
  • Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’ 
  • Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism.
  • providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.
  • Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust
  • Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.
  • A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings
  • In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”
  • These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?
  • One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length.
  • The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism
  • “many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews
  • This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.
  • Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths.
  • One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?
  • Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.
  • One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”
  • The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing
  • it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.
  • “It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’
  • Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?
  • I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”
  • Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.
  • “The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.
  • Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.
  • These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week
  • the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night—because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.
  • In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”
  • The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.
  • Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.
  • Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.”
  • “It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”
  • Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?
  • In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about i
  • We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”
  • These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.
  • In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism
  • To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.
  • Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?
  • “People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,”
  • “People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too.”
  • The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”
  • But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?
  • I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”
  • Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?
  • “Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”
  • “Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”
  • perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish
  • The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”
  • American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering
  • But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting i
  • That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters.
  • It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.
  • How should we teach children about anti-Semitism?
  • Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism.
  • “If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”
  • She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”
  • “Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said
  • I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”
  • I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.
  • “The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”
  • This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.
  • Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism
  • “Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,”
  • Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,”
  • then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.
  • Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written: “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”
  • Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.
  • this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.
  • The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others.
  • a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?
  • I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”
  • I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews doe
  • There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor
Javier E

The Court Affirms Our Social Contract - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the federal courts are the guardians of our Constitution. That is certainly true, but it not the whole story. In fact, the most important function of the federal courts is to legitimate state building by the political branches.
  • What is "state building?" Throughout our country's history, government has taken on many new functions. The early 19th century American state actually didn't do very much more than national defense and customs collection. The executive branch was tiny. Over the years, the federal government took on more and more obligations, offering new protections and new services for its citizens. After the Civil War, Congress passed a series of civil rights laws, it created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads, it passed an income tax, and early in the twentieth century it created a central bank. State building really took off after the New Deal, which established the modern administrative and regulatory state and added a host of labor and consumer protection regulations, investments in infrastructure, and Social Security. The National Security State was born after World War II, and the 1960s brought new civil rights laws and new social welfare programs through the Great Society. At the turn of the 21st century, the federal government expanded its national security infrastructure even further, implementing vast new surveillance programs and strategies for dealing with terrorism
  • Whenever the federal government expands its capabilities, it changes the nature of the social compact. Sometimes the changes are small, but sometimes, as in the New Deal or the civil rights era, the changes are big. And when the changes are big, courts are called on to legitimate the changes and ensure that they are consistent with our ancient Constitution.
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  • The words "legitmate" and "ratify," however, are ambiguous terms. Courts do not simply rubber stamp what the political branches do. Rather, they set new ground rules. The government may do this as long as it doesn't do that. Legitimation is Janus-faced: it establishes what government can do by establishing what the government cannot do.
  • The real constitutional struggle begins in 1968, when Richard Nixon appointed four new conservative justices to the Court in his first term. These new justices accepted and ratified the changes of the 1960s, but also limited them in important ways. They made clear that the welfare state was constitutionally permissible but not constitutionally required, held that education was not a fundamental right, limited the use of busing to achieve racial integration, and halted the Warren Court's revolution in criminal procedure. The changes in social contract were ratified, but on more conservative terms.
  • Roberts held that the individual mandate could not be justified by Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. If it was constitutional, it was only as a tax, which gave people a choice to purchase health insurance or pay a small penalty. As I have argued for many years, this is, in fact, the correct interpretation of what the mandate does. Once this point is accepted, the argument for the mandate's constitutionality is straightforward, and Roberts quickly showed why this was true.
  • Roberts' reasoning captures the dual nature of judicial legitimation. He has said to Congress: "You may compel people to enter into commercial transactions like the insurance mandate, but you may not do so as a direct order under the commerce power. Instead, you must do it through the taxing power, always giving people the choice to pay a tax instead. And as long as you structure the mandate as a tax, the people's rights are protected because they always have the right to throw their elected representatives out of office if they don't like the tax." Roberts' opinion thus harks back to a basic source of legitimacy enshrined in the American Revolution: "No taxation without representation."
  • the Medicaid extension. He argued that Congress may create new social programs that expand protection for the poor. But Congress may not tell states that they must accept the new programs or else lose all federal contributions to existing social programs of long standing. The federal government may, if it wants, totally fund the Medicaid extension out of its own pocket without any help from the states. It may abolish the old version of Medicaid and create a new version in its place identical to the expanded version. What it may not do, Roberts argued, is to leverage States' dependence on federal money in established social welfare programs to compel States to participate in new social welfare programs.
Javier E

