Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged podcast

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
10More

Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
  • That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
  • In attempting to force her hand, they essentially forced her out. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Get CNN Opinion's newsletter for the latest thoughts and analysis on today's news.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376914 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campa
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Open organizers didn't stop there, issuing a news release threatening to expel her from the tournament if she kept it up.
  • And so, she quit. Read More
  • Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
  • Osaka first came into the spotlight at the 2018 US Open when her historic win against Serena Williams received boos from a crowd convinced that Williams was unfairly targeted by the umpire. What should have been an extraordinarily joyous occasion, her first major victory and the event that catapulted her into public recognition, was instead one that made her cry, both immediately following the match and when she went to collect her trophy. ESPN declared that "Naomi Osaka was denied her magic moment."
  • Simply put, it's because the world has unrealistic expectations of celebrities and athletes. We believe the public nature of their fame entitles us access to their private lives. In several recent interviews, such as one with podcaster Dax Shepard, Prince Harry has talked openly of his own mental health struggles and of the pressures he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have felt as objects of media fascination, pressures so severe that Markle thought of suicide.
  • Many of her fellow athletes agreed with her decision. Steph Curry tweeted, "you shouldn't ever have to make a decision like this -- but so damn impressive taking the high road when the powers that be don't protect their own. major respect @naomiosaka." Martina Navratilova tweeted her support of Osaka, noting that "as athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental & emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference." Serena Williams offered her support, too.
  • Some tennis players, of course -- including Rafael Nadal and Sofia Kenin -- have come out to say that speaking to reporters is part of the job. But just because something has been part of the job needn't mean it should be, or that it should be for everyone. Osaka didn't just decide she didn't feel like giving interviews. She was forced to make a choice, and she chose herself. That takes courage, courage that is a shame she had to muster at all. Because in the end, the tennis world has lost a great, at least for now -- a point that deserves much more attention.
5More

A Daughter's Journey To Learn Mandarin Chinese At 30 : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-reclaim-her-heritage-language
shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • NPR Short Wave host and reporter Emily Kwong is a third generation Chinese American, but she's never spoken her family's language.
  • At age 30, she's trying to learn the language for the first time, and unpacking why she never learned it in the first place.
  • Emily's father, Christopher Kwong, stopped speaking his first language — Mandarin Chinese — when he was five-years-old. Born in New York City in 1958, he struggled to communicate with his kindergarten teacher and classmates.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Emily's grandparents, Hui and Edgar Kwong, were worried he would fall behind. They stopped speaking Mandarin to Christopher at home, and dedicated themselves to teaching him English. "I realized I had to engage in a different world, a world in English," Christopher Kwong says. "You have to integrate, otherwise you're going to be really in a terrible place."
  • Emily will explore how being 'Chinese enough' gets tied up in language fluency and the feeling of racial imposter syndrome, in conversation with sociolinguist Amelia Tseng. She also discovers how language is a bridge that can be broken and rebuilt between generations — as an act of love and reclamation.
10More

Opinion | My Ears Might Never Be Bored Again - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...music-streaming.html Culture opinion technology
shared by aleija on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Something unexpected happened to me during lockdown: I gained deeper appreciation for my ears. I don’t mean aesthetically, (though I’ve got no problem in that department, believe me), but rather functionally.
  • he other day I realized that I’ve taken to popping my AirPods Pro in just after I wake up, sometimes at the same time I put in my contact lenses. From there my ears are usually occupado all day, often until I sleep, sometimes even during.
  • If you’re under 35 or so, my paean to the mind-altering magic of ubiquitous digital audio might sound more than a bit outdated; Farhad, do you also get goose bumps when considering the TV remote?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Streaming services are often said to have “saved” the music industry, which is no doubt true, notwithstanding persistent complaints from artists about the paltriness of their streaming paychecks. Revenue from the sale of recorded music in the United States declined for almost two decades before streaming services began turning the business around in 2016. In 2020, recorded music grew to $12.2 billion in sales, the vast majority from streaming (still well below the industry’s peak sales year, $14.6 billion in 1999).
  • For me, the clearest way that streaming has altered my relationship to music is in its steady blurring of the boundaries between genres. I
  • Streaming has turned me into a musical butterfly, flitting between moods and genres in whatever way my tastes happen to lean. Indeed, in the last half decade I have explored more kinds of music than in the decades before — and I keep finding more stuff I like, because thanks to endless choice, there’s never nothing to listen to.
  • The number of artists in the service’s most-played 10 percent of streams keeps growing — that is, there are many more artists at the top. “Gone are the days of Top 40, it’s now the Top 43,000,” Spotify crowed.
  • But you don’t need stats to show that music is increasingly breaking through staid genre boundaries — you can tell in the music itself.
  • What’s not going to change is the pre-eminent role audio now plays in our days. Once, I thought of my headphones as a conduit for music, and then they were for music and podcasts, but now they are something else entirely: They are the first gadget to deliver on the tech industry’s promise of “augmented reality” — the mashing up of the digital and analog worlds to create a novel, enhanced sensory experience.
  • Now that sound has been liberated from time, place and physical media — now that I can fly from the Nashville studio where Dylan recorded “Blonde on Blonde” to Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert to the comforting, indistinct background murmur of a crowded coffee shop, all while on a walk in my suburban California neighborhood — my ears might never be bored again.
6More

