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Javier E

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Responsibility for Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...407131

incarceration policy history origins

shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Coates demonstrates that white Americans’ fear of black Americans, and their impulse to control blacks, are integral to the rise of the carceral state. A result is that one of every four black men born since the late 1970s has spent time in prison, at profound cost to his family. For this, Coates holds Moynihan, in part, responsible.
  • My argument is that mass incarceration is built on a long history of viewing black people as unequal in general, and criminal in the specific.
  • Moynihan presented a portrait to the president of an America riven by two groups—hard-working, law-abiding, working-class whites and criminal and scheming blacks.
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  • Through all of his memos Moynihan  remains thoroughly committed to government action to help black families. He believes the black poor to be “unusually self-damaging,” but he does not believe they should be left to their fate. He believes the government should invest in poor black communities. But this is accompanied by a telling dig—aiding the ghettoes would prevent the militant black middle class from threatening the “the larger society much as the desperate bank robber threatens to drop the vial of nitroglycerin.” Moynihan used the rhetoric of black criminalization, even in arguing for government aid. It takes a peculiar blindness to wonder why we built prisons instead.
  • The point is not that Moynihan wanted prisons.  I am certain the growth in incarceration truly horrified Moynihan. And I don’t doubt for a minute the sincerity in the words that Weiner quotes in Moynihan’s defense. But the possession of good intentions, and deep sympathies, does not absolve men with power of their responsibility, nor of their imprudence. Whatever his ultimate goals, Moynihan buttressed, and employed, the logic of black criminality and white victimhood
  • I spent the past year poring over books on and by Moynihan and examining as many memos written by him and articles on him as I could get my hands on. I came away with tremendous respect for his intelligence, his foresight and his broad, ranging curiosity. I did not come away from the research thinking him a racist. I did not come away thinking he was a conservative. But this is precisely the point. The story of mass incarceration, of American racism, is not simply a story of evil racists. It is also the story of people trying to help. And it is also the story of these same people not fully understanding the ugly traditions alive in their own country. Black criminalization is such a tradition and when Moynihan employed it he was playing with fire. Others got burned.
Javier E

Hooray for Obamacare - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rugman-hooray-for-the-aca.html

obamacare politics health-care results

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Put all these things together, and what you have is a portrait of policy triumph — a law that, despite everything its opponents have done to undermine it, is achieving its goals, costing less than expected, and making the lives of millions of Americans better and more secure.
  • what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.
  • That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.
Javier E

Harper Lee and Truman Capote: A Collaboration in Mischief - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...collaboration-in-mischief.html

fiction collaboration character

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • One summer about 85 years ago in a small Alabama town, a scrappy tomboy named Nelle met her new next door neighbor, Tru, a bookish, dapper dresser with a high-pitched voice and a mischievous streak.They made an unlikely pair. She often went barefoot in overalls while he dressed so fastidiously that a teacher said he stood out like a bird of paradise in a flock of crows. But both were oddballs who took refuge in detective novels, and they quickly bonded over their mutual love of Sherlock Holmes and the Rover Boys, spending long afternoons reading mysteries in their treehouse sanctuary. To entertain themselves, they started writing their own stories on her father’s Underwood typewriter, taking turns as one of them narrated while the other typed.
  • They grew up to be two of the South’s greatest writers — Harper Lee and Truman Capote — and their lives and work were intertwined long after that first summer. Ms. Lee drew on their friendship in her portrait of the characters Scout and Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and in her newly released novel, “Go Set a Watchman.”
  • Their broken friendship has been restored — in fiction, at least — in a forthcoming middle-grade novel, “Tru & Nelle,” by Greg Neri. Though Ms. Lee and Mr. Capote have each individually been the subject of numerous biographies, documentaries and feature films, “Tru & Nelle” is the first book to focus primarily on their childhood bond.
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  • “It was just kind of sitting there, and I couldn’t believe no one had taken it on,” said Mr. Neri, author of six books for teenagers, including “Ghetto Cowboy.” “Both she and Truman used their real lives as fodder for their fiction, and I figured if they did it, maybe I could do it too.”
  • “Go Set a Watchman,” which takes place 20 years after “Mockingbird” when Scout is an adult, is punctuated by flashbacks to her childhood adventures with her brother, Jem, and her best friend, Dill, the Capote figure: “He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat,” Ms. Lee wrote. “He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.”
  • In one scene of “Watchman” that parallels an actual childhood incident, Dill, Scout and Jem put on a mock Baptist revival, culminating with a baptism in the fish pond. To their mortification, their antics are interrupted by dinner guests, the minister and his wife. In reality, Nelle, Truman and his cousin put on a mock carnival sideshow on a similar occasion, shocking the visitors, an episode woven into Mr. Neri’s book.
  • Born a year and a half apart, the young Harper and Truman both had active imaginations and distant mothers. Neither of them fit in especially well in a small Southern community.“Nelle was too rough for the girls, and Truman was scared of the boys, so he just tagged on to her and she was his protector,” a family friend, Charles Ray Skinner, recalled in “Mockingbird,” Charles J. Shields’s biography of Ms. Lee. When schoolyard bullies ganged up on Truman, who was small for his age, Nelle, who was younger, got in fistfights to protect him.
  • Ms. Lee, who stopped giving formal interviews in the 1960s, once described feeling bound to Mr. Capote by “a common anguish” and said of her childhood, “We lived in our imagination most of the time.” Mr. Capote recalled in an interview that the two often felt like “apart people.”
Javier E