Masks and school dress codes: If you can punish a teenage girl for spaghetti straps, yo... - 0 views

  • For government officials:Legislate the “personal choice” of mask noncompliance the way you have for decades tried to legislate women over their own deeply personal decisions.
  • After refusing to wear a mask or to instruct his staff to work remotely, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) tested positive for the coronavirus. He then tweeted that he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, despite top infectious-disease specialists, including Anthony S. Fauci, noting that the anti-malarial drug has not been proved an effective treatment. “It is what was decided as the best course of action between my doctor and me — not by government bureaucrats,” Gohmert wrote.
  • Was he plagiarizing Busy Philipps? Because last year at a hearing on abortion, the actor and activist told Gohmert, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”
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  • Gohmert, who is antiabortion, was not persuaded then. He has repeatedly shown he feels it is exactly his business, as a government bureaucrat, to regulate individuals’ conversations with their doctors. At a House hearing he once said women should carry a brain-dead fetus to term.
  • In a funhouse-mirror situation, the de facto slogan of the anti-mask crowd has become “My body, my choice,” the chant originally created by women in the abortion rights movement. In that context, the goal was to argue that a woman’s decisions about her health, her family, her morals and her soul were up to her, possibly in consultation with her doctor, her partner or her pastor.
  • You might believe that abortion is murder, but you cannot say that it is contagious and airborne, something you can catch or transmit unknowingly to others. You cannot argue that, upon choosing to have an abortion, a pregnant person walks into a grocery store and infects 50 other innocent shoppers with abortion.
  • public health concerns are completely different from individual medical procedures.
  • But if that’s the comparison that anti-mask folks want to make — fine. Prepare to be judged and harangued the way women are for seeking abortions. And prepare to deserve it, because unlike what goes on inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, public health actually is the business of the public.
  • I don’t think this is about the ability to enforce mandates. Schools, legislators and workplaces have all found ways to enforce mandates on women’s bodies, or gender nonconforming bodies, for years. This is about a sickness that is far more pervasive than the coronavirus: the belief that one’s comfort is more important than someone else’s life.
  • The stubborn resistance to science for reasons that often boil down to, “I don’t wanna.”
  • The refusal to acknowledge that living in a functioning society sometimes means sacrificing a tiny smidgen of personal liberty for the well-being of the group
  • — and that there are circumstances exceeding the boundaries of taste and discretion, where those sacrifices should be mandated: The presence of a deadly virus in the halls of a school is a better reason to enforce a dress code than the presence of bare shoulders.
hannahcarter11