Why Are We All Talking About U.F.O.s Right Now? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ufos-report.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena as the government calls them, have been taken more seriously by U.S. officials in recent years, starting in 2007 with a small, secretly funded program that investigated reports of military encounters
  • The program, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times in December 2017, was revived by the Defense Department last summer as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The department said the task force’s mission was to “detect, analyze and catalog” sightings of strange objects in the sky “that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.” Service members were newly encouraged to speak up if they saw something, with the idea being that removing the stigma behind reporting something weird would provide the authorities with a better idea of what’s out there.
  • John Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., said in a podcast last year that some of the unexplained sightings might be “some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Nonetheless, the government began a classified study, called Project Sign, out of concern that such objects could be advanced Soviet weapons. That was followed by Project Blue Book, which reviewed about 12,000 cases from 1952 to 1969, 701 of which could not be explained. It ended with a report saying U.F.O.s were not worth further study
  • Other cases include a spinning disk that was seen hovering above O’Hare Airport in Chicago in 2006, and two “sunlight-colored” objects reported by a professional pilot in England in 2007, as The New Yorker reported.
  • Senior administration officials who had been briefed on the report’s contents told The Times that the report still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, but that it concludes a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology.
5More

Opinion | How Chuck Schumer Plans to Win Over Trump Voters - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ein-podcast-chuck-schumer.html Schumer Trump Voters Senate
shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In his 100 days address this week, Joe Biden outlined his plans for a big, bold legislative agenda to come. He previewed a two-pronged economic package: the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan. He spoke about the need to pass universal background checks for firearms, comprehensive immigration reform, and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
  • The success of that agenda hinges on whether 50 Senate Democrats — ranging from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin — can come together and pass legislation.
  • Schumer has a theory of politics that he believes can hold or even win Democrats seats in 2022. It’s not a complicated theory: For Democrats to win over middle-of-the-road voters — including those who voted for Donald Trump — they need to prove that government is actually helping them.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • That means passing big, bold legislation. And the institution Schumer leads — the Senate — is the primary obstacle to that happening.
  • How do you win over Trump voters? What kinds of economic policies can help deliver Democrats victory in 2022? How should the party approach topics like race and gender? How will he pass bills, like the For The People Act, that can’t go through budget reconciliation? And, of course, what do you do about the filibuster?
36More

Historians Clash With the 1619 Project - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...604093 slavery project 1619 history controversy US
shared by Javier E on 02 May 21 - No Cached
  • “They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of The New York Times, they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama's historic presidency edition,” Hannah-Jones told me. “I know when I talk to people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.”
  • For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the project, the response has been deeply gratifying.
  • When The New York Times Magazine published its 1619 Project in August, people lined up on the street in New York City to get copies. Since then, the project—a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions—has spawned a podcast, a high-school curriculum, and an upcoming book
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom.
  • The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.
  • given the stature of the historians involved, the letter is a serious challenge to the credibility of the 1619 Project
  • he letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.
  • Underlying each of the disagreements in the letter is not just a matter of historical fact but a conflict about whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere.
  • while some of the critiques can be answered with historical fact, others are questions of interpretation grounded in perspective and experience.
  • Both sides agree, as many of the project’s right-wing critics do not, that slavery’s legacy still shapes American life—an argument that is less radical than it may appear at first glance. If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project, though not necessarily with all of its individual arguments.
  • Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles?
  • The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society
  • The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize.
  • The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union.
  • Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism.
  • “The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as ‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all,”
  • The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.”
  • The letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.
  • “To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding,” Wilentz told me. Anti-slavery ideology was a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” he said, and “there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in Britain.”
  • Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.
  • On this question, the critics of the 1619 Project are on firm ground. Although some southern slave owners likely were fighting the British to preserve slavery, as Silverstein writes in his rebuttal, the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the Revolution helped fuel abolitionism in the North.
  • it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.
  • The most radical thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union.
  • In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, Oakes said, “The function of those tropes is to deny change over time … The worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?”
  • The project’s pessimism has drawn criticism from the left as well as the right.
  • A major theme of the 1619 Project is that the progress that has been made has been fragile and reversible—and has been achieved in spite of the nation’s true founding principles, which are not the lofty ideals few Americans genuinely believe in.
  • “The fight for black freedom is a universal fight; it's a fight for everyone. In the end, it affected the fight for women's rights—everything. That's the glory of it,” Wilentz told me. “To minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical tradition in America.”
  • the question of whether black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “largely alone,” as Hannah-Jones put it in her essay, is subject to vigorous debate.
  • “I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.”
  • “The tone to me rather suggested a deep-seated concern about the project. And by that I mean the version of history the project offered. The deep-seated concern is that placing the enslavement of black people and white supremacy at the forefront of a project somehow diminishes American history,”
  • To Wilentz, the failures of earlier scholarship don’t illustrate the danger of a monochromatic group of historians writing about the American past, but rather the risk that ideologues can hijack the narrative. “[It was] when the southern racists took over the historical profession that things changed, and W. E. B. Du Bois fought a very, very courageous fight against all of that,” Wilentz told me. The Dunning School, he said, was “not a white point of view; it’s a southern, racist point of view.”
  • In the letter, Wilentz portrays the authors of the 1619 Project as ideologues as well. He implies—apparently based on a combative but ambiguous exchange between Hannah-Jones and the writer Wesley Yang on Twitter—that she had discounted objections raised by “white historians” since publication.
  • Hannah-Jones told me she was misinterpreted. “I rely heavily on the scholarship of historians no matter what race, and I would never discount the work of any historian because that person is white or any other race,” she told me. “I did respond to someone who was saying white scholars were afraid, and I think my point was that history is not objective. And that people who write history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing as well.”
  • When I asked Wilentz about Hannah-Jones’s clarification, he was dismissive. “Fact and objectivity are the foundation of both honest journalism and honest history. And so to dismiss it, to say, ‘No, I'm not really talking about whites’—well, she did, and then she takes it back in those tweets and then says it's about the inability of anybody to write objective history. That's objectionable too,”
  • The problem, as Du Bois argued, is that much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.
  • Newt Gingrich called the 1619 Project a “lie,” arguing that “there were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves." In City Journal, the historian Allen Guelzo dismissed the Times Magazine project as a “conspiracy theory” developed from the “chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.
5More