Why Statism Is the Wrong Frame, Cont'd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...-is-the-wrong-frame-contd.html

statism liberalism right tyranny

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • if you're trying to understand someone like Matt Yglesias, whether to effectively argue against his views or to engage him persuasively, the frames of "statism" and "liberty versus tyranny" are almost completely useless.
  • Why does he favor some policies that conservatives like? And can we identify more of them for the sake of strategic alliances? We'll never know if, upon learning that he is a liberal, we automatically presume that he is a "statist," or even more absurdly, that he prefers tyranny to liberty. Those are unserious buzz words that sell books, not a realistic portrait of American liberals,
Javier E

Hegel on Wall Street - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...hegel-on-wall-street

hegel self-interest practices meaning capital virtue Wall Street

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • That we all agreed about the moral ugliness of the bailouts should have led us to implementing new and powerful regulatory mechanisms.  The financial overhaul bill that passed congress in July certainly fell well short of what would be necessary to head-off the next crisis.  Clearly, political deal-making and the influence of Wall Street over our politicians is part of the explanation for this failure; but the failure also expressed continuing disagreement about the nature of the free market.  In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel
  • the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. 
  • The “Phenomenology” is a philosophical portrait gallery that presents depictions, one after another, of different, fundamental ways in which individuals and societies have understood themselves.  Each self-understanding has two parts: an account of how a particular kind of self understands itself and, then, an account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart.  Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond. 
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  • Hegel’s probing account means to show is that the defender of holier-than-thou virtue and the self-interested Wall Street banker are making the same error from opposing points of view.  Each supposes he has a true understanding of what naturally moves individuals to action.  The knight of virtue thinks we are intrinsically good and that acting in the nasty, individualist, market world requires the sacrifice of natural goodness; the banker believes that only raw self-interest, the profit motive, ever leads to successful actions.
  • Both are wrong because, finally, it is not motives but actions that matter, and how those actions hang together to make a practical world.  What makes the propounding of virtue illusory — just so much rhetoric — is that there is no world, no interlocking set of practices into which its actions could fit and have traction: propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.
  • Conversely, what makes self-interested individuality effective is not its self-interested motives, but that there is an elaborate system of practices that supports, empowers, and gives enduring significance to the banker’s actions.  Actions only succeed as parts of practices that can reproduce themselves over time.  To will an action is to will a practical world in which actions of that kind can be satisfied — no corresponding world, no satisfaction.  Hence the banker must have a world-interest as the counterpart to his self-interest or his actions would become as illusory as those of the knight of virtue.
  • Actions are elements of practices, and practices give individual actions their meaning. Without the game of basketball, there are just balls flying around with no purpose.  The rules of the game give the action of putting the ball through the net the meaning of scoring, where scoring is something one does for the sake of the team.   A star player can forget all this and pursue personal glory, his private self-interest.  But if that star — say, Kobe Bryant — forgets his team in the process, he may, in the short term, get rich, but the team will lose.  Only by playing his role on the team, by having an L.A. Laker interest as well as a Kobe Bryant interest, can he succeed.
  • Every account of the financial crisis points to a terrifying series of structures that all have the same character: the profit-driven actions of the financial sector became increasingly detached from their function of supporting and advancing the growth of capital.  What thus emerged were patterns of action which, may have seemed to reflect the “ways of the world” but in financial terms, were as empty as those of a knight of virtue, leading to the near collapse of the system as a whole.  A system of compensation that provides huge bonuses based on short-term profits necessarily ignores the long-term interests of investors. As does a system that ignores the creditworthiness of borrowers; allows credit rating agencies to be paid by those they rate and encourages the creation of highly complex and deceptive financial instruments.  In each case, the actions — and profits — of the financial agents became insulated from both the interests of investors and the wealth-creating needs of industry.
  • Nothing but fierce and smart government regulation can head off another American economic crisis in the future.  This is not a matter of “balancing” the interests of free-market inventiveness against the need for stability; nor is it a matter of a clash between the ideology of the free-market versus the ideology of government control.  Nor is it, even, a matter of a choice between neo-liberal economic theory and neo-Keynesian theory.  Rather, as Hegel would have insisted, regulation is the force of reason needed to undo the concoctions of fantasy.
Javier E