COVID news: Arizona, South Dakota no masks; Denver schools go virtual - 0 views

  • The U.S. death toll from coronavirus has surpassed 250,000, including 1,700 reported Wednesday alone. Hospitalizations across the nation have exploded, with almost 80,000 Americans now receiving inpatient treatment.
  • Still, some governors remain unconvinced that mandatory facial coverings are a necessary tool in curbing the pandemic. 
  • Thirty-six states have some type of statewide mask requirement
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  • But he suggested that a statewide mask mandate would not help halt the surge, adding that it is nearly impossible to participate in the Arizona economy without wearing a mask due to various local restrictions.
  • She said cases were increasing in many states with mandates, adding that communities were free to establish local regulations. 
  • The U.S. has reported more than 11.5 million cases and more than 250,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The global totals: 56.4 million cases and 1.35 million deaths.
  • As state officials and lawmakers urged the shutdown of a Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Iowa, managers at the plant reportedly placed bets on how many would end up getting sick.
  • As COVID-19 cases pile up at a staggering rate, Republicans and Democrats remain in stark disagreement over the threat of the virus and the steps necessary to mitigate its spread.
  • That has surprised political scientists and public health experts who thought that, if the pandemic worsened, the partisan gap would begin to close
  • European officials announced a modest gain in the continent's battle against the virus.
  • Still, an average of 4500 lives are lost to COVID-19 in Europe every day, Kluge said.
  • He described further lockdowns as a last resort and said that if mask use reached 95%, lockdowns would not be needed.
  • Almost 100,000 long-term care U.S. residents have died in the coronavirus pandemic, and advocates for the elderly say tens of thousands more are succumbing to neglect by overwhelmed staffs and slow declines from isolation imposed as protection from COVID.
  • The U.S. has become the first country to have 250,000 people die from COVID-19, nearly 19% of the global total of 1.35 million fatalities.
  • That means we can begin inoculating health care and other essential workers even before we’re done with the Thanksgiving leftovers,
  • The vaccine being developed Oxford researchers and U.K.-based AstraZeneca appears to trigger a "robust immune response" in healthy adults, including those aged 56 and older, the university said in a release.
  • Although the COVID-19 outbreak is looking worse than ever, news from vaccine makers is fueling optimism
  • The death toll the virus has inflicted among Americans is more than twice as large as the number of U.S. service members who died in World War I.
  • Colleges are scrambling to prevent a massive spread, with some urging or requiring students to quarantine or receive a negative coronavirus test before traveling home. Without those precautions, college leaders say, students should consider abstaining from their holiday plans and instead opt for a celebration closer to campus.
  • Boston University's recommendation is that students either stay in Boston for the holiday or go home and not come back. Kenneth Elmore, dean of students, says the school is urging students to think of the greater good. 
  • As Arizona's COVID-19 trends spike, the state is giving hospitals $25 million to bolster staffing, but Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday that he won't impose a statewide mask mandate.
  • Ducey suggested that a statewide mask mandate would not effectively curb the spread of the virus, and emphasized that about 90% of the state is under a local mask mandate. He also said it is nearly impossible to participate in the Arizona economy without wearing a mask.
  • More than 90,000 students in the state's largest school district will return to virtual learning starting Nov. 30 through the end of the semester.
  • The district reported about 13 cases per week when it first opened early childhood education centers. Cases have now surpassed 300 per week.
  • There are some reasons for this. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acknowledging the nation's pandemic-related rodent problem, points out restaurants have reduced service, which means fewer food scraps are ending up in the dumpsters on which rats and mice often feed.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci is urging Americans to "think twice" about traveling and having indoor gatherings for the holidays.
  • "As we get into the colder weather, we should really think twice about these kind of dinner parties where you're not sure of whether the people that are in your bubble (are safe)," he said. "Then you're going to start seeing these unanticipated infections related to innocent home gatherings, particularly as we head into the holiday season."
lilyrashkind

Supreme Court blocks Biden's COVID vaccine mandate for companies, but allows for health... - 0 views