Opinion | Let's Cut Our Ridiculous Defense Budget - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-defense-budget.html politics Culture history biden
shared by cartergramiak on 07 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden loves spending money. Last month, he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to stimulate the economy. Now he’s pushing the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He vows to follow that with the American Families Plan to improve health care, child care and education, which could cost billions or trillions more.
  • The more money Mr. Biden tries to spend, the more loudly critics ask where he’s getting it. He borrowed the funds for the stimulus. He wants corporations to pay for the infrastructure plan. With every legislative battle, finding the money grows harder. All of which raises a question: Will Mr. Biden try to cut defense?
  • It’s not as if there aren’t places to cut. In 2016, Bob Woodward and Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post disclosed that, according to an internal study, the Defense Department could save $125 billion over five years simply by trimming its distended bureaucracy. The department, the study found, employed close to 200,000 people in property management alone. After a summary of the report became public, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Whitlock noted, the Pentagon “imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings.” It remains the only federal agency that has never passed an audit.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • China, however, spends less than one-third as much on defense as the United States does and has fewer than one-tenth as many nuclear weapons. China’s military could indeed be a match for the United States in conflicts near China’s shores, but globally, China poses a far greater economic challenge. To meet it, the United States must invest enormously in education and emerging technologies — the very investments that military spending will sooner or later crowd out. The two superpowers also compete ideologically, and the United States gravely undermines the appeal of its democratic system when, amid a pandemic, the dictatorship in China proves better able to keep its citizens alive.
  • None of this means that Mr. Biden and his advisers aren’t doing what they believe is best for the country. But their beliefs about what’s best for the country have evolved in a Beltway ecosystem in which the military-industrial complex wields enormous power.
10More

After Second Impeachment, Giuliani Vows to Support Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-giuliani.html politics US crisis trump
shared by saberal on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When Rudolph W. Giuliani was treating his efforts to carry out President Trump’s wishes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as a payment opportunity — he proposed a daily retainer of $20,000 for his legal services from the burgeoning Trump campaign legal fund — the president dismissed it and responded by demanding to personally approve each expense.
  • Even as he complains about Mr. Giuliani’s latest efforts as fruitless, the president remains unusually deferential to him in public and in private. “Don’t underestimate him,” Mr. Trump has told advisers.
  • But only up to a point. While Mr. Trump and his advisers balked at the $20,000 request weeks ago, it is unclear whether the president will sign off on Mr. Giuliani being paid anything other than expenses.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Few people have had such durability with the president, and few have been so willing to say and do things for him that others will not.
  • “I don’t mind being shut down for my craziness,” Mr. Bannon told Mr. Giuliani, according to Alexander Panetta, a reporter for CBC News who listened to the podcast before it was removed. “I’m not going to be shut down for yours.”
  • In return, Mr. Giuliani, who failed at his own bid for the presidency in 2008, got to hang out with the president in the Oval Office and used his new connections to pursue lucrative contracts.
  • Mr. Giuliani stepped into the president’s legal affairs in April 2018. His eagerness to attack Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, impressed Mr. Trump, who was constantly making changes to his legal team. Most Trump advisers came to see Mr. Giuliani’s efforts with Mr. Mueller as a success.
  • Mr. Giuliani’s own legal problems have mounted alongside those of the president. As Mr. Giuliani pursued separate business opportunities in Ukraine, intelligence agencies warned that he could have been used by Russian intelligence officers seeking to spread disinformation about the election — reports that Mr. Trump shrugged off. Mr. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine continues to be a matter of interest in a continuing investigation by federal prosecutors in New York.
  • In a 37-minute video published Wednesday evening, Mr. Giuliani tried to rewrite the history of the Capitol riot. Although Mr. Trump incited his supporters to march to the building and “show strength,” Mr. Giuliani suggested in the video that antifa activists had been involved, a repeatedly debunked theory that has proliferated in pro-Trump circles online.“The rally ended up to some extent being used as a fulcrum in order to create something else totally different that the president had nothing to do with,” Mr. Giuliani said.
  • “He’s not alone,” Alan Marcus, a former Trump Organization consultant, said of the president. “He’s abandoned. Rudy’s just the last in a whole group of people.”
4More