'Eichmann Before Jerusalem,' by Bettina Stangneth - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alem-by-bettina-stangneth.html

nazi holocaust moral reasoning anti-Semitism wwII

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in many ways mirrored Eichmann’s own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, nonideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt’s insights — that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder — remain pertinent.
  • as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist.
  • Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the “little man” portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”
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  • Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt’s puzzling contention that he “never realized what he was doing”). His was a consciously wrought racial “ethics,” one that pitted as an ultimate value the survival of one’s own blood against that of one’s enemies. He defined “sacred law” as what “benefits my people.” Morality was thus not universal or, as Eichmann put it, “international.” How could it be, given that the Jewish enemy was an international one, propounding precisely those universal values?
  • In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”
  • She documents the almost incredible lack of interest, inactivity, even cover-ups by the numerous groups charged with bringing Eichmann to justice. It now appears that by 1952, German intelligence services — and to some degree Jewish and Israeli bodies — were aware of Eichmann’s whereabouts, yet for various political reasons did nothing to apprehend him. Remarkably, Eichmann actually drafted an unpublished letter to Chancellor Adenauer proposing to go back to Germany to stand trial. Convinced of his blamelessness, he felt sure that he would receive only a light sentence and, like many other Nazis at the time, go on to live a comfortable German life. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is thus also a tale of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning in an era that wished the dark past would simply go away.
  • no future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book. To what degree the man’s biography is unique or exemplary of mass murderers in general remains, of course, an open question.
qkirkpatrick

Poll: Ukrainians support neutrality, disagree on war - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...24620853

ukraine

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • L, Ukraine — Several residents in this city in far eastern Ukraine said they want a united country, but they're split on the use of force to solve Ukraine's war with Russian-backed separatists.
  • The survey authors did not define neutrality other than to point out that European countries have urged Ukraine to move closer to the EU, while Russia wants Ukraine aligned with former Soviet republics.
  • It comes as more of President Obama's advisers have voiced support for providing military aid to Ukraine's military. A slight 52% majority of Ukrainians support this move, with three-quarters of respondents supportive in the west, and three-fifths supportive in the north. In the east 62% opposed U.S. military support, and the South is evenly divided.
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  • The results show that 63% of Ukrainians would find neutrality tolerable, while 31% find it unacceptable. Support for the idea was least strong in Ukraine's west, where 48% said they could tolerate the notion, and the same percentage said neutrality would be unacceptable.
  • Carrying flowers and portraits, tens of thousands of people somberly marched Sunday in Moscow to mourn opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, whose slaying on the streets of the capital has shaken Russia's beleaguered opposition. (Mar. 1) A
qkirkpatrick

Mourners call murder 'turning point' for Russia - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...24225709

russia politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Carrying flowers and portraits, tens of thousands of people somberly marched Sunday in Moscow to mourn opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, whose slaying on the streets of the capital has shaken Russia's beleaguered opposition. (Mar. 1) AP
Grace Gannon

Swiss Company Apologizes for Hitler Coffee Cream Containers - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-coffee-cream-containers.html