  • "Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly," the court said. "Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category."
  • The high court, though, gave the green-light to a requirement that health care workers in facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding must be vaccinated, siding 5-4 with the Biden administration.
  • The decisions come less than a week after the justices heard oral arguments on the emergency requests regarding the vaccine-or-test rule and vaccine requirement for health care workers.
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  • President Biden first announced the rules in September as part of a broader strategy from his administration to combat the spread of the Delta variant, which drove a surge of infections toward the end of the summer. 
  • The Supreme Court was asked to intervene last month and swiftly held oral arguments to weigh the emergency requests.
  • "As a result of the court's decision, it is now up to states and individual employers to determine whether to make their workplaces as safe as possible for employees, and whether their businesses will be safe for consumers during this pandemic by requiring employees to take the simple and effective step of getting vaccinated," Mr. Biden said. "The court has ruled that my administration cannot use the authority granted to it by Congress to require this measure, but that does not stop me from using my voice as president to advocate for employers to do the right thing to protect Americans' health and economy."
  • The Biden administration estimated that more than 80 million employees could be impacted by the policy.
  • The Supreme Court received more than a dozen requests for emergency action in cases challenging the requirement after the 6th U.S. Circuit's ruling, with business associations, Republican-led states and private businesses covered by the rule arguing OSHA lacked the power to issue the vaccine requirement.
  • "Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life — simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock — would significantly expand OSHA's regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization," the court said.
  • The second rule examined by the Supreme Court was issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in November and laid out vaccine requirements for staff at a wide range of facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid. The requirement does not have a daily or weekly testing option for unvaccinated workers, but does include medical and religious exemptions.
  • . Then, in a separate case brought by 14 states, a federal district court in Louisiana blocked the rule from taking effect nationwide, but the 5th Circuit narrowed the scope of the order to the 14 states that together sued the Biden administration. 
  • "After all, ensuring that providers take steps to avoid transmitting a dangerous virus to their patients is consistent with the fundamental principle of the medical profession: first, do no harm," the Supreme Court said.
  • "The omnibus rule is undoubtedly significant — it requires millions of healthcare workers to choose between losing their livelihoods and acquiescing to a vaccine they have rejected for months. Vaccine mandates also fall squarely within a state's police power, and, until now, only rarely have been a tool of the federal government," Thomas wrote. "If Congress had wanted to grant CMS authority to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate, and consequently alter the state-federal balance, it would have said so clearly. It did not."
ethanmoser

South Sudan claims mandate has expired for more UN troops | Fox News - 0 views

  • South Sudan claims mandate has expired for more UN troops
  • South Sudan's government is claiming that the U.N. Security Council mandate has expired to send a new contingent of 4,000 peacekeepers to boost the existing force.
  • The U.N. Security Council decided in August to send additional peacekeepers after clashes killed hundreds in South Sudan's capital Juba. South Sudan initially objected to the force and has delayed its deployment.
anonymous

Trump Administration Rolls Back Birth Control Mandate - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Trump Administration Rolls Back Birth Control Mandate
  • The Trump administration on Friday moved to roll back the federal requirement for employers to include birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, vastly expanding exemptions for those that cite moral or religious objection
  • The new rules, which fulfill a campaign promise by President Trump, are sure to touch off a round of lawsuits on the issue.
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  • More than 55 million women have access to birth control without co-payments because of the contraceptive coverage mandate, according to a study commissioned by the Obama administration. Under the new regulations, hundreds of thousands of women could lose birth control benefits they now receive at no cost under the Affordable Care Act. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Dr. Haywood L. Brown, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the rules would turn back the clock on women’s health.
  • The Trump administration says the new rules are motivated by “our desire to bring to a close the more than five years of litigation” over the contraceptive coverage mandate.The Obama-era policy generated dozens of lawsuits by employers, including religious schools, colleges, hospitals and charitable organizations, priests and nuns and even some owners of private for-profit companies who objected to some forms of birth control.However, the rules are likely to generate more litigation, this time by advocates for women and public health groups
  • In the new rules, the Trump administration says the Affordable Care Act does not explicitly require coverage of contraceptives.
  • By contrast, many doctors, including obstetricians and gynecologists, say contraceptives have generally been a boon to women’s health.
  • “Affordable contraception for women saves lives,” he said. “It prevents pregnancies. It improves maternal mortality. It prevents adolescent pregnancies.”
  • The Trump administration said the new rules would take effect immediately because “it would be impracticable and contrary to the public interest to engage in full notice and comment rule-making.”
Javier E

How a Rising Religious Movement Rationalizes the Christian Grasp for Power - The French... - 0 views

