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Javier E

Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz: Young Silicon Valley billionaires pioneer new approach ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html

philanthropy effectiveness role model Facebook

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.
  • They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.
  • they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. They plan to announce their first major gifts in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
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  • As Tuna and Moskovitz, now 29 and 30, respectively, began to compare one possibility with another and then another, they have become pioneers in an emerging philosophy of philanthropy known as “effective altruism” — which applies evidence and reason over things like emotion and intuition to determine where one can do the most good.
  • Today, Tuna and Moskovitz have a reputation for being among Silicon Valley’s most low-key billionaires. Friends and colleagues mention that they prefer to spend their free time doing yoga, meditating and taking walks. They fly coach, share a used car and bike or take public transportation to work.
  • Early in her research, Tuna came across Peter Singer’s “The Life You Can Save” — a book she cites as the catalyst for their approach. An Australian philosopher, Singer makes the moral case for giving, arguing that many people in the developed world can do so at little cost to themselves.
  • Each topic is assigned to one of four researchers who work full-time — which include Tuna, Karnovsky and two other young whizzes from the country’s top colleges. They conduct “shallow” investigations of the ideas that involve making a few phone calls with experts and reading a few smart papers or journal articles on the subject.
  • A former hedge fund analyst, Karnovsky was frustrated that he could not compare the impact of different charities when he tried to give away $5,000 of his own one year. So he and a colleague, Elie Hassenfeld, quit their jobs and founded an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator that they dubbed GiveWell.
  • Tuna and Karnovsky approached the challenge like reporter-scientists, partnering to collect data on the universe of possible causes, evaluate them and share their findings online for anyone interested to see. As part of a joint venture between Good Ventures and GiveWell that they called the Open Philanthropy Project, they talked to foundation heads, technical experts, historians, biologists, former government officials, political campaign managers and many others.
  • “One thing I learned early on is that a well-placed donation can transform someone’s life, but a poorly placed donation can have no impact or even do harm,” Tuna said. “But it’s not at all obvious from charities’ marketing which are the best buys.”
  • The centerpiece of the team’s investigation is a giant spreadsheet, the origins of which can be traced to a Google Doc list Tuna began in 2011. She added causes as she thought of them: Malaria, microfinance, marijuana policy. The arts. Nuclear security, climate change and on and on until there were hundreds of entries.
  • “Cari and I are stewards of this capital,” Moskovitz wrote in a Quora chat in 2013 shortly before they married. In response to a question about what it feels like to be a billionaire, he said: “It’s pooled up around us right now, but it belongs to the world. We intend not to have much left when we die.”
  • They consider three questions when deciding whether a cause has promise. First, importance — how many people’s lives would be affected and by how much? Second, could it be solved, in the short-term and long-term? And third, how crowded is the space? If a lot of smart people are already thinking about the issue, the marginal impact could be less than in other areas.
  • If a topic passes this initial test, an in-depth investigation follows. That can take months and includes discussions with as many as 50 people in the field and an attempt to home in on what kind of specific project could make a difference.
  • One of the topics they zeroed in on was criminal justice reform. Tuna and her team were struck by two statistics: The United States incarcerates a larger percentage than almost any other country in the world at great fiscal cost and it has highest rate of criminal homicides in the developed world. Clearly something wasn’t working.
  • “The world is a big, complicated system,” Tuna said, “and I feel we need to be as smart as we can be in order to stand a chance of having an impact with the resources we have — which are significant in one sense but really small in comparison to the kinds of the problems we want to work on.”
Javier E

Zephyr Teachout on Sheldon Silver, Corruption and New York Politics - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ion-and-new-york-politics.html