Hitler Mussolini dictators Swiss Company

shared by Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14
     
    A Swiss Company recently withdrew over 2,000 coffee cream containers, their labels possessing images of dictators Hitler and Mussolini. This error in production and distribution occurred when an external company asked to feature vintage cigar labels on the coffee cream containers, two of which were portraits of the dictators. Migros, a Swiss retail store, has apologized for this "unforgivable incident," horrified that such coffee cream containers found their way into the homes of thousands of people.
johnsonma23

GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...sson-how-not-respond-terrorism

gop terrorism politics US

shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism
  • About 10 months ago, after terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 11 people, congressional Republicans quickly began looking for ways to blame American leadership
  • Republican field is dominated by candidates with no meaningful experience in or understanding of foreign affairs, and nearly all of whom continue to think the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was a great idea.
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  • A dark portrait of a vulnerable homeland – impotent against Islamic State militants, susceptible against undocumented refugees and isolated in a world of fraying alliances –
  • Ted Cru
  • military strikes against ISIS targets should be less concerned about “civilian casualties.”
  • the disastrous war McCain celebrated, should be blamed on President Obama’s foreign policy.
  • The one reaction nearly every Republican candidate agreed on is a refusal to accept Syrian refugees – as if the real lesson of the Paris attacks is feeling less sympathy for ISIS’s victims
  • the Republican’s rush toward “stop letting in refugees” is reminiscent of “the ‘travel ban now or we all die of Ebola’ fad of last year.”
  • But there’s also the unnerving track record of many Republican officials – including would-be presidents – who seem to fall to pieces every time there’s a crisis
  • The GOP’s responses to Friday night’s bloodshed was a discouraging reminder of a party that still doesn’t know what to do or say when mature leadership is required
aqconces

Only Five Works From the Gurlitt Art Nest Have Been Confirmed As Stolen Nazi Art | Smar... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...d-as-stolen-nazi-art-180957847

nazi stolen art

shared by aqconces on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A task force took two years and nearly $2 million to investigate more than 1,200 pieces found in a Munich apartment
  • German prosecutors sat on the information that they had confiscated some 1,200 pieces of art stolen by Nazis before World War II hidden in a Munich apartment in 2012, until the find was made public by a piece published in a German newsmagazine, Spiegel, in 2013.
  • In the wake of the outcry following the reveal, a task force spent two years and nearly $2 million on a project to return the stolen works to their rightful owners. Yet, so far, the provenance of only five artworks has been determined, Melissa Eddie writes for the New York Times.
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  • The pilfered art was collected by Hildebrand Gurlitt, the so-called "art dealer to the Führer," who was tasked by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's head of propaganda, to sell art that the Nazis confiscated.
  • Instead, it seems Gurlitt collected the art and kept about a billion dollars worth of drawings and paintings throughout the war, reports Philip Oltermann for the Guardian.
  • The collection, including pieces by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann and Paul Klee, was hidden away in the flat of Grulitt's son, Cornelius Gurlitt. Officials were first alerted to the art after Cornelius was put under investigation for tax evasion.
  • Among the works whose histories have been traced, four have been restored to the families of their original owners. They include an oil painting by Max Liebermann, “Two Riders on a Beach,” that sold for $2.9 million at auction, and a portrait by Matisse, “Femme Assise,” or “Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in an Armchair,” that was given to the descendants of Paul Rosenberg. Other restored works include a Pissarro and a drawing by Carl Spitzweg.
  • Though just these five works have been traced so far, the group has determined that 499 works have "a questionable history," the Reuters report adds. The German Lost Art Foundation, who oversaw the task force, announced that a new phase of the project will begin this month that will continue to seek the original homes for those works still in the government's custody.
qkirkpatrick

Russian communists mark 63rd anniversary of Stalin's death - RT In motion - 0 views

www.rt.com/...ussia-anniversary-stalin-death

russian stalin history politics culture communism

shared by qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Russia's Communist Party marked the 63rd anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin in Moscow on Thursday. Hundreds of people holding Stalin portraits and Soviet flags gathered near the memorial to Georgi Zhukov in the center of Moscow. Party members then moved to pay their respects at Stalin’s grave near the Kremlin wall, where they laid flowers and wreaths. Joseph Stalin held the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from April 3, 1922 until the day of his death. He died on March 5, 1953 at his residence in Kuntsevo Dacha.
  • qkirkpatrick on 07 Mar 16
     
