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Javier E

Britain Tells Two Brexit Stories That Add Up to One Big Problem - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-to-one-big-problem-1533767980

brexit uk

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • To the governments of the other 27 European Union nations, the U.K. message is that failure to agree a Brexit deal would be a geopolitical calamity that could bring unimaginable risks to the Continent’s security. But to the British public, the message has been one of reassurance. The government insists that preparations are well under way to cope with any fallout should the talks fail: Brexiters have flooded the airwaves to drive home the message that no deal is no big deal.
  • In December’s Joint Report on the state of the negotiations, the British government accepted an obligation to pay €40 billion ($46.4 billion) to the EU in settlement of the U.K.’s outstanding financial commitments
  • if the U.K. leaves the EU with no agreement and refuses to pay its debts, it will become an international legal pariah, at least in the EU’s eyes. The EU will want to recover what it believes it is rightfully owed and will pursue its claims through international courts.
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  • Under such circumstances, it is hard to imagine how anything other than the barest minimum of agreements could be struck to avoid chaos on either side of the English Channel
  • Meanwhile the twin objectives that have informed British foreign policy for most of the past 200 years—the need to avoid uniting Europe against the U.K. and to preserve the unity of the West—will have been fatally undermined. No wonder the British government warns of geopolitical disaster.
  • The government would almost certainly have to arm itself with emergency powers, allowing it to issue decrees and suspend basic rights as it commandeered resources, creating a warlike political climate inflamed by national defiance.
  • the EU’s instinct will be to wait until the inevitable chaos brought the U.K. back to the table, as the introduction of capital controls did in Greece.
  • In 1914, a shot was fired in Sarajevo that within six weeks sparked World War I. Hopefully, nothing so grotesque will unfold this time. Nonetheless, a shot was fired in Britain two years ago whose consequences are only now starting to become clear and which the U.K. may be unable to prevent—unless someone finds a way to put the bullet back in the gun.
Javier E

Mark Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Emulate China's WeChat. Can It? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acebook-zuckerberg-wechat.html

facebook strategy

shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • WeChat users only see one or two ads a day in their Moment feeds. That’s because WeChat isn’t dependent on advertising for making money. It has a mobile payments system that has been widely adopted in China, which allows people to shop, play games, pay utility bills and order meal deliveries all from within the app. WeChat gets a commission from many of these services.
  • “WeChat has shown definitively that private messaging, especially the small groups, is the future,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University. “It is the uber utility of business and life. It has shown the path.”
  • WeChat, which has 1.1 billion monthly active users, shows that other models — particularly those based on payments and commerce — can support massive digital businesses. That has implications for Google, Twitter and many others, as well as Facebook
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  • On WeChat, those services are underpinned by its mobile payments system, WeChat Pay. Because payments is already tied into the messaging service, people can easily order meal deliveries, book hotels, hail ride-sharing cars and pay their bills. WeChat Pay itself has 900 million monthly active users.
  • People also use WeChat Pay to transfer money and to buy personal finance products. More than 100 million customers have purchased WeChat’s personal finance products, which managed over 500 billion yuan, or $74 billion, by the end of last September, Tencent has said. Its users can buy everything from bonds and insurance to money market funds through the app.
  • “He is renowned in China’s tech scene as an artist and philosopher, as well as for his fierce mission against anything that degrades user experience,”
  • In a four-hour speech earlier this year, he pondered the question of why there were not more ads on the messaging service, especially the opening-page ads that are the norm in many other Chinese mobile apps.
  • Mr. Zhang’s answer: Many Chinese spent a lot of time — about one third of their online time — on WeChat, he said. “If WeChat were a person, it would have to be your best friend so that you would be willing to spend so much time with it,” he said. “How could I post an ad on the face of your best friend? Every time you see it, you’ll have to watch an ad before you can talk to it.”
  • Tencent makes most of its money from online games so that it does not need to sell ads for revenue.
  • said Ivy Li, a venture capitalist at Seven Seas Partners in Menlo Park, Calif. “How comprehensive the surgery is going to be and whether the implementation will be twisted by all kinds of compromises is a big question.”
  • She added: “Facebook is trying to seek a balance between a public square and a private space in an increasingly polarizing society. The final result could be it will be abandoned by both.”
Javier E

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-analytica-trump-campaign.html

Big data data mining fb cybersecurity privacy social media

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”
  • “They want to fight a culture war in America,” he added. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”
  • But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.
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  • The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and “likes.”
  • “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do,” Mr. Grewal said. “No systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”Still, he added, “it’s a serious abuse of our rules.”
  • The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said.
  • Mr. Nix and his colleagues courted Mr. Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter Rebekah, who shared his conservative views. Mr. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Mr. Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
  • Mr. Wylie’s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.
  • But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult. Those were among the psychological traits the firm claimed would provide a uniquely powerful means of designing political messages.
  • Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from the their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew — a claim that has been disputed.
  • When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. The business covered the costs — more than $800,000 — and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, according to company emails and financial records.
  • He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested.Image
  • Mr. Wylie said the Facebook data was “the saving grace” that let his team deliver the models it had promised the Mercers.
  • “We wanted as much as we could get,” he acknowledged. “Where it came from, who said we could have it — we weren’t really asking.”
  • The firm was effectively a shell. According to the documents and former employees, any contracts won by Cambridge, originally incorporated in Delaware, would be serviced by London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, a British citizen who held dual appointments at Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Most SCL employees and contractors were Canadian, like Mr. Wylie, or European.
  • In a memo to Mr. Bannon, Ms. Mercer and Mr. Nix, the lawyer, then at the firm Bracewell & Giuliani, warned that Mr. Nix would have to recuse himself “from substantive management” of any clients involved in United States elections. The data firm would also have to find American citizens or green card holders, Mr. Levy wrote, “to manage the work and decision making functions, relative to campaign messaging and expenditures.”
  • In summer and fall 2014, Cambridge Analytica dived into the American midterm elections, mobilizing SCL contractors and employees around the country. Few Americans were involved in the work, which included polling, focus groups and message development for the John Bolton Super PAC, conservative groups in Colorado and the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican.
  • While Cambridge hired more Americans to work on the races that year, most of its data scientists were citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries, according to two former employees.
  • Under the guidance of Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016 and now the campaign manager for his 2020 re-election effort, Cambridge performed a variety of services, former campaign officials said. That included designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.
  • Mr. Grewal, the Facebook deputy general counsel, said in a statement that both Dr. Kogan and “SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”
  • But copies of the data still remain beyond Facebook’s control. The Times viewed a set of raw data from the profiles Cambridge Analytica obtained.
  • While Mr. Nix has told lawmakers that the company does not have Facebook data, a former employee said that he had recently seen hundreds of gigabytes on Cambridge servers, and that the files were not encrypted.
  • Mr. Nix is seeking to take psychographics to the commercial advertising market. He has repositioned himself as a guru for the digital ad age — a “Math Man,” he puts it. In the United States last year, a former employee said, Cambridge pitched Mercedes-Benz, MetLife and the brewer AB InBev, but has not signed them on.
  • Today, as Cambridge Analytica seeks to expand its business in the United States and overseas, Mr. Nix has mentioned some questionable practices. This January, in undercover footage filmed by Channel 4 News in Britain and viewed by The Times, he boasted of employing front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients around the world, and even suggested ways to entrap politicians in compromising situations.
  • Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew
Javier E