Before the Capitol Riot, Calls for Cash and Talk of Revolution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...capitol-riot-funding.html Riot Capitalpolice
shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In online videos, the 41-year-old Texan pointed out the flimsiness of the fencing. He cheered the arrival, long before President Trump’s rally at the other end of the mall, of far-right militiamen encircling the building. Then, armed with a bullhorn, Mr. Lee called out for the mob to rush in, until his voice echoed from the dome of the Rotunda.
  • By far the most visible financial backer of Women for America First’s efforts was Mike Lindell, a founder of the MyPillow bedding company, identified on a now-defunct website as one of the “generous sponsors” of a bus tour promoting Mr. Trump's attempt to overturn the election. In addition, he was an important supporter of Right Side Broadcasting, an obscure pro-Trump television network that provided blanket coverage of Trump rallies after the vote, and a podcast run by the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon that also sponsored the bus tour.
  • Wild Protest linked to three hotels with discounted rates and another site for coordinating travel plans. It also raised donations from thousands of individuals, according to archived versions of a web portal used to collect them. The website has since been taken down, and it is not clear what the money was used for.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “American citizens feel like they’ve been attacked. Fear’s reaction is anger, anger’s reaction is patriotism and voilà — you get a war,” said Mr. Lee’s co-host, who gave his name as Rampage.
14More

Capitol riots unleashed long-term danger, experts warn - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Politics US trump crisis Culture policy GOP extremist Biden inauguration security riot
shared by aidenborst on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The US Capitol is surrounded by fences and troops amid fear the January 6 riots could spark violence this weekend and leading up to Wednesday's inauguration. But experts worry the real threat may be what the attack unleashed for the long term.
  • In many messaging apps and boards, some are calling for a boycott of events this weekend and the inauguration. Michael Edison Hayden, the Southern Poverty Law Center senior investigative reporter and spokesperson, says high-profile names and podcasters Mike Peinovich and Nick Fuentes have told their followers not to go to rallies. The ADL says that White supremacist Peinovich, known as Mike Enoch, and the far-right Fuentes have been rallying voices of discontent for years.
  • They're also worried that the numbers of potentially violent extremists are growing. Social media giants banned President Donald Trump and others over fears their posts would continue to spark violence, which the experts said has led to a sympathetic and growing audience at risk of radicalization.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • "Our moderators are reviewing an increased number of reports related to public posts with calls to violence, which are expressly forbidden by our Terms of Service," Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told CNN in a statement on Wednesday. Vaughn added: "We welcome peaceful discussion and peaceful protests, but routinely remove publicly available content that contains direct calls to violence."
  • In public and private chats there are common messages about plotting to "take back America" or rallying together against supposed censorship, according to Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. Carusone and his team have been tracking extremist language and posting in a variety of media landscapes.
  • "The FBI cannot open an investigation without a threat of violence or alleged criminal activity. However, when that language does turn to a call for violence or criminal activity, the FBI is able to undertake investigative activity," the agency said.
  • "It is more and more important to know where they're going, especially if they're moving even further and further behind the veil," Carusone said. "If you lose track of them entirely, you lose that that information pipeline, you lose the ability to identify those indicators, which means it's harder to prevent harm."
  • "The plots of tomorrow are literally being hatched right now," Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, told CNN.
  • Segal said extremists might move cautiously in coming days, from both paranoia and knowing they're being watched.
  • "It's not before inauguration that we need to be concerned about them trying to spark another civil war -- it's after," Segal told CNN.
  • Trump was very much a part of that, too. He repeatedly criticized Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about her Covid-19 restrictions before and after the news of the plot against her.
  • Experts note that at the protests against her moves, there too was a cross-pollination of people who showed up -- self-declared militia members, anarchists, those with anti-government beliefs and anti-vaxxers.
  • Carusone says this is just the beginning of the country heading "into a buzzsaw" due to divisiveness, extremist actions and political rhetoric. "Trump has gift-wrapped the narrative for the next four years," Segal explains.
  • "All of those new people being brought into these communities creates new opportunity for expanding the ranks," Carusone said. "There's going to be a lot of new people ... organized and exposed to a set of prescriptions that ultimately bring us back to the same place ... leading up to the attack on the Capitol. "Except in this case, it'll be more of them."
16More