    Russian Communists remember Stalin on the 63rd anniversary of his death
Javier E

History News Network | This Is What Oliver Stone's Movie About Nixon Got Right - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...161187

nixon movie history politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • When a Hollywood filmmaker portrays a famous figure from the past, critics often express outrage over the portrayal. They denounce the filmmaker for taking too many artistic liberties and distorting the historical record. Oliver Stone came under that kind of attack in 1995 when he released Nixon, a dark and disturbing portrayal featuring actor Anthony Hopkins as President Richard M. Nixon.
  • In the years following Watergate, Richard Nixon worked assiduously to improve his public image. To a considerable degree, he succeeded in shaping a revised perspective on his place in history. By 1995, many Americans remembered Richard Nixon as the architect of bold foreign policies and as a surprisingly liberal leader in domestic affairs, exemplified by his support of environmental reforms.
  • In view of the late President’s improved standing since his embarrassing resignation, Oliver Stone’s movie struck many viewers as heavy-handed and disrespectful.
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  • So much information has come out since 1995 about Richard Nixon’s responsibility for criminal conspiracies, expanding death and destruction unnecessarily in the Vietnam War, and much more, that Rutgers historian David Greenberg concluded the new evidence renders “the pro-Nixon hagiography of yesteryear a musty artifact.
  • Several important books resulted, analyses that describe a duplicitous politician. Kenneth Hughes’s Chasing Shadows describes Nixon’s interference in President Lyndon Johnson’s negotiations with North Vietnam shortly before the 1968 presidential election. The Nixon Tapes, edited and discussed by Douglas Brinkley (Rice University) and Luke A. Nichter (Texas A & M University – Central Texas) shows diverse examples of mischief at the White House, and One Man Against the World by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner connects much of the President’s lying and criminal behavior to his struggles with the Vietnam War.
  • Some of the most intriguing evidence about Richard Nixon that fortifies Oliver Stone’s portrayal can be found in Bob Woodward’s recent book, The Last of the President’s Men. That publication is based on lengthy interviews with Alexander Butterfield, a Nixon aide
  • Butterfield characterizes the Nixon White House as “a cesspool.” He reports that the President encouraged sycophants to attack “enemies” (politicians, print and television journalists, and antiwar protesters, among others). Alexander Butterfield describes Nixon’s efforts to remove the “infestation” of portraits of John F. Kennedy in the staff’s offices (which backs up Stone’s speculation about the President’s obsession with the Kennedys). As for drinking and swearing, evidence from Butterfield and other sources indicates that the President was much more engaged in these excesses than biographer Stephen Ambrose recognized
  • Woodward said the recordings “depict a White House full of lies, chaos, distrust, speculation, self-protection, maneuver and counter-maneuver, with a crookedness that makes Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ look unsophisticated.”
Javier E

Silicon Valley Is Growing Up, Giving Parents a Break - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...up-giving-parents-a-break.html

silicon valley family parenting lifestyle

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Long hours in the office and the expectations of being connected at home are familiar to workers across industries, not just Silicon Valley. Fifty-six percent of parents in dual-income households across the wage spectrum say they find the work-family balance to be difficult and stressful. But tech takes the high-stress, high-stakes American work culture to the extreme.
  • “The tech industry’s love for scrappy, accessible founders adds to the pressure,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, the online real estate company. “You’re expected to lead by example, to roll up your sleeves, to know everything going on.”
  • “Being a tech founder is all-consuming; you can never really turn off,” said Clara Shih, founder and chief executive of Hearsay Social, who recently had her first child with her husband, Daniel Chao, also a tech founder and chief executive, of Halo Neuroscience. “You can’t skimp on your family, and you can’t skimp on your start-up, so you end up skimping on yourself.”
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  • One reason this has recently become an issue could be that Silicon Valley is aging. There are, of course, many established companies with older employees, but many people who work at the hot companies of the web era are now also becoming parents. And start-ups stay private for longer periods now, meaning employees work at them longer before cashing out.
  • Tech companies also employ a disproportionately small number of women — one-third of employees at many companies, and often less than one-fifth of technical employees. Over all, parenthood affects women’s careers more substantially than men’s, and women tend to be the ones who ask for family-friendly policies at work like paid leave or flex time.
  • One symbol of the cultural change in tech, fair or not, is the criticism of executives who seem to prioritize work over family. That happened to Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, when she announced she would take only a very short leave after having twins.
redavistinnell