corruption campaign political politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • fighting the kind of corruption that plagues not only New York State but the whole nation isn’t just about getting cuffs on the right guy. As with the recent conviction of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell for receiving improper gifts and loans, a fixation on plain graft misses the more pernicious poison that has entered our system.
  • Corruption exists when institutions and officials charged with serving the public serve their own ends. Under current law, campaign contributions are illegal if there is an explicit quid pro quo, and legal if there isn’t. But legal campaign contributions can be as bad as bribes in creating obligations. The corruption that hides in plain sight is the real threat to our democracy.
  • The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can’t even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day. When you spend a lifetime serving campaign donors, it may seem easy to serve them when they come with an outright bribe, because it doesn’t seem that different.
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  • The former governor of New York David A. Paterson, for example, said that he had trouble understanding where the criminality lay in the allegation that Mr. Silver accepted payments from law firms for referrals, including referrals by a doctor to whom Mr. Silver funneled state health research funds. Mr. Paterson said, “in the legal profession, people refer business all the time. And theoretically, as a speaker, you could do that as well.”
  • In our private financing system, candidates are trained to respond to campaign cash and serve donors’ interests. Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it’s not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.
  • We should take this moment to pursue fundamental reform. We must reconstitute what it means to run for office and to serve in office. We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn’t solve the problem of creating outside dependencies. New York lawmakers can’t carry water for two masters when in office.
  • We should reject the private financing of campaigns as the only model. We need to provide enough public funding for campaigns so that anyone with a broad base of support can run for office, and respond effectively to attacks, without becoming dependent on private patrons. Running for office shouldn’t be a job defined by permanent begging at the feet of the wealthiest donors in the country.
  • Corruption is about greed and private interests put ahead of the public good. Whether influence is bought through a bribe, outside spending, outside income or campaign contributions, the public suffers in the same way.
Javier E

The Coming Democratic Schism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-young-democrats-values.html

generation political attitudes democrat wall street lobbying liberalism

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • According to Pew, the older group believes, 73-20, that “government should do more to solve problems.” Only 44 percent of the younger group agrees — and of younger respondents, 50 percent believe that “government is trying to do too much.”
  • Eighty-three percent of the older group of Democratic voters believes that “circumstances” are to blame for poverty; only 9 percent blame “a lack of effort.” The younger group of pro-Democratic voters is split, with 47 percent blaming circumstances and 42 percent blaming lack of effort.
  • Asked by Pew to choose between two statements — “Racial discrimination is the main reason why many blacks can’t get ahead” and “Blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition” – the older Democratic cohort blamed discrimination, by an 80 to 10 margin. In contrast, only 19 percent of the younger group of Democrats blamed discrimination, with 68 percent saying that blacks “are mostly responsible for their own condition.”
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  • A 56 percent majority of the younger group of Democrats believes that “Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts,” with just 36 percent believing that Wall Street hurts the economy. Older Democrats have almost exactly the opposite view. 56 percent believe that Wall Street hurts the economy; 36 percent believe it helps.
  • An overwhelming majority of the older cohort, 83-12, believes that “government should do more to help needy Americans, even if it means more debt,” while a majority of the younger Democratic respondents, 56-39, believes “government cannot afford to do much more.”
  • Some 91 percent of the older group said the “U.S. needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights,” and just 6 percent said the “U.S. has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights.” 67 percent of the younger group said the United States has done enough for blacks, and 28 percent said that the country needs to do more to give blacks equal rights.
  • By a margin of 70-35, millennials in the Reason survey chose “competition is primarily good; it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas” over “competition is primarily harmful; it brings out the worst in people.” By 64-25, millennials picked “profit is generally good because it encourages businesses to provide valued products to attract customers” as opposed to “profit is generally bad because it encourages businesses to take advantage of their customers and employees.”
  • every one of the prospective Republican presidential candidates pollsters mentioned — Christie, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal — received more noes than yeses from millennials, by margins ranging from two noes for every yes to four noes for every yes
  • When asked by Reason if they would consider voting for Clinton, 53 percent of those surveyed said yes, and 27 percent said no. Both Joe Biden, the vice president, and Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, received more yeses than noes.
  • In some other respects, the millennial voters studied by Reason appear to hold orthodox liberal views: they support more spending to help the poor, even if it means higher taxes; government action to guarantee a living wage, enough for everyone to eat and have a place to sleep; and a government guarantee of health insurance. Conversely, majorities of the same voters believe that wealth should be distributed according to achievement as opposed to need, and that “people should be allowed to keep what they produce, even if there are others with greater needs.”
  • “You may have issue differences within the Democratic Party, but they become irrelevant when confronted by a Republican Party determined to turn elections into cultural conflicts,” Greenberg said in a phone interview. “These differences don’t matter in the context of a Republican party that brings out the commonality of the Democratic Party.”
  • Money, in Leege’s view, will be likely to trump the demographic trends favoring Democrats. Continue reading the main story 378 Comments Leege raises a fundamental question. The Democratic Party could well gain strength politically as it edges away from economic liberalism to a coalition determined to protect personal liberties from conservative moral constraint.
  • Corporate America faces a divided Democratic Party, vulnerable to the kind of lobbying pressures that the business elite specializes in. Under this scenario, Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce will enjoy increased leverage in the policy-making arenas of Congress and the executive branch despite – or even because – of Democratic political success.
Javier E