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html

facebook violence tribalism crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.
  • Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company
  • Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.
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  • A reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s descent into violence, based on interviews with officials, victims and ordinary users caught up in online anger, found that Facebook’s newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumor to killing.
  • Facebook officials, they say, ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact.
  • Sri Lankans say they see little evidence of change. And in other countries, as Facebook expands, analysts and activists worry they, too, may see violence.
  • As Facebook pushes into developing countries, it tends to be initially received as a force for good.In Sri Lanka, it keeps families in touch even as many work abroad. It provides for unprecedented open expression and access to information. Government officials say it was essential for the democratic transition that swept them into office in 2015.
  • where institutions are weak or undeveloped, Facebook’s newsfeed can inadvertently amplify dangerous tendencies. Designed to maximize user time on site, it promotes whatever wins the most attention. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, produce the highest engagement, and so proliferate.
  • n developing countries, Facebook is often perceived as synonymous with the internet and reputable sources are scarce, allowing emotionally charged rumors to run rampant. Shared among trusted friends and family members, they can become conventional wisdom.
  • “There needs to be some kind of engagement with countries like Sri Lanka by big companies who look at us only as markets,” he said. “We’re a society, we’re not just a market.”
  • Last year, in rural Indonesia, rumors spread on Facebook and WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging tool, that gangs were kidnapping local children and selling their organs. Some messages included photos of dismembered bodies or fake police fliers. Almost immediately, locals in nine villages lynched outsiders they suspected of coming for their children.
  • Near-identical social media rumors have also led to attacks in India and Mexico. Lynchings are increasingly filmed and posted back to Facebook, where they go viral as grisly tutorials.
  • One post declared, “Kill all Muslims, don’t even save an infant.” A prominent extremist urged his followers to descend on the city of Kandy to “reap without leaving an iota behind.”
  • Desperate, the researchers flagged the video and subsequent posts using Facebook’s on-site reporting tool.Though they and government officials had repeatedly asked Facebook to establish direct lines, the company had insisted this tool would be sufficient, they said. But nearly every report got the same response: the content did not violate Facebook’s standards.
  • “You report to Facebook, they do nothing,” one of the researchers, Amalini De Sayrah, said. “There’s incitements to violence against entire communities and Facebook says it doesn’t violate community standards.”
  • In government offices across town, officials “felt a sense of helplessness,” Sudarshana Gunawardana, the head of public information, recounted. Before Facebook, he said, officials facing communal violence “could ask media heads to be sensible, they could have their own media strategy.”
  • now it was as if his country’s information policies were set at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The officials rushed out statements debunking the sterilization rumors but could not match Facebook’s influence
  • where people do not feel they can rely on the police or courts to keep them safe, research shows, panic over a perceived threat can lead some to take matters into their own hands — to lynch.
  • Facebook’s most consequential impact may be in amplifying the universal tendency toward tribalism. Posts dividing the world into “us” and “them” rise naturally, tapping into users’ desire to belong.
  • Its gamelike interface rewards engagement, delivering a dopamine boost when users accrue likes and responses, training users to indulge behaviors that win affirmation
  • And because its algorithm unintentionally privileges negativity, the greatest rush comes by attacking outsiders: The other sports team. The other political party. The ethnic minority.
  • Mass media has long been used to mobilize mass violence. Facebook, by democratizing communication tools, gives anyone with a smartphone the ability to broadcast hate.
  • Facebook did not create Sri Lanka’s history of ethnic distrust any more than it created anti-Rohingya sentiment in Myanmar.
  • In India, Facebook-based misinformation has been linked repeatedly to religious violence, including riots in 2012 that left several dead, foretelling what has since become a wider trend.
  • “We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”
  • Mr. Kumarasinghe died on March 3, online emotions surged into calls for action: attend the funeral to show support. Sinhalese arrived by the busload, fanning out to nearby towns. Online, they migrated from Facebook to private WhatsApp groups, where they could plan in secret.
malonema1

New alarm among Republicans that Democrats could win big this year - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html

US politics

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A raft of retirements, difficulty recruiting candidates and President Trump’s continuing pattern of throwing his party off message have prompted new alarm among Republicans that they could be facing a Democratic electoral wave in November.
  • But the trends have continued, and perhaps worsened, since that briefing, with two more prominent Republican House members announcing plans to retire from vulnerable seats and a would-be recruit begging off a Senate challenge to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota despite pressure from Trump to run.
  • In the Camp David presentation, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) described scenarios to the president ranging from a bloodbath where Republicans lost the House “and lost it big,” in the words of one official, to an outcome in which they keep control while losing some seats. McCarthy outlined trends over recent decades for parties in power and spotlighted vulnerable Republican seats where Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Eight years ago, before the 2010 midterms swept the GOP to power, he had drafted a similar presentation with the opposite message for his party. Republicans hold the advantage of a historically favorable electoral map, with more House seats than ever benefiting from Republican-friendly redistricting and a Senate landscape that puts 26 Democratic seats in play, including 10 states that Trump won in 2016, and only eight Republican seats.
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  • At least 29 House seats held by Republicans will be open in November following announced retirements, a greater number for the majority party than in each of the past three midterm elections when control of Congress flipped.
  • Who knows what 2018 will be like? Nobody called 2016, right?” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the second-ranking Republican in that chamber. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to get elected and that Chuck Schumer was going to be the majority leader. And none of that turned out to be true.”
  • In private conversations, Trump has told advisers that he doesn’t think the 2018 election has to be as bad as others are predicting. He has referenced the 2002 midterms, when George W. Bush and Republicans fared better after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, these people said.
  • Trump continually reminds advisers that he remains popular in a number of states, including West Virginia, Montana and North Dakota, according to aides. But slow fundraising and anemic candidate recruitment have caused tensions between the White House and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, White House advisers said. Still, two people with direct knowledge of that relationship said it has improved considerably in recent months. One person said “there is an active effort to professionalize the operation,” and “coordination has improved.”
  • White House officials said they expect a full plunge in upcoming weeks into a special House race in Pennsylvania, with trips from Trump, Vice President Pence and Cabinet members. The race has taken on a larger-than-life role in the White House because officials want to stem the tide of the losses they suffered last year in Virginia and Alabama.
  • But maintaining that message can be a challenge, as the president showed this week when his vulgar comments about some developing countries sparked international outrage. Dave Hansen, a political adviser to Love, the Utah congresswoman, said such conflicts are unavoidable during the Trump presidency. “It’s certainly not like running with Ronald Reagan, that’s for sure,” Hansen said. “What a candidate has to do in a situation like this is, you can’t be all in for the guy. Basically, you support him when you think he’s right and oppose him when you think he’s wrong.”
zachcutler