The Death Penalty Election: A Louisiana Parish Is Ground Zero for the Capital Punishmen... - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...capital-punishment-debate.html

death penalty election louisiana parish ground capital punishment

shared by redavistinnell on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Death Penalty Election: A Louisiana Parish Is Ground Zero for the Capital Punishment Debate
  • For a county of around 250,000 residents, Caddo Parish, Louisiana, has attracted an outsize share of attention of late: long-form articles in The New Yorker and the New York Times, a Super-PAC funded by billionaire George Soros, and Saturday’s closely watched election for the office of district attorney, now headed for a runoff.
  • “Our community does not need any more controversy,” Cox told the Shreveport Times, when he decided not to run.
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  • There’s the murder conviction of Rodricus Crawford, which Cox secured despite thin evidence and racist appeals to the all-white jury.
  • Then there’s the case of Glen Ford, another black man sent to death row by Caddo Parish. He spent 30 years on death row, much of it in solitary confinement, before a court declared him innocent in 2014. Ford died of lung cancer within a year of being released
  • At the same time, it’s possible that Cox didn’t run for office because he has his sights set higher.
  • He’s justified the death penalty as an expression of “revenge;” he’s said “we need to kill more people;” he’s said of racism, “I don’t get this discrimination business, I really don’t.” And he has a portrait of a Confederate general turned Ku Klux Klan leader hanging in his office.
  • “George Soros reflects an anti-American sentiment that does not reflect the values of Caddo Parish,” said the Republican chairman, Louis Avallone.
  •  “My campaign knows nothing about where the funding for this PAC comes from,” he said. “Just like my campaign cannot force a PAC to stop a negative ad, my campaign cannot stop a positive ad.”
qkirkpatrick

The Royal British Legion Recreates Stunning Photos Of WWI Soldiers Taken A Century Ago - 0 views

www.fastcocreate.com/...i-soldiers-taken-a-century-ago

wwi soldiers history politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Royal British Legion has run many emotive and memorable campaigns to support its annual Poppy Appeal, which marks Remembrance Day. This year it has produced a series of haunting photographs of modern service people, that are also meticulous reconstructions of photographs taken a century ago.
  • In an accompanying film, Reeves explains he found in the studio archives a series of photographs of First World War servicemen, who had come to have their portraits taken before they went to the front. He set about recreating the same shots, in the same studio, using the same backdrops with modern servicemen and women
  • The Royal British Legion was founded by veterans of the First World War and the Poppy Appeal is just one of its many activities to support and help veterans, servicemen and women and their families
qkirkpatrick

How WWI was waged at sea deck - Washington Times - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...20040313-103729-8239r

wwi navy politics history battle of Jutland

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In “Dreadnought,” the reader is reminded that the author is a biographer at heart: His portraits of the young Winston Churchill; of the intense, eccentric Adm. Sir John “Jacky” Fisher; and of Germany’s ambitious Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz make for a riveting narrative.
  • The two great fleets had vastly different origins. The German fleet was the creation of an unstable monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who chose to compete for naval supremacy with the Royal Navy.
  • At sea as on land, World War I confounded the planners on both sides. The Germans anticipated a sea blockade, but thought that an enemy blockade close to their own coast would be vulnerable to sorties by their own warships.
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  • Instead, Britain instituted a remote blockade, declaring most of the North Sea a war zone and enforcing the blockade from a distance. Much of the war was passed in attempts by each side to lure the other into a naval ambush.
  • The climax of World War I at sea was the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916. There, in the North Sea off Denmark, a sortie by German battle cruisers led to the greatest naval battle of the last century, involving at one time or another more than 200 vessels, including 44 battleships.
  • The British lost more ships and men than their enemies in the resulting melee, in part because of the rugged construction of the German ships.
johnsonma23