In Minnesota, a G.O.P. Lawmaker's Death Brings Home the Reality of Covid - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...relph-covid-minnesota.html harm principle morality pandemic responsibility liberty
shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • while Republicans insist that their freedom was at issue in refusing to wear masks or enforce mandates, such events and the death of Mr. Relph raise urgent questions as to where individual “freedom” ends and where responsibility to others begins in a pandemic during which breathing shared air can be fatal.
  • “It’s ironic that Senator Gazelka, as majority leader, was always the person most outspoken in opposing the governor’s emergency order and would state to us over and over again that Minnesotans would do the responsible thing,” said Richard Cohen, a Democrat who retired from the Legislature last month. “And now it is alleged that because of a caucus event, where apparently many people were not wearing masks, a caucus member became ill and then passed away.”
  • An owner of the catering hall, John Schiltz, said that his servers had worn masks and gloves throughout that evening, and that none had later tested positive. Although masks were offered to guests, state guidelines at the time allowed them to be removed at tables.Mr. Schiltz said the dinner was the only event any group had booked at his venue in November before he had to close on Nov. 20.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Pressed about the dinner in a radio interview in late November, Mr. Gazelka, 61, who is reported to be considering a run for governor, said he had no regrets.
  • “The idea that everyone can just be trusted rings a little hollow with the knowledge” that Republicans did not tell Democrats of the positive cases before the special session, Ms. Kent said in an interview last week.
  • He continued through the year to argue that mask mandates or limits on restaurants and bars were not needed because Minnesotans could be trusted to make responsible choices, and that the harmful effects on schools, the economy and people’s mental health outweighed the value of restrictions.
  • Holding the celebratory dinner wasn’t the only point of contention.Afterward, Republicans alerted their own caucus about the virus outbreak, but not Democrats. They instructed Republican staff members not to go to the Capitol for a special session of the Legislature on Nov. 12 — but did not inform Democrats, who were livid after learning of the positive cases from news reports.
  • “There was a lot of food and a lot of beverage, and when you’re at an activity when the food and beverage is there, that’s when you don’t have your mask,” he said. “I don’t regret that we had the celebration. The Republican majority was the No. 1 target to switch from Republican to Democrat.”
  • She described the working environment of the Senate as poisoned by Republicans’ disregard for masks. Most refuse to wear them on the Senate floor, she said. One Republican senator, she recounted, broke into fake coughing while waiting for an elevator in a cramped vestibule with Democratic colleagues.
  • After learning of the outbreak from Republican leaders, Mr. Relph, who did not have any symptoms, went for a coronavirus test, his daughter said. It came back positive.
  • “None of us can be sure he got sick at that party, but it’s really, really likely,” Dana Relph said. “There wasn’t any other place he would have gotten it.”
  • As one of the Senate’s oldest members, Mr. Relph was one of the few Republicans known for regularly wearing a face covering. He had an underlying condition, mild asthma, his daughter said.
  • As a lab technician for 3M, Ms. Relph tests industrial masks. “The fact that people deny the science behind masks makes me even angrier,” she said. She recalled that a Senate colleague of her father’s had stopped by her family’s house, without a mask, while her father was in the hospital. “Point blank, he said, ‘I don’t think this is as serious as they’re telling us it is,’” Ms. Relph said. “My dad was dying. These are people that think they’re good, kind, compassionate people, and yet they don’t act that way.”
  • Last week, as the Legislature returned for its 2021 session, senators held a moment of silence for Mr. Relph. Mr. Gazelka called him “a great senator, a true friend.”
  • The majority leader also led his party in blocking a Democratic proposal to require masks in public areas of the Capitol, flouting a statewide mask mandate, imposed by the governor, in indoor settings. (The Legislature is not subject to the governor’s orders.) Republicans questioned the effectiveness of masks. But Mr. Gazelka did include language in a resolution “strongly encouraging” mask wearing.
  • Ms. Kent, the Democratic leader, said that she had noticed lately that Mr. Gazelka was always wearing a mask himself in the Capitol, where before he had not worn one. Besides Mr. Relph’s death, Mr. Gazelka’s mother-in-law died in December after contracting Covid-19.
16More

U.S. Says Rioters At Capitol Aimed 'To Capture And Assassinate Elected Officials' : Ins... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-assassinate-elected-officials
shared by anonymous on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Members of the pro-Trump mob that staged an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week intended "to capture and assassinate elected officials,
  • It notes Chansley's status as a "shaman" within QAnon, which the prosecutors variously define as "a dangerous extremist group ... founded on an imaginary conspiracy theory," and a cult that "preaches debunked and fictitious anti-government conspiracy theories that a deep state is out to take down the current administration."
  • The note was left at the spot where, moments earlier, Pence had been poised to preside over a joint session to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory over President Trump. Chansley told the FBI he believes Pence is a "child-trafficking traitor."
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The U.S. attorney's office in Arizona filed the memorandum Thursday as part of its argument against releasing Chansley while his case proceeds.
  • Chansley is charged with two felonies: obstructing the conduct of a law enforcement officer and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors say that as he committed those actions, Chansley was also carrying a dangerous weapon – specifically, "a six-foot spear."
  • Prosecutors say Chansley should remain in custody for a variety of reasons, including his part in the riot and his avowed intent to return to Washington to protest Biden's upcoming inauguration.
  • The U.S. attorney's office also says that Chansley would not likely conform to court-imposed conditions on his release, noting that while in custody, he has refused to eat anything other than organic food. Prosecutors also note that Chansley has shown he can travel without being traced. And because he is widely associated with the horns-and-fur costume and face paint he wore at the Capitol, prosecutors say, Chansley "is virtually unidentifiable when not wearing it."
  • The memorandum, like other documents prosecutors have filed in Chansley's case, notes he refers to himself and other rioters as "patriots."
  • Chansley wore horns, face paint and fur as he stood on the Senate dais – where he left a threatening note for Vice President Pence, prosecutors say."It's only a matter of time, justice is coming,"
  • "Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government. "
  • Prosecutors also note that Chansley sought to mislead officials about his drug use. While he allegedly claimed to be a weekly user of marijuana, they note, he has described using peyote and mushrooms in his podcast (on which he uses the name "Jake Angeli"),
  • "Chansley has spoken openly about his belief that he is an alien, a higher being, and he is here on Earth to ascend to another reality."
  • Chansley and dozens of others who breached security at the Capitol have been arrested in the past week. In many cases, they have been identified by citizens and authorities from photos and videos taken inside lawmakers' offices and other areas in the congressional complex.
  • The attack on the Capitol has been linked to five deaths, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and a woman whom police shot as she climbed up a barricaded door.
  • "Media and FBI reports have detailed carefully-planned insurrection attempts scheduled throughout the country in the coming weeks at every state capital, including the [Arizona] capitol."
  • Arguing that Chansley poses a flight risk, the court filing says he does not have a stable job that would require him to remain in Arizona.
8More