The tumultuous 2016 campaign is in a sudden limbo - CNNPolitics.com - 1 views

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

politics US campaign limbo culture policy

shared by zachcutler on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The tumultuous 2016 campaign is in a sudden limbo
  • Donald Trump and his team, facing widening deficits in the polls, insist the Republican nominee can still win. But he and his allies seem to be increasingly contemplating the possibility of defeat.
  • With just over two weeks remaining before Election Day, much of the drama is shifting to Capitol Hill, where anxious Republican leaders -- estranged from their nominee -- can do little more than fret about how bad it could get. Trump's stumbling campaign threatens to wipe out the GOP's majority in the Senate -- and maybe even the House.
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  • A new ABC News national poll released Sunday had Clinton 12 points up on Trump, clinching the support of 50% of likely voters nationwide. CNN's Poll of Polls gives the Democratic nominee a nine-point edge. The mounting evidence seems to be fueling a realization in the Trump camp that he may be too far behind to catch up — with hundreds of thousands of ballots already cast in some early voting states.
  • "I never want to look back," he said. "I never want to say that about myself."
  • "Now even though we're doing pretty good in the polls, I don't believe in the polls anymore," he said.Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway admitted the campaign's struggling position Sunday, but was loathe to give Clinton any credit for her lead.
  • 'We are behind'
  • He's showing that he will continue to lash out, is happy to settle scores with GOP critics like House Speaker Paul Ryan while he still can, and will use the media spotlight to wage his own personal battles before the American people
  • But Trump characteristically stole his own headlines, threatening to sue women who accused him of sexual assault after the election and lambasting the media for rigging the race against him.
  • Speaking with Jake Tapper Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Conway declined to say if she knew that her boss would weave such a personally focused tirade into his Gettysburg speech.
  • "He wasn't off message," she said. "That is his message."Increasingly, Trump supporters are forced to cherry pick polls that show their candidate competitive, or to place their faith in crowd sizes and enthusiasm on the trail, metrics that often seem attractive to lagging campaigns.
  • "I think a lot of folks think that the polls don't reflect reality," Vance said on CNN's "Smerconish" on Saturday. "If Trump loses, as the polls tell us he will, I do think a lot of folks are going to be very surprised."
  • "I do think there is a Brexit out there ... I am almost positive there is a Brexit out there. I don't know how big it is, I think that remains to be seen," Andre Bauer, the former Republican Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina said on CNN on Thursday night.
  • CNN's Jeff Zeleny reported on Sunday that Clinton had already reached out to some Republican senators, including allies from her days on Capitol Hill, saying she hopes to work with them to govern. And in another sign the campaign is looking to the future, her running mate, Tim Kaine, named Wayne Turnage as his transition director.
  • "We don't want to get ahead of skis here, so we're just as focused on Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, other states as we have ever been," Mook told Tapper. "We have a very clear message to our supporters: Let's double down, nose to the grindstone, and keep working."
Javier E

How Jeff Bezos' iPhone X Was Hacked - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jeff-bezos-hack-iphone.html

privacy surveillance hacking phone

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The hack also exposed how popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp have vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
  • In October, WhatsApp sued the NSO Group in federal court, claiming that NSO’s spy technology was used on its service to target journalists and human rights activists. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has patched the flaw that the malware used.
  • “This case really highlights the threats that are posed by a lawless and unaccountable private surveillance industry,
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  • smaller companies also sell simpler versions of the software for as little as $10, allowing people to snoop on their spouses or children.
  • Malware that was created for the explicit purpose of prying into private online communications, also known as spyware, has become a $1 billion industry.
  • The May 2018 message that contained the innocuous-seeming video file, with a tiny 14-byte chunk of malicious code, came out of the blue, according to the report and additional notes obtained by The New York Times. In the 24 hours after it was sent, Mr. Bezos’ iPhone began sending large amounts of data, which increased approximately 29,000 percent over his normal data usage
  • The FTI report was not definitive about the hack, but said it had “medium to high confidence” that the message from the prince’s WhatsApp account was the culprit. In notes to the report, FTI said it was still attempting a more thorough analysis of the iPhone, including by jailbreaking it, or bypassing Apple’s control system on the phone.
  • the episode was “a wake-up call to the international community as a whole that we are facing a technology that is very difficult to track, extremely powerful and effective, and that is completely unregulated.”
  • She said Mr. Bezos’ experience should sound alarms because even with his wealth and resources, it took months of investigation by specialists to figure out what had happened — a luxury few others have.“It basically means that we are all extremely vulnerable,”
brookegoodman