At Republican Debate, Taunts and Quips as Rivals Battle - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aunts-quips-rivals-battle.html

republican debate new york times US

shared by johnsonma23 on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The debate turned from a reality show into a comedy as Mr. Trump mused that if he chose Mr. Cruz as his running mate, Democrats would sue to challenge Mr. Cruz’s eligibility — as they would, he said, if Mr. Cruz won the presidential primary.
  • At Republican Debate, Taunts and Quips as Rivals Battle
  • — Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas sharply attacked each other on Thursday night over the Canadian-born Mr. Cruz’s eligibility to be president and Mr. Trump’s “New York values,” shedding any semblance of cordiality as they dominated a Republican debate
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  • not only over issues like imposing tariffs on Chinese goods and fighting the Islamic State, but also over matters of character and integrity that drew some of the hardest punches of the race so far.
  • In many ways, it was the darkest debate of the campaign, as the Republicans tried to paint the grimmest possible portrait of an America in decline economically
  • Mr. Rubio and Mr. Christie, along with Jeb Bush and John Kasich, are vying to emerge as the leading candidate of mainstream Republicans, yet they struggled to be heard on Thursday night.
  • After months as Mr. Trump’s closest ally in the race, Mr. Cruz pointedly noted that Mr. Trump had dismissed questions in the fall about Mr. Cruz’s constitutional eligibility given his birth to an American mother living in Calgary, Alberta.
  • Mr. Cruz gave his most aggressive performance so far as he sought to protect the support he has built among social conservatives and evangelical Christians
  • “I hate to interrupt this episode of ‘Court TV,’ ” he said, drawing laughs and applause. He then sought to refocus the conversation on President Obama’s shortcomings and what he said was a need to revive the country, safe terrain for Republican primary voters.
  • Mr. Cruz seemed more comfortably in command with his needling of Mr. Trump, who was booed frequently. But then he was asked to elaborate on his suggestion earlier in the week that Mr. Trump embodied “New York values.”
  • “I think most people know exactly what New York values are: socially liberal, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, focused on money and the media,” he said.
  • But Mr. Trum
  • recalled the way that New Yorkers suffered, grieved and recovered from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — drawing applause even from Mr. Cruz.
  • “And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everyone in the world watched and loved New York and New Yorkers. And I’ll tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”
  • Mr. Bush — who had his best debate last month when he doggedly criticized Mr. Trump, but saw little bounce in his poll numbers in New Hampshire — took another pass at Mr. Trump when he urged him to “reconsider” his proposal for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.
johnsonma23

In Syrian Town Cut Off From the World, Glimpses of Deprivation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...madaya-syria.html

new york times

shared by johnsonma23 on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • In Syrian Town Cut Off From the World, Glimpses of Deprivation
  • BEIRUT, Lebanon
  • The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics
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  • And there is the relentless physical and psychological contraction of their communities,
  • “I don’t go anywhere,” said Maleka Jabir, 85, who said she inherited American citizenship from her father, a World War I veteran, and is so disabled from hunger and heart problems she can hardly walk
  • This portrait of life in Madaya is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen residents, conducted over several months and in recent days by telephone and over the Interne
  • While details of their experiences could not be independently confirmed, international aid workers who have visited the town or been in direct contact with groups on the ground provided accounts that echoed the residents’.
  • While parts of Homs and the Damascus suburbs have been blockaded for years, Madaya managed to survive relatively unscathed, until last summer
  • Both local residents and Hezbollah officials say most of the fighters in Zabadani are affiliated with a Syrian Islamist group called Ahrar al-Sham, and smaller numbers with the more moderate Free Syrian Army and the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
  • Looking for leverage, rebels allied with the local insurgents began blockading and bombarding Fouaa and Kfarya, two isolated, pro-government Shiite towns in Idlib Province, in Syria’s northwest.
  • The medical clinic in Madaya, which works with Doctors Without Borders, was bombed, and thus was moved to a basement. Mr. Mohammad, an anesthesia technician who has been acting as a doctor, said he was overwhelmed with cases he could not treat properly: broken bones, amputations, abdominal wounds
  • giving the most endangered children syrupy medicines, for the glucose, further depleting supplies.
  • Finding food was getting harder. Aid workers and residents said fighters on both sides profited from smuggling it across the lines.
johnsonma23

Amnesty is not immigration reform - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...78943240