Europe's Schools Are Closing Again on Concerns They Spread Covid-19 - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ey-spread-covid-19-11610805601 pandemic children schools
shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • “In the second wave we acquired much more evidence that schoolchildren are almost equally, if not more infected by SARS-CoV-2 than others,“ said Antoine Flahault, director of the University of Geneva’s Institute of Global Health.
  • “The problem is not that schools are unsafe for children,” Mr. Johnson said last week. “The problem is schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”
  • Mr. Flahault said an antibody survey conducted by researchers in Geneva in May and December, using thousands of random samples, found that children of age 6 to 18 were getting infected as often as young adults. The study has yet to be peer reviewed.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In Austria, a nationwide survey by universities and medical institutes found that children under 10 showed a similar rate of infection to those between 11 and 14, and that the children in general were getting infected as often as teachers, said Michael Wagner, a microbiologist at the University of Vienna who oversees the study.
  • Scientists also point to data from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, which conducts a weekly random survey of the population. Just before the Christmas break, when schools were still open, the positivity rate among children was higher than in most adult groups, especially in those older than 11.
  • German virologist Christian Drosten said in his weekly podcast that the study “pretty much answers the question of how children contribute to the pandemic.”
  • Still, many policy makers across Europe say schools are safe. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control states on its website that while clusters have been reported in all types of schools, such outbreaks have been relatively rare. Statistics also show that children rarely fall seriously ill after contracting the virus.
  • Mr. Wagner, who oversees the Austrian survey, said opening schools while the U.K. variant spreads in Europe bears a big risk. “We should be careful now,” he said.
9More

Adam Kinzinger voted to impeach 'knowing ... it could very well be terminal to my caree... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html impeachment
shared by katherineharron on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Rep. Adam Kinzinger is willing to lose his seat over his vote to impeach then-President Donald Trump, the Illinois Republican told CNN's David Axelrod during an episode of "The Axe Files" podcast released Thursday.
  • "I did it knowing full well it could very well be terminal to my career," Kinzinger said of his vote. "But I also knew that I couldn't live with myself having, you know, try to just protect it and just felt like the one time I was called to do a really tough duty, I didn't do it."
  • Kinzinger was one of 10 Republicans who joined all House Democrats in voting to impeach Trump earlier this month for "incitement of insurrection"
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 'll say to anybody that thinks my vote was for politics, they don't know me. And I would say now they don't know politics because, you know, you have to get through a primary,"
  • "There is no doubt in my mind that the President of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection. He used his position in the Executive to attack the Legislative."
  • Concerns over his future within the party aren't without merit. Several House Republicans have hammered Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the party's third-ranking House leader, calling for her to step down from her leadership position over her vote to impeach Trump. She's also facing a primary challenge from a prominent conservative state legislator.
  • "I'm more passionate about this country than I think I was January 5, even," he continued. "I know my passion is the restoration of the Republican Party. I know I may go down fighting like that."
  • "I think this is one of those votes that that transcends any kind of political implication of the moment," Kinzinger said at the time. "This is one of those that you're going to look back on when you're 80 and this will be the one you talk about."
  • Kinzinger also said at the time that he didn't feel pressure from the party but that his constituents were all over the place
26More