Coronavirus: 'Nature is sending us a message', says UN environment chief | World news |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...sage-says-un-environment-chief

crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis, according to the UN’s environment chief, Inger Andersen.
  • Leading scientists also said the Covid-19 outbreak was a “clear warning shot”, given that far more deadly diseases existed in wildlife, and that today’s civilisation was “playing with fire”. They said it was almost always human behaviour that caused diseases to spill over into humans.
  • They also urged authorities to put an end to live animal markets – which they called an “ideal mixing bowl” for disease – and the illegal global animal trade.
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  • “Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people,” she told the Guardian, explaining that 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.“Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans.”
  • “There are too many pressures at the same time on our natural systems and something has to give,” she added. “We are intimately interconnected with nature, whether we like it or not. If we don’t take care of nature, we can’t take care of ourselves. And as we hurtle towards a population of 10 billion people on this planet, we need to go into this future armed with nature as our strongest ally.”
  • Human infectious disease outbreaks are rising and in recent years there have been Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Rift Valley fever, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), West Nile virus and Zika virus all cross from animals to humans.
  • Cunningham said other diseases from wildlife had much higher fatality rates in people, such as 50% for Ebola and 60%-75% for Nipah virus, transmitted from bats in south Asia. “Although, you might not think it at the moment, we’ve probably got a bit lucky with [Covid-19],” he said. “So I think we should be taking this as a clear warning shot. It’s a throw of the dice.”
  • “The animals have been transported over large distances and are crammed together into cages. They are stressed and immunosuppressed and excreting whatever pathogens they have in them,” he said. “With people in large numbers in the market and in intimate contact with the body fluids of these animals, you have an ideal mixing bowl for [disease] emergence. If you wanted a scenario to maximise the chances of [transmission], I couldn’t think of a much better way of doing it.”
  • Aaron Bernstein, at the Harvard School of Public Health in the US, said the destruction of natural places drives wildlife to live close to people and that climate change was also forcing animals to move: “That creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts.”
  • The billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is another part of the problem, said John Scanlon, the former secretary general of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
  • The Covid-19 crisis may provide an opportunity for change, but Cunningham is not convinced it will be taken: “I thought things would have changed after Sars, which was a massive wake up call – the biggest economic impact of any emerging disease to that date,” he said.
Javier E

Italy, Pandemic's New Epicenter, Has Lessons for the World - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-center-lessons.html

politics pandemic italy

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Governments beyond Italy are now in danger of following the same path, repeating familiar mistakes and inviting similar calamity. And unlike Italy, which navigated uncharted territory for a Western democracy, other governments have less room for excuses.
  • But tracing the record of their actions shows missed opportunities and critical missteps.
  • In the critical early days of the outbreak, Mr. Conte and other top officials sought to down play the threat, creating confusion and a false sense of security that allowed the virus to spread.
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  • They blamed Italy’s high number of infections on aggressive testing of people without symptoms in the north, which they argued only created hysteria and tarnished the country’s image abroad.
  • Even once the Italian government considered a universal lockdown necessary to defeat the virus, it failed to communicate the threat powerfully enough to persuade Italians to abide by the rules, which seemed riddled with loopholes.
  • Still, he acknowledged that the health minister had struggled to persuade his government colleagues to move more quickly and that the difficulties of navigating Italy’s division of powers between Rome and the regions resulted in a fragmented chain of command and inconsistent messages.
  • For the coronavirus, 10 days can be a lifetime.
  • Politicians across the spectrum worried about the economy and feeding the country, and found it difficult to accept their impotence in the face of the virus.
  • Most importantly, Italy looked at the example of China, Ms. Zampa said, not as a practical warning, but as a “science fiction movie that had nothing to do with us.” And when the virus exploded, Europe, she said, “looked at us the same way we looked at China.”
  • A day later, on March 9, when the positive cases reached 9,172 and the death toll climbed to 463, Mr. Conte toughened the restrictions and extended them nationally.
  • But he also had not had any direct contacts with China, and experts suspect he contracted the virus from another European, meaning Italy did not have an identifiable patient zero or a traceable source of contagion that could help it contain the virus.
  • The virus had already been active in Italy for weeks by that time, experts now say, passed by people without symptoms and often mistaken for a flu
  • “Who we call ‘Patient One’ was probably ‘Patient 200,’ ” said Fabrizio Pregliasco, an epidemiologist.
  • Mr. Fontana, who had been pressing the central government for tougher action, agreed. He said that the mixed messages from Rome and the easing of restrictions had led Italians to believe “that everything was a joke, and they kept living as they used to.”
  • “They were convinced that the situation was less serious and they did not want to hurt our economy too much,”
  • the nation became divided between those who saw the threat and those who didn’t.
  • some regional governors independently ordered people coming from the newly locked-down area to self quarantine. Others didn’t.
  • Mr. Ricciardi said Italy had the bad luck of having a super spreader in a densely populated and dynamic area who went to the hospital not once, but twice, infecting hundreds of people, including doctors and nurses.“He was incredibly active,” Mr. Ricciardi said.
  • Italy is still paying the price of those early mixed messages by scientists and politicians. The people who have died in staggering numbers recently — more than 2,300 in the last four days — were mostly infected during the confusion of a week or two ago.
  • Roberto Burioni, a prominent virologist at the San Raffaele University in Milan, said that people had felt safe to go about their usual routines and he attributed the spike in cases last week to “that behavior.”
  • Leaders in the north are desperate for the government to crack down harder.
  • On Friday, Mr. Fontana complained that the 114 troops the government deployed were insignificant, and that at least 1,000 should be sent. On Saturday, he closed public offices, work sites and banned jogging. He said in an interview that the government needed to stop messing around and “apply rigid measures.”
  • “At least this slows down the virus’ speed,’’ Mr. Zaia said, arguing that testing helped identify potentially contagious people without symptoms. ‘‘And slowing down the virus’ speed allows the hospitals to breathe.’’
Javier E

10,000 UK coronavirus deaths: don't forget that this was preventable | Nesrine Malik | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...preventable-government-account

uk pandemic response accountability government responsibility

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The UK is now surpassing the apocalyptic tolls we fixated on just two weeks ago. The same tragedies are unfolding across our country
  • Questions over his responsibility for the national carnage – his complacent messaging over shaking hands with the afflicted, his delay in shutting down the country, his “herd immunity” policy, the ongoing lack of testing, of equipment and of ventilators – were not asked.
  • Not only did the UK have the experience of Italy play out before the virus hit its own shores, illustrating clearly the measures that needed to be taken, it had explicit warnings from Italians spelling out the pitfalls to be avoided.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Every report showing the scale of the crisis should be framed in the language of accountability and anchored in the premise of preventability.
  • With all the benefits of hindsight, the government dragged its feet, wasted precious time and infused the issue with a sense of British exceptionalism: drastic measures need not be taken because in the UK things will somehow be different.
  • Johnson’s illness was folded into a larger, editorialised narrative about his martyrdom and indefatigability, turning his sickness and recovery into a virtue of character
  • But the sense of distress with which the Italian scenario was reported and received in the UK is strangely absent. Missing too is the urgent need to understand why this is happening.
  • The terminology of war did much of the work. The virus was framed in the context of an enemy to be fought in the trenches, rather than a series of public health policy failures
  • The Queen’s message, a call for noble resolve, further generalised the crisis into an act of God that we must weather by mobilising the powers of the British national character. It’s now a matter of grit, of reaching into our reserves to see us through until we meet again.
  • Despite the extent of the crisis, many doctors and nurses fear speaking on the record
  • I have received WhatsApp messages from NHS staff too afraid even to email them in case the paper trail leads to disciplinary action – detailing horrors of an NHS stretched thin, of ill-protected staff doing 36-hour shifts. They will be clapped every week, as the government claims to champion the NHS, yet gagged if they dare raise concerns
  • . It’s hard, as we lock down, to nurture an outrage that is based on decisions in the past when the loss of life is happening today – more so when the government has stealthily removed itself from the picture and shifted the responsibility entirely on to the public, responding to any concerns by robotically repeating the mantra: “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”
  • Relocate the pain and recall that this need not have happened. Ten thousand people, in UK hospitals alone, have now died.
Javier E