  • The origin of the Seven Mountain Mandate rests with an alleged divine revelation shared by Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission, and the theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer
  • They’re among the most influential Evangelicals of the modern age.
  • In its distilled essence, the Seven Mountain concept describes seven key cultural/religious institutions that should be influenced and transformed by Christian believers to create “Godly change” in America. The key to transforming the nation rests with reaching the family, the church, education, media, arts, the economy, and the government with the truth of the Gospel.
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  • To put it another way: If God asks mankind to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God,” He does not intend that those virtues be confined to church. The fruits of the spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control”—are not mere Sunday School values. They should pervade our interactions with the wider world.
  • Moreover, if and when those seven key institutions become instruments of injustice, Christians should respond. To take some obvious examples, if the “mountain” of government turns against its citizens, Christians have an obligation to stand with the oppressed. If the mountain of popular culture transforms the beauty of art into the perversion of porn, Christians must resist. And if the mountain of education teaches falsehoods, Christians have an obligation to tell the truth. 
  • But there is an immense and important difference between seeking justice and seeking power. In fact, the quest for power can sideline or derail the quest for justice. And that’s where we get to the real problem—the difference between a Seven Mountain concept and a Seven Mountain mandate or Seven Mountain dominionism.
  • In 2013, Bethel Church pastor Bill Johnson and author Lance Wallnau co-authored a short book called Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate. In that book, here’s how Wallnau described the stakes:
  • Each of these seven mountains represents an individual sphere of influence that shapes the way people think. These mountains are crowned with high places that modern-day kings occupy as ideological strongholds. These strongholds are, in reality, houses built out of thoughts. These thought structures are fortified with spiritual reinforcement that shapes the culture and establishes the spiritual climate of each nation. I sensed the Lord telling me, “He who can take these mountains can take the harvest of nations.” (Emphasis added.)
  • Wallnau went on to describe the importance of “mountain kings”—those individuals who have a “position in a high place” and who wield influence over “their own sphere directly and other spheres indirectly.” It is thus of urgent importance for Christians to reach, influence, or even become these “mountain kings.”
  • At its most extreme edges, Seven Mountain dominionism holds that Christ will not return unless and until the church successfully invades or “occupies” each of the seven key spheres of life.
  • Astute readers will by now have noticed two things. First, you’ll note the extent to which the heart of this strategy (or mandate) isn’t based on clear scriptural commands but rather on claimed special revelations from God. Second, you’ll note how much it emphasizes the importance of placing people in positions of power and control
  • The business of shifting culture or transforming nations does not require a majority of conversions.” What does it require? “We need more disciples in the right places, the high places.”
  • What is the alternative to the pursuit of power? I prefer the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr. “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
  • Christians can never forget that they live in what my pastor once called an “upside-down kingdom.” The last shall be first. If you want to save your life, you’ll lose it, but if you lose your life for Christ, you’ll save it. And don’t forget, the Son of God himself spent his entire life on earth far from the mountaintop.
Javier E

Mask mandates lifted in Texas and Mississippi, leaving public health officials worried ... - 0 views

  • Abbott on Tuesday issued an executive order allowing Texas businesses to operate at full capacity and revoking a statewide mask mandate. The order also curtailed local officials’ ability to impose tougher restrictions in their communities, by barring countywide mask mandates and removing jail time and other penalties for those who do not follow local coronavirus rules.
  • The Republican governors’ decisions to lift covid restrictions was warmly embraced by many conservatives. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said in a statement that reopening businesses without restrictions would “help us restore the livelihoods of millions of Texans even faster.” And Texas Speaker of the House Dade Phelan (R) said people should “exercise personal responsibility” to prevent further spread of the coronavirus while the state reopens
  • “It puts a lot of businesses in a tough spot, I think,” San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich told KSAT. “Basically you’re saying, ‘If you get infected, you die, that’s the way it goes. We got to open up.’ That’s not the way to do it. This is really ridiculous.”
hannahcarter11

'It's every man for himself': The Texans defying end of mask mandate | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

  • Governor Greg Abbott announced an end to the statewide mask mandate he issued over the summer on 2 March, and on Wednesday, the new rules took effect. This means that not only are Texans no longer required to wear a mask, but stores, restaurants, and even bars are fully open at maximum capacity despite the fact that only 16% of adults in the state are fully vaccinated.
  • Mahak Ahsan is a student pharmacist in the city. She expressed frustration that the state government is impeding the work she and her colleagues are doing to administer vaccines, and educate people about the benefits of immunizations and wearing masks
Javier E