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Voting rights advocates observe somber King holiday
  • While most of the country will spend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday remembering the peaceful nature and civil rights successes lodged by the late leader, voting rights advocates say this is a dark time for them.
  • Many might spend Monday reflecting on King's 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to push for voting equality for black Americans,
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  • voting rights advocates note that there has been a major setback in their world.
  • Also, 33 states now have Voter ID laws in place with increased identification requirements for people seeking to cast ballots
  • controversial one for civil rights advocates, who maintain that some groups of Americans, including older people and minorities, are less likely to have the sort of identification that would be required.
  • acts of civil disobedience and even a mid-April march from
  • What many view as the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has prompted civil rights advocates to take action. A coalition of 100 organizations including the NAACP will stage a string of protests
  • “I anticipate arrests, in and outside the Capitol,” Brooks said. “Congress allowing the Voting Rights Act to be gutted has disrupted our democracy … so our democracy should get back to functioning as it should.”
  • Rights that had appeared to be resolved as matters of controversy in American politics are unfortunately once again up for grabs. It’s hard to imagine what’s more American than insuring the right to vote for all Americans, and what could be more un-American than impeding it?”
  • "We are making it very clear that we're protecting the right to vote, insuring the integrity of the right to vote and getting out the vote. This is not all of us registering people to vote and waiting for November with polite patience."
  • Citizen Cruz: Our view
  • Legal case against the Canadian-born senator's eligibility is weak, but not non-existent.
  • The most boisterous exchange in Thursday night's Republican debate was not over terrorism, guns or the economy. It was over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s eligibility under the Constitution
  • to run for president because
  • “Democrats are going to be bringing a suit,” Trump predicted, adding, “There’s a big question mark on your head.”
  • the chances of any litigation proceeding and succeeding on this are zero.”
  • Cruz is as American as anybody born on U.S. soil.  And Trump, by suggesting that the Constitution’s “natural born” citizen clause could actually keep Cruz out of the White House, is trying to eliminate an oppone
  • the founders wrote that only "a natural born citizen" is eligible to be president. They  did not define the phrase further.
  • Cruz was born in Canada, but there is no doubt that he is an American citizen because his mother was a U.S. citizen.
  • 1787, the founders feared that some foreign-born interloper, perhaps from England, might come to the USA and seek the presidency for nefarious reasons
  • candidacies of others have been challenged on this point. Former Michigan governor George Romney, who was born in Mexico to two American parents and ran for the 1968 GOP nomination, was threatened with legal action before he dropped out for other reasons.
  • The overwhelming weight of legal scholarship is on Cruz’s side. Many scholars assert that an infant born to an American parent, regardless of location, acquires citizenship “at birth” and therefore passes the “natural born” test
  • They argue that the meaning of “natural born” should be viewed in the context of the 1700s, when where you were born was the controlling factor.
  • In 2008, a bipartisan Senate resolution was passed by unanimous consent, asserting that McCain was indeed a “natural born” citizen
  • If the problem can't be fixed legislatively, a constitutional amendment would be necessary. Those are hard to pass, as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, discovered after he introduced one in 2003 that would have allowed anyone who has been a citizen for 20 years, and is otherwise eligible, to become presiden
  • Amnesty is not immigration reform: Opposing view
  • There have been several legislative attempts to overhaul U.S. immigration policy over the past decade. All of them failed
  • how immigration affects the economic, social and national security interests of the American people — was, at best, an afterthought.
  • Immigration has taken center stage in the 2016 campaign because many Americans have come to recognize that it is a policy without any definable public interest objective
  • Granting amnesty — euphemistically called “a pathway to citizenship” — is not immigration reform
  • institutionalizes the government’s failure to protect the interests of the American people, and encourages still more illegal immigration.
  • amnesty benefits illegal aliens, it does not promote any public interest. Nearly half of all adult illegal aliens have not completed high schoo
  • high-productivity, high-earning workers. What it will do, over time, is make them eligible to add to the 51% of immigrant-headed households in the U.S. that rely on some form of welfare.
  • Amnesty would also exacerbate the already alarming erosion of America’s middle class, as former illegal aliens would be eligible to compete legally for all U.S. jobs and petition for millions more similarly skilled relatives to join them here.
  • The American people are seeking a new direction in the long simmering debate over immigration.
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