Government Needs to Get Its Coronavirus Message Straight - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-message-straight-11585694702

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Eight hours after President Trump made his off-the-cuff remarks about an “enforced” quarantine for the region, he walked them back. But the episode is illustrativ
  • They have been holed up at home, waiting patiently for public officials to explain what exactly is going on and when the situation will improve.
  • At a time when it has never been easier to communicate with the public, and perhaps never more important to do so, the people in charge of addressing the coronavirus crisis seem incapable of speaking with anything close to a united voice
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • People want to feel safe. They expect those in charge to be competent and working in unison, even in an election year. And they want to know how to tell when we’ve turned a corner. Will it be a decline in the infection rate? The hospitalization rate? The mortality rate?
  • Why can’t our public officials—with a few exceptions—spell out these answers with any clarity or consistency?
  • How tough can it be for the politicians and their public health advisers to get on the same page before sounding off on, say, the promise and efficacy of repurposing antimalarial drugs to fight the pandemic?
  • Can’t the president and the governors consult on major announcements in private before they go public in a manner that sends residents of three states into a panic? And must officials lay bare their differences each evening on cable news?
  • We can’t even get a straight answer from the government on whether we should be covering our faces in public
  • it would help tremendously if the White House and its public-health experts could improve their messaging. We’re already on pins and needles. Don’t make it worse. In the short run, beating back the virus will require hundreds of millions of Americans to engage in certain unusual behaviors voluntarily. And the element of trust goes a long way toward getting people to cooperate.
Javier E

When it comes to Facebook, Russia's $100,000 is worth more than you think - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-aace-04b862b2b3f3_story.html

facebook ads influence election 2016 russia echo chamber division

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • . Because of its millions of users and the site’s focus on sharing, Facebook has a news reach that can transcend that of traditional media such as print or television. And that reach comes oddly cheap. One hundred dollars in Facebook ads could deliver a buyer’s message to thousands of viewers, whose further sharing would allow it to ripple out exponentially.
  • Now, turn that into $100,000 and inject it with malice. And imagine being able to target this message with minute precision: say, telling black voters in swing counties that Hillary Clinton was an incorrigible racist, or enraging white, male gun lovers with her supposed plans to roll back the Second Amendment. Imagine how quickly such misinformation could spread and metastasize.
  • And imagine no one knowing it was happening.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Facebook’s own chief security officer, Alex Stamos, shed some light on what those purchases might have looked like.
  • the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”
  • In other words, the United States is so caught up in partisanship that we’ve lost our ability to keep a level head, and the whole world knows it — including our adversaries.
  • Americans can more consistently be relied upon to share wild-eyed rumors than to think critically on social issues. Basic civic debates have become so inflammatory that foreign actors can use them as cattle prods, sending us running mindlessly to whichever side we’re told is safe. We’re easily distracted from real facts and flock to news that confirms our biases. While the echo-chamber effect has been known for some time, the fact that it has become so dependable as a way to divide us is damning.
  • Russia spent at least $100,000 on Facebook ads because of Americans’ known susceptibility to partisan division, our willingness to outsource the work of analysis to social-media algorithms and our tendency to not think too hard about what we see. No, the money isn’t minor. But the real problem is us.
anonymous

Growing number of Southern Baptist women question roles - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...s-limits-womens-roles-76651536

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Emily Snook is the daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor. She met her husband, also a pastor, while they attended a Southern Baptist universityYet the 39-year-old Oklahoma woman now finds herself wondering if it’s time to leave the nation's largest Protestant denomination, in part because of practices and attitudes that limit women’s roles.
  • Among the millions of women belonging to churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, there are many who have questioned the faith’s gender-role doctrine and more recently urged a stronger response to disclosures of sexual abuse perpetrated by SBC clergy.
  • popular Bible teacher Beth Moore said she no longer considered herself Southern Baptist. Moore, perhaps the best-known evangelical woman in the world, had drawn the ire of some SBC conservatives for speaking out against Donald Trump in 2016 and suggesting the denomination had problems with sexism.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Yet she is among a number of SBC women publicly sharing their dismay about sex abuse and the vitriol directed at Moore.“Beth has been scorned, mocked, and slandered while doing exactly what the denomination has determined she could and should do: be a woman teaching other women,” Prior said via email.
  • “If these women leave, it won’t be because Beth left. It will be because the men the Baptist Faith and Message says are supposed to lead in Christ-like ways have failed to do so.”
  • espouses male leadership in the home and the church and says a wife “is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” It specifies that women cannot be pastors, citing the Apostle Paul’s biblical admonition, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to remain quiet.”
  • There are “painful, disorienting double-messages for women in the SBC,” she said. “You’re created in the image of God, but if you experience God leading you to be pastor, you get told there are limits to what you can do — sit down, go home, be quiet. There’s kind of a crisis where women feel shut down and dismissed and attacked.”
  • “Is it about protecting women — or is it really about protecting your power and covering up sexual abuse in the church?” she asked. “That’s caused a crisis of faith among a lot of women and men.”
  • “There are a lot of women who will never have the scope and reach of a Beth Moore but believed they had something to contribute because of her,” McCoy said. “It’s those women who look at the online vitriol and feel discouraged before they even begin, thinking, ‘If this is what they say about Beth Moore, what will they say about me?’”
  • “I have lost count of the number of times I have seen evangelical men on social media repeating that awful command ‘Go home’ to Beth Moore,” she said via email. “I wonder if they realize when they say those two words with such glee, they are sending a message to all women that our giftings and opinions and ideas may not be all that welcome in our denomination.”
  • “He explained to me, Julia, you can’t be a head pastor for the same reason I can’t have babies. That’s not God’s design,” Sadler said.Sadler, 33, directs a program at her father’s megachurch called Next Generation that develops ministries for teens, college students, single young adults and young moms. She says there are about 1,500 participants, with a 60%-40% female-male split.
  • Katie McCoy, a professor of theology in women’s studies in the undergraduate branch of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, tells her female students there are meaningful roles they can play in the SBC even if pastoring is off-limits. But she says many Southern Baptist women, including students of hers, were unsettled by the criticism of Moore.
  • Brown sees a link between the abuse and the doctrine that women should submit to male leadership.“It sets up interpersonal and institutional dynamics that help to foster abuse and cover-ups,” she said. “The SBC’s pervasive misogyny inculcates attitudes that, at best, are limiting of female potential, and at worst, are disrespectful and dehumanizing.”
  • In some cases, entire congregations have walked away. Joel Bowman, pastor at Temple of Faith Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, recently abandoned plans to move the congregation into the SBC fold. Bowman, who is African American, had differences with SBC leaders on racism issues and also gender roles — his wife, Nannette, is an associate minster at the church.
anonymous