Opinion | An Appalled Republican Considers the Future of the G.O.P. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...klein-podcast-yuval-levin.html filibuster moderation Politics crisis culture compromise congress
shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Ezra Klein: There used to be this idea that it was the Democratic Party that was chaotic and unpredictable in who it would nominate, in whether or not it would listen to its own governing or organizing institutions.
  • And now it’s Republicans where this anti-institutional force has overwhelmed the institutions. Do you think that’s true, and if so, why is it that Republican institutions are proving weaker?
  • on the whole, the culture of the right has become much more hostile to the establishment.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • And that, I think, has encouraged the kind of anti-institutional mind-set that, in some ways, is always there. Populism is always anti-institutional, and there’s always been a populist element of the right. But the American right, at its origins, was in the business of defending the institutions.
  • sometimes that meant defending the institutions from the people running them.
  • Think about William F. Buckley’s first book. He was just out of Yale and wrote a book called “God and Man at Yale,” which was basically an argument for saving the great universities from the professors
  • I think that when conservatives think about universities now, they’re more inclined to think that there is no saving these institutions — we have to attack these institutions.
  • Even people who get elected to high office on the right tend to be sort of inherently anti-institutional in the way they approach their voters. And I think it’s a problem.
  • Yuval Levin: I think that our politics has never really been intended to function as a pure majoritarian politics. One of the most important insights built into the constitutional system is that a functional republic, to be stable, has to not only enable enduring majorities to have their way but also protect durable minorities — large ones. And that means that there are all kinds of structures in the system that compel accommodation, that require differing factions to work together if they’re going to achieve anything.
  • I don’t think conservatism can do its job in a free society in opposition to the institutions of that society. I think it can only function in defense of them.
  • a conservatism that becomes anti-institutional looks like a mob attacking the Capitol
  • Yuval Levin: Creating alternatives to [mainstream institutions] is quite a challenge. To start a new elite university is not a simple matter. It’s not unimaginable.
  • It’s just very hard to do.
  • And so I think conservatives have found that rather than create alternative institutions, they’ve created critical institutions. They’ve created institutions that exist to attack the left’s institutions. And there’s an audience for that, but that’s not really mainstream work. That’s not a place to just get your news when you just want news.
  • To Levin, the problem is that the Republican Party, in hock to these institutions, has become untethered from the tangible stakes of politics. “The question for us in the coming years is whether we can move a little more in the direction of a politics of ‘What does government do?’ and less of a politics of ‘Who rules?’” he said.
  • Yuval Levin: I do think that’s true. I would say one important force that’s played a role here is the increasing capture of our core mainstream institutions by the left. The core institutions of American media, the academy, culture are abjectly left-leaning institutions. That has meant that to resist the left is to resist these core institutions.
  • I think a politics where a narrow majority could just advance its agenda and then see what the public says at the next election is not a good idea for American society in this moment. I think we are much better served by a politics that compels some work across party lines in order to get anywhere.
  • Congress has always been designed that way. Congress was not intended to be like a European Parliament, where the majority rules for as long as the public will let it. It is a place where the country works out its differences
  • that requires these supermajority institutions
  • I think it is very important that our system requires some cross-partisan accommodation, frustrating as it is for those of us who have policy ambitions. I think that the contribution of that to the health of our political culture is absolutely essential, especially now.
  • the filibuster was not an idea of the founding fathers. They did not want a supermajority requirement in Congress. They thought about that and rejected it.
  • one way of framing what you’re saying here is that a system that requires more accommodation to get things done is going to encourage compromise and understanding between the parties
  • well, look around. We have more filibusters than ever and more polarized politics than ever. More party line votes than ever. Less cooperation than ever.
  • I feel like if your view on this were right, politics would look better right now. And these various blockages we have would encourage compromise. But instead, the more blockage we have, the less compromise we seem to get.
  • The question is, what gives us a chance to arrive at a more legitimate and a more sustainable set of political arrangements?
  • I think, ultimately, it is a good thing for a very narrow majority to have to get some support from the minority for its big ideas if those are going to endure.
6More

Supreme Court declines to review murder case chronicled in 'Serial' podcast - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html supreme court court review murder case
shared by annabelteague02 on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • The petition, filed by lawyers C. Justin Brown and Catherine Stetson along with other lawyers at the Washington law firm Hogan Lovells, stated that that basis for the Supreme Court to take up the case rested on the "straightforward legal issue" of ineffective counsel provided by Syed's trial attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, who is deceased.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 25 Nov 19
       
      are they trying to say that he did not commit the crime or just did not have adequate representation but DID commit the crime?
  • Gutierrez's failure to call an alibi witness.
  • Gutierrez's failure to call an alibi witness.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • During the trial one of his friends, Jay Wilds, testified that he helped Syed dig a hole for Lee's body.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 25 Nov 19
       
      that's pretty damning evidence against Syed, statement against the interest of his friend
15More

How We Are Ruining America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ow-we-are-ruining-america.html inequality class classism structural
shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • The most important is residential zoning restrictions.
  • zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009
  • Reeves’s second structural barrier is the college admissions game.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution.
  • With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.
  • We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.
  • American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
  • In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
  • To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality. 1019 Comments
  • the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.
  • Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
  • Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids
  • Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
  • Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
  • Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else
8More