Why You Can Dine Indoors but Can't Have Thanksgiving - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Because the state and city had reopened restaurants, Josh, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, assumed that local health officials had figured out a patchwork of precautions that would make indoor dining safe.
  • They were listening to the people they were told to listen to—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently released a book about how to control the pandemic—and following all the rules.
  • Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?
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  • Before you can dig into how cities and states are handling their coronavirus response, you have to deal with the elephant in the hospital room: Almost all of this would be simpler if the Trump administration and its allies had, at any point since January, behaved responsibly.
  • In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,”
  • “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.
  • Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it.
  • Early federal financial-aid programs could have been renewed and expanded as the pandemic worsened. Centrally coordinated testing and contact-tracing strategies could have been implemented. Reliable, data-based federal guidelines for what kinds of local restrictions to implement and when could have been developed.
  • The country could have had a national mask mandate. Donald Trump and his congressional allies could have governed instead of spending most of the year urging people to violate emergency orders and “liberate” their states from basic safety protocols.
  • But that’s not the country Americans live in. Responding to this national disaster has been left to governors, mayors, and city councils, basically since day one
  • When places including New York, California, and Massachusetts first faced surging outbreaks, they implemented stringent safety restrictions—shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates, indoor-dining and bar closures. The strategy worked: Transmission decreased, and businesses reopened. But as people ventured out and cases began to rise again, many of those same local governments have warned residents of the need to hunker down and avoid holiday gatherings, yet haven’t reinstated the safety mandates that saved lives six months ago
  • Even in cities and states that have had some success controlling the pandemic, a discrepancy between rules and reality has become its own kind of problem.
  • it’s a lot of wasted time and money.” Instead of centralizing the development of infrastructure and methods to deal with the pandemic, states with significantly different financial resources and political climates have all built their own information environments and have total freedom to interpret their data as they please.
  • beneath this contradiction lies a fundamental conflict that state and local leaders have been forced to navigate for the better part of a year. Amid the pandemic, the people they govern would generally be better served if they got to stay home, stay safe, and not worry about their bills. To govern, though, leaders also need to placate the other centers of power in American communities: local business associations, real-estate developers, and industry interest groups
  • The best way to resolve this conflict would probably be to bail out workers and business owners. But to do that at a state level, governors need cash on hand; currently, most of them don’t have much. The federal government, which could help states in numerous ways, has done little to fill state coffers, and has let many of its most effective direct-aid programs expire without renewal.
  • If you make people safe and comfortable at home, it might be harder to make them risk their lives for minimum wage at McDonald’s during a pandemic.
  • However effective these kinds of robust monetary programs may be at keeping people fed, housed, and safe, they are generally not in line with the larger project of the American political establishment, which favors bolstering “job creators” instead of directly helping those who might end up working those jobs
  • Why can’t a governor or mayor just be honest? There’s no help coming from the Trump administration, the local coffers are bare, and as a result, concessions are being made to business owners who want workers in restaurants and employees in offices in order to white-knuckle it for as long as possible and with as many jobs intact as possible, even if hospitals start to fill up again. Saying so wouldn’t change the truth, but it would better equip people to evaluate their own safety in their daily life, and make better choices because of it.
  • Kirk Sell stopped me short. “Do you think it might be the end of their career, though?” she asked. “Probably.”
  • With people out of work and small businesses set up to fail en masse, America has landed on its current contradiction: Tell people it’s safe to return to bars and restaurants and spend money inside while following some often useless restrictions, but also tell them it’s unsafe to gather in their home, where nothing is for sale.
  • Transparency, Kirk Sell told me, would go a long way toward helping people evaluate new restrictions and the quality and intentions of their local leadership. “People aren’t sheep,” she said. “People act rationally with the facts that they have, but you have to provide an understanding of why these decisions are being made, and what kind of factors are being considered.”
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