Prosecutors Share New Evidence In Capitol Riot Conspiracy Case : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eper-conspiracy-to-storm-capit

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The founder of the Oath Keepers militia had a 97-second phone call with a senior member of the group who minutes later took part in a military-style "stack" formation with other Oath Keepers to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to federal prosecutors.
  • The allegation emerged in court papers the Justice Department filed overnight in the case against 10 alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers facing conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol riot.
  • Prosecutors allege that the call, along with a series of text messages in an encrypted chat group called "DC OP: Jan 6 21," amount to "substantial evidence" of a conspiracy to try to stop Congress' certification of the Electoral College count.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The filing sheds more light on the actions on Jan. 6 of Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009. Rhodes is only identified as "Person One" in the document but has been identified as the group's founder in previous court papers.
  • Rhodes has not been charged in connection with the Capitol insurrection, but the latest court document and previous statements by prosecutors suggest investigators are closely scrutinizing his actions on and around Jan. 6.
  • In the latest filing, prosecutors allege that Rhodes called Florida Oath Keeper leader Kelly Meggs at 2:32 p.m. on Jan. 6, just as Meggs and several of his associates were getting into a "stack" formation to push up the steps of the Capitol.
  • It is not clear what the two men spoke about, but prosecutors note that around six minutes later, the militia members who had coalesced into a stack formation "forcibly" entered the Capitol "by pushing past just opened and severely damaged Capitol building doors."
  • The latest government filing was made to oppose the pretrial release of one of the 10 defendants in the case, Jessica Watkins, who the government says was the leader of an Ohio militia and member of the Oath Keepers.
  • Prosecutors allege that Watkins was in a chat group on the encrypted messaging app Signal called "DC OP: Jan 6 21" with Meggs, Rhodes and two other Oath Keepers who have been charged over the Capitol riot.
  • The government says the group used the chat to talk about what weapons to bring to Washington, D.C., about using handheld radios to communicate on Jan. 6 and about the existence of so-called quick reaction forces waiting outside Washington with weapons in case "of worst case scenarios."
  • In the Signal chat on the day of the riot, prosecutors say shortly after 1 p.m. Rhodes messaged the group: "All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They've had enough."
  • Prosecutors say around 2:15 p.m., one of the chat participants told the group that ground had been taken at the Capitol and "we need to regroup any members who are not on mission," an apparent reference to Oath Keepers who were providing "security" in Washington during the Trump rally.
  • Around 2:32 p.m., the government says, Rhodes "exchanged a 97 second call with 'stack' member and Florida Oath Keepers leader, Kelly Meggs, as Meggs, Watkins and the rest of the stack embedded themselves among insurgents trying to force open the east side Capitol building double doors that officers were desperately trying to keep shut."
  • The government argues that evidence supports the theory that the defendants stormed the Capitol "with the shared objective of using force to upend the transition of presidential power."
ethanshilling

China's Plan to Win in a Post-Pandemic World - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...national-peoples-congress.html

politics economics china

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • China unveiled a road map for cementing its rise in a post-Covid world as it opened one of its biggest political events of the year on Friday, casting its success against the coronavirus as evidence of the superiority of its top-down leadership while warning of threats at home and abroad.
  • The message on Friday was one of optimism about the strength of its economy and the solidarity of its people, and of struggle against an array of challenges: a hostile global environment, demographic crises at home and resistance to its rule of Hong Kong.
  • According to the plan, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, will be amended to change the process of selecting the territory’s chief executive and the legislature.
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  • The changes will amount to a new electoral process with “Hong Kong characteristics,” Wang Chen, a Politburo member who specializes in legal matters, said in a speech.
  • Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 on the promise that it would be accorded a high degree of autonomy for 50 years. But “Beijing’s full grip on power in Hong Kong may happen well before 2047,” said Diana Fu, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
  • The government promised economic growth of “over 6 percent,” a relatively modest target by the standards of China’s pre-pandemic expansion but a big turnabout from last year and a signal of its commitment to keeping the world’s second-largest economy humming.
  • The forecast indicates that China expects a strong rebound after the pandemic brought the country’s economy to a standstill for several months last year.
  • The spending increases over the past two decades, which have given China the world’s second-largest military budget today, have paid for a modernization and expansion program aimed at challenging American military dominance in the Pacific, especially in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.
  • Strengthening that message will be a major focus for Mr. Xi as he looks ahead to two important political events. In July, the party will celebrate the centenary of its founding.
  • As China’s rivalry over science and technology with the United States and other countries remains at a boil, Beijing is digging deep into its pockets in a bid for victory.
  • Just over a year after the coronavirus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, Beijing also pledged to increase resources to guard against emerging infectious diseases and biosafety risks.
  • The Communist Party’s latest five-year plan specifically calls for the construction of a “Polar Silk Road,” presumably aimed at helping China better capitalize on new energy sources and faster shipping routes in the Arctic.
  • China’s military budget is set to rise by around 6.9 percent this year, a slight increase from last year. As overall government spending is projected to decline slightly, the People’s Liberation Army is still being funded robustly.
  • As countries continue to grapple with the pandemic, the party has doubled down on the message that China’s political model of strong, centralized leadership is superior to the chaos of liberal democracies.
  • The government addressed concerns about China’s aging population and shrinking labor force by announcing pension reforms and gradual changes to the official retirement age
  • On Friday, the government announced plans to build a system to support “family development” and strengthen marriage and family counseling services.
  • “Fully implement the party’s basic policy on religious work,” read a draft of the five-year plan. “Continue to pursue the sinicization of China’s religions and actively guide religions so that they can be compatible with socialist society.”
hannahcarter11

Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...over-covid-19-vaccine-strategy

democrats vaccine Black community minorities

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Publicly, House Democrats are largely united behind a simple message surrounding COVID-19 vaccines: Get one as soon as you can and take whichever one is offered.   
  • Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiGOP senator applauds restaurant stimulus money after voting against relief bill McCarthy calls on Pelosi to return Capitol to pre-pandemic operations Jayapal asks for ethics investigation into Boebert, Gosar, Brooks MORE (D-Calif.) has sided with those Black Caucus leaders, arguing on a recent conference call that underserved communities, including Black and brown populations, should get to pick which vaccine they receive, according to sources on the call.  
  • Rep. Kim SchrierKimberly (Kim) Merle SchrierThe Hill's Morning Report - Presented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation - At 50 days in charge, Democrats hail American Rescue Plan as major win Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Democrats point fingers on whether Capitol rioters had inside help MORE (D-Wash.), a pediatrician, issued a stern warning to her colleagues that demanding choice would not only buck the advice of public health experts and muddle the Democrats’ vaccine message, it would also heighten the the doubts of many Americans already skeptical about taking vaccines — doubts that threaten the arrival of herd immunity and a return to social normalcy.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The Democrats’ message, Schrier said, should be clear and simple: All vaccines are good. And the best thing American can do to protect themselves and their loved ones is to get a shot.
  • Pelosi spokesman Henry Connelly said the Speaker was simply reflecting concerns in her diverse caucus about whether minority communities were being treated equitably in the aggressive push to vaccinate all Americans.
  • That disparity has been attributed, in part, to the fact that the earlier Moderna and Pfizer vaccines each require two shots and colder refrigeration, complicating storage and distribution. That’s created additional barriers for getting the vaccine to poorer, historically underserved populations and rural communities.
  • Black people are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white people and nearly two times more likely to die from the disease; Hispanics are more than three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than whites and 2.3 times more likely to die. 
  • White people have been vaccinated for COVID-19 at two times the rate of Black people, according to a New York Times analysis. The figures are worse for Hispanics. 
  • The disagreement among Democrats comes during a pivotal moment in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic as states like Texas and Mississippi end their mask mandates and lift restrictions on businesses, and health experts worry about a surge in cases driven by COVID-19 variants.
  • Because the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot and regular refrigeration levels, some officials like New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) have ordered that shipments of that vaccine be prioritized for harder-to-reach Black and brown communities. 
  • But while Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an overall efficacy of about 95 percent in preventing moderate to severe disease, that number for the Johnson & Johnson version is just 66 percent — though experts point out the J&J vaccine was being tested after more contagious variants had begun spreading in the U.S., unlike the Pfizer and Moderna versions. 
  • That's led to some in those minority communities voicing concerns in recent days that they are being given a less-effective vaccine than more affluent, white communities.
  • Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), another CBC member, noted that those suspicions have historic roots, pointing to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — a deadly federal research project that targeted poor Black people in rural Alabama in 1930s — as evidence of the "painful history" of biomedical mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. 
  • Despite such reservations, the broad consensus in the caucus appears to favor efforts to maximize vaccinations in the shortest possible time, regardless which shot is available in a given community.
  • On Wednesday, Kelly is set to join Rep. Joyce BeattyJoyce Birdson BeattyDemocrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Black Caucus backs Biden's pick to head DOJ Civil Rights Division Sole GOP vote on House police reform bill says he 'accidentally pressed the wrong voting button' MORE (D-Ohio), head of the Black Caucus, in an online forum with medical experts designed to educate minority communities on best vaccine practices. 
  • Rep. Anthony BrownAnthony Gregory BrownOvernight Defense: Pentagon chief to press for Manchin's support on Colin Kahl | House Dems seek to limit transfer of military-grade gear to police Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy 140 lawmakers call for Biden administration to take 'comprehensive' approach to Iran MORE (D-Md.) said officials should monitor the distribution of vaccines to identify “patterns” that might indicate prejudices in the dispensation. But he’s also encouraging all of his constituents to get whatever vaccine is available first, and he highlighted the advantages of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, particularly in hard-to-reach populations like the homeless. 
Javier E

All The Things You Never Even Knew You Wanted To Know About Neil Postman - NeilPostman.org - 0 views

neilpostman.org

psychology social media technology language bias postman Culture

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • here are some Big Ideas that have stuck out to me:
  • The medium is the message. Borrowing from McLuhan, he explained that every medium — TV, radio, typography, oral transmission — changes and biases the message itself
  • The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Video tends to bias towards the “peek-a-book world”: trivial content that vanishes in seconds, constantly flickering images, yet the viewer has a hard time turning away no matter the subject… because the medium is just so darn entertaining
  • Education ≠ entertainment
  • School is about asking questions; TV is about passive consumption. School is about the development of language; TV demands attention to images.
  • TV is always fun and entertaining; serious education is not.
  • by equating education with entertainment children would never learn the rigorous of serious schooling.
  • Subjects should be taught as history. “Every teacher,” Postman said, “must be a history teacher.” Every subject has a fascinating history.
  • To teach a subject without the history of how it happened “is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product,” he said. “It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.
  • To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots
  • Fear Huxley’s future, not Orwell’s. Everyone is worried about Big Brother… but we should really fear ourselves. We live in a society where we can spend hours on devices entertaining ourselves.
  • We can amuse ourselves to death.
  • How we talk is how we think. “Any significant change in our ways of talking can lead to a change in point of view.”
  • The words we use convey meaning and if you can convince others to use your words, perspectives can shift.
  • Technology is a doubled-edged sword. Technology giveth and taketh away.
  • The printing press allowed us to codify and pass down knowledge reliability but in exchange we gave up our memories.
  • Mobile phones gave us constant communication but now we’re always distracted and never alone.
  • What should I read first?
  • You should start with Amusing Ourselves to Death:
  • The foreword is brilliant. It’s short, here’s an excerpt:
  • We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
  • But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
  • Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.
  • But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
  • What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books
  • Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism
  • Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
  • Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture
  • As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
  • In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
  • In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
rerobinson03