What Naomi Wolf and Cokie Roberts teach us about the need for historians - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...teach-us-about-need-historians historian methods history misunderstanding
shared by Javier E on 11 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • First, journalist Naomi Wolf discovered on live radio that she had misinterpreted key historical terms in her new book, “Outrage,” leading her to draw the wrong conclusions. A week later, journalist Cokie Roberts, too, got a quick smackdow
  • Wolf and Roberts fell victim to a myth widely shared with the American public: that anyone can do history.
  • why would they imagine it takes any special training? After all, the best-selling history books are almost always written by non-historians, from conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly to journalists like Wolf and Roberts.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Freeman’s conversations tackled the topic of revisionism, or the public perception that any historian who offers new information or a new interpretation is instantly suspect (a common accusation on Twitter).
  • the ability of just about anyone to produce a historical podcast or to jump into a historical project can make it seem that anyone with enough enthusiasm can do historical scholarship — leaving us unclear about where expertise comes in.
  • we ask journalists — and historians, too — to stretch themselves to become generalists, a system that prizes entertainment over substance and more to the point, dilutes the key contributions of historical training.
  • historical understanding isn’t static any more than knowledge in any other field. We wouldn’t expect our doctors to convey the same information that our parents received from doctors decades ago. The same holds true for history.
  • Historians learn from one another and build on each other’s work to get an ever clearer, fuller picture of the past. And it is often this interplay that non-historians trying to write history miss
5More

'Believe women' is being cheapened to score political points. That will backfire | Jess... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders politics US Warren Sanders
shared by johnsonel7 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • It’s a familiar scenario. An exchange occurs in private. Only the two figures involved – a man and a woman – know what truly transpired. But once they leave that room and start to tell their version of events, the man is given the benefit of the doubt and the woman faces intense scrutiny and skepticism.
  • This is the basic set-up for any number of high-profile cases, stories of rapists and other sexual offenders evading legal prosecution or other consequences for years as their accusers were painted as gold diggers, political operatives, and compulsive liars
  • But “believe women” is getting thrown around by political strategists and official opinion-havers to support the Elizabeth Warren’s claim that Bernie Sanders told her, in a private meeting with no witnesses and no evidentiary support, that a woman could not win the presidency in 2020. This is not only a grotesque distortion of what “believe women” is supposed to mean, it undermines the good work the phrase’s use was doing.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The goal is to put the offense on a higher level than one of just lying. That way, if the Sanders campaign decides to point to all of the lies Warren has told throughout her career – that her father was a janitor, that she is Native American – her lies won’t matter as much because she’s just electioneering while his lies are rooted in misogyny. It’s a trick that still works for Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly complained about the lack of support Sanders gave to her campaign, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. (Clinton, after losing the primary to Obama in 2008, appeared at two rallies with Obama and did 10 solo campaign appearances to help him get elected. Sanders, after losing the primary to Clinton in 2016, did three events with Clinton and 37 solo events.)
  • Early accusers of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were deemed golddiggers, looking for an easy settlement to shut them up. Even when there’s some form of evidence, such as when photographs show Donald Trump with E Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape, even while he insists he doesn’t know her, supporters are still willing to take his word for it.
16More

American Airlines Wheelchair Weight Limit Excludes Some People With Disabilities : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-cant-fly-on-american-airlines disabilities airlines
shared by mimiterranova on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • He's a frequent flyer who, in his power wheelchair, has traveled to 46 countries.
  • He also started a website called Wheelchair Travel and hosts a travel podcast.
  • Now a new policy from one airline could limit the ability of some people such as Morris to fly. American Airlines, the largest airline in the United States, put in place a limit on the weight of a wheelchair, and now many power wheelchairs, such as the one Morris uses, are deemed too heavy to fly on smaller regional jets.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • At the airport, Morris checked with other airlines and was told they had not added weight limits for wheelchairs.
  • Morris filed a complaint with American Airlines and quickly got back a written response: "The wheelchair could not be loaded on the aircraft due to the weight limitations and the passenger could not leave the wheelchair behind, so he was denied boarding for the flight."
  • Morris says he could not find the policy on American's website but a representative he spoke to on the phone said the new weight limit began in June.
  • In 2018, the federal government started requiring an airline to report every time it damaged or lost a wheelchair. It turned out that was happening about 25 to 30 times a day — at least, before air travel fell during the coronavirus.
  • To Morris, that didn't make sense.
  • The aircraft hasn't changed. The only thing that has changed is that the airline has made a decision to exclude me."
  • The weight of a power wheelchair varies and is determined by components including batteries, motors, seating and systems that allow a wheelchair to tilt — which helps someone who can't move avoid painful skin ulcers — and other components.
  • A federal law, the Air Carrier Access Act, says an airline cannot refuse to take a passenger on the basis of his disability.
  • Kenneth Shiotani, an attorney with the National Disability Rights Network, looked through the Department of Transportation's regulations around that act and said he believes a weight limit on wheelchairs violates the act.
  • An airline can limit a wheelchair, based on size, if it doesn't fit through a plane's cargo doors. Morris lists those cargo door sizes on his website, Wheelchair Travel, so travelers can know in advance whether they need to modify a chair or use a different one before a flight. He knew, for instance, that the door on the Canadair Regional Jet model he was flying has a cargo door 33 inches high, large enough to take his wheelchair.
  • That travel is often essential, says Lee Page of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. "He needs to get there for job opportunities, or get there because of family emergency or get there because he's got a health appointment," Page says. "And in some cases, the only way to get to that destination might be that flight."
  • After NPR asked American Airlines about the limit, the airline's spokesperson said the restriction would remain in place. But she said the airline had offered Morris an "apology" and an accommodation: Next time, American said it would take the batteries off his wheelchair. That might get the chair under the 300-pound weight limit.
  • On Wednesday, Morris got to fly again.
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 80 of 142 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page