Justice Dept. Links Oath Keepers and Proud Boys Ahead of Capitol Riot - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-proud-boys-capitol-riot.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Leaders of the Oath Keepers militia and the far-right group the Proud Boys were in communication in the weeks before the Capitol riot and appear to have coordinated some plans for the day of the attack, prosecutors said in court papers.
  • From the start of the investigation, agents and prosecutors have focused on the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, if for no other reason than the two groups both sent large contingents of members to the Capitol. The organizations have a history of working and appearing together at right-wing street events dating to the early days of the Trump administration.
  • According to the messages, Mr. Meggs had already been in touch with a leader of the Proud Boys whose name was redacted in the papers. Apparently expecting a conflict with the antifascist activists known as antifa, the two men had devised a plan to catch their left-wing adversaries in a kind of pincer move on the streets. “We will have the proud boys get in front of them,” Mr. Meggs wrote. “The cops will get between antifa and proud boys. We will come in behind antifa and beat the hell out of them.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The new disclosure about the links between two extremist groups was contained in a motion filed late Thursday night by prosecutors seeking to keep Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, in jail before his trial. Prosecutors cited several of Mr. Meggs’s private Facebook messages in which he told others that as many as 100 Oath Keepers planned to be in Washington for a rally in January answering a call by President Donald J. Trump.“He called us all to Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” Mr. Meggs wrote on Dec. 22. “Sir yes Sir!!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC.”
  • This week, The New York Times published an article saying that federal prosecutors were weighing sedition charges against some of the Oath Keepers arrested in connection with the Capitol attack — a rare crime that has not been successfully prosecuted in more than 20 years. The article came on the heels of an unusual interview that Michael R. Sherwin, the prosecutor who until recently was leading the riot inquiry, gave to “60 Minutes” in which he said that evidence obtained by the government investigators almost certainly meets the bar needed to file sedition charges.
  • In a separate filing issued on Wednesday, prosecutors revealed evidence that two of Mr. Meggs’s co-defendants in the Oath Keepers case, Jessica Watkins and Donovan Crowl — both Ohio residents — swapped messages on Facebook just days after the Capitol attack, discussing a “bugout plan” if then-President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. actually took office.
anonymous

In rare joint message, top U.S. military leaders condemn Capitol riot | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...emn-capitol-riot-idUSKBN29H2WF

usmilitary riot

shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the uniformed leaders of the military branches, on Tuesday put out a rare message to service members saying the violent riots last week were an assault on America’s constitutional process and against the law.
  • There has also been a renewed focus on extremism within the U.S. military after the Capitol storming.
  • “If you are serving in uniform and think it was something else, I would encourage (you) to sit down and read the constitution that you swore an oath to support and defend,”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • U.S. officials said Milley had not commented on last week’s events because he wanted to stay out of politics.The silence was in sharp contrast to June, when Milley made a controversial walk to a church with Trump after law enforcement officers backed by National Guard troops used tear-inducing chemicals and rubber bullets to clear the area of peaceful protesters.
anonymous

CDC Director Robert Redfield Defends Pandemic Response : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...about-to-be-in-the-worst-of-it

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  • Next week marks one year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first coronavirus case in the United States.Dr. Robert Redfield, the outgoing CDC director, has been heading the federal public health agency's response to the pandemic from the start.Redfield's departure on Wednesday, when President-elect Joe Biden will usher in a new administration, comes as a record surge in COVID-19 cases is sweeping across the country. The U.S. has far surpassed all other nations with more than 23 million virus-related cases and more than 391,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.But, even as the pandemic enters its deadliest stage yet, Redfield told NPR on Friday that the country is "about to be in the worst" months of the crisis.
  • When asked if the White House interfered with the CDC's work, Redfield said no. "There was review and comments by different agencies within the White House," he said. "But at the end of the day, the CDC published the guidance that we believe is the most important for the American public."
  • Why has the U.S. done so much worse than the rest of the world?I think this virus has a unique ability to have differential pathogenesis in different people. And what it really does is it exploits the underlying health condition of the individual it infects.
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  • But in terms of how the U.S. has responded, in terms of how the CDC has responded ... are you able to defend the Trump administration's record on this as anything other than a catastrophic failure?Well, I'm actually very proud of the response that CDC has done. I think if I have one criticism that I do believe is significant is the importance of consistency and unity of message.
  • Last September, you testified before a Senate panel that masks were an effective tool to combat spread. Also, that a vaccine would not be widely available to the general public until summer or fall of this year, 2021. And a few hours later, the president came out, gave a press conference and contradicted you on both points. He said you were confused. Were you confused?No. I stand by my comments that masks are extremely effective and what I was trying to point out — if you had a vaccine, it was 50% effective and you were the half that it didn't work in, your mask is your best shot.
  • The gold standard for the nation's public health — has been tarnished." How would you respond to that?That's just not true. The men and women at CDC are highly respected across this nation and around the world. Clearly, there's no doubt that the lack of reinforcement and support from some individuals in the administration of the public health message had impact.
  • So when the president came out and contradicted you and said, "[Redfield is] confused," do you have an obligation then to stand up and say, no, sir?What I did was just repeat the position that I took, I didn't change the position, I just repeated the position as I did for you just now.
  • When you say the CDC has done everything it could to get the right guidance out there, to get good public messaging out there, why did the CDC stop giving press conferences for critical months in the middle of the pandemic?Yes, you know, I'm very disappointed in that. Again, the reality is --But you're in charge of it. So why, when we went back and looked at the numbers. In January, you did 10 media telebriefings. In February, you did eight, and then it fell off a cliff. There were two in March, zero in April, zero in May. Why?I would say, you know, that ultimately the ability to do those briefings had to be cleared by the secretary of health's office for us to be able to do those. That's the system that's in place under the current relationship between CDC and the secretary of health.
  • I interviewed you in April of last year, and I asked you what your sense was of where we were in the arc of this. And here's what you said: "We're nearing the peak of the outbreak, the pandemic, in our country right now. ..." What goes through your mind when you hear those words now?Well, as you know, we were looking at that at the time of what we call the first peak, the spring surge, and obviously that was at a time when we still didn't understand to the fullest degree asymptomatic, silent epidemic. What I say right now is, we're about to be in the worst of it.
  • When will we get to the point where the vaccine is going to be available to the general public — everybody can get one?Well, you know, that would be speculative, but as I said even earlier in my testimony in Congress, I didn't see that day coming until end of the second quarter, beginning third quarter of 2021.
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