'Dear White People,' About Racial Hypocrisy at a College - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...al-hypocrisy-at-a-college.html

white supremacy university movie

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • “Dear White People” brilliantly uses the complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic paradox of interpersonal interaction. We are all stereotypes in one another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in our own minds. Somehow, within the compass of a compact, modestly budgeted (and independently financed) feature, Mr. Simien holds the antics of an astonishing variety of recognizable human types up to critical scrutiny. At the same time, he explores the desires and frustrations of a motley collection of plausible human beings with amused compassion.
  • “Dear White People” does not point the way toward a happy, huggy, post-racial future. Nor does it prophesy a revolutionary fire next time. And it does not pretend that “race” is a symmetrical problem to be solved by acts of reciprocal good will on both sides. This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves on their diversity and tolerance. It is, in other words, about how the distance from a place like Winchester to a place like Ferguson, Mo., is not as great as some of us might wish or suppose.
  • Mr. Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy.
sarahbalick

A Tearful Obama Announces New Executive Actions on Gun Control - 0 views

mic.com/...xecutive-action-on-gun-control

obama gun control actions policy

shared by sarahbalick on 06 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • "The United States of America is not the only country on Earth with violent or dangerous people," Obama said during a press conference surrounded by loved ones of victims of gun violence. "We are not inherently more prone to violence — but we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency."
  • We become numb to it, and start thinking this is normal," Obama said. "And instead of thinking about how to solve the problem, this has become one of our polarized, partisan debates." 
  • "It doesn't matter where you conduct your business: from a store, at gun shows or over the internet. If you're in the business of selling firearms, you must get a license and conduct background checks," the White House said in a statement emailed Monday night, outlining the policy.
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  • The executive actions also call for a $500 million investment to improve access to mental health services, as well as changes to bureaucratic rules that impede the ability of the current national background check system to tap into databases that track people who are banned from obtaining firearms for specific mental health reasons.
  • 200 new examiners and staff to help manage that process. 
  • "The gun lobby might be holding Congress hostage. But they cannot hold America hostage," Obama said. 
  • Gun violence, typically brought to the national spotlight in the wake of particularly brutal mass shootings, has been one of the few issues that has repeatedly moved the president to unabashed displays of anger and sadness in the public eye
  • "There's a general consensus in America about what needs to be done," Obama said Tuesday.
katyshannon

Abbas Says PA Not Bound by Agreements With Israel - Diplomacy and Defense - Haaretz - 2 views

www.haaretz.com/...1.678271

israel palestine politics crisis history culture policy

shared by katyshannon on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • NEW YORK – The Palestinian Authority will no longer uphold the agreements it has signed with Israel over the last 20 years, PA President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday
  • Abbas said Israel “must assume all of its responsibilities as an occupying power
  • The State of Palestine, based on the 4th of June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, is a state under occupation,” Abbas continued. He urged the United Nations to grant the Palestinians international protection and said any country that hasn’t yet recognized Palestine should do so forthwith.
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  • Abbas used the speech to assail Israel, accusing it of systematically violating all its agreements with the Palestinians and of trying to destroy the two-state solution.
  • “We expect and call on the [Palestinian] Authority and its leader to act responsibly and accede to the proposal of the prime minister of Israel and enter into direct negotiations with Israel without preconditions,” the PMO said. “The fact that he – time and again – has refused to do so is the best possible proof of the fact he does not intend to reach a peace agreement.”
  • A response to the speech issued by the Prime Minister’s Office didn’t relate directly to Abbas’ statement.  
  • Abbas also dwelled at length on hate crimes perpetrated by Jews against Palestinians and accused Israel of protecting the perpetrators rather than catching them. He also accused Israel of establishing an apartheid regime in the West Bank.
  • “How can a state claiming to be an oasis of democracy and claiming that its courts and security apparatus function according to the law accept the existence of so-called ‘price tag’ gangs and other terrorist organizations that terrorize our people, their property and holy sites, all under the sight of the Israeli army and police, which do not deter or punish, but rather provide them with protection?” he demanded.
  • Responding to speeches by other world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which focused mainly on the battle against ISIS, Abbas declared that any war on terror must begin with solving the Palestinian problem.
  • Immediately after his speech, Abbas attended a festive ceremony in which the Palestinian flag was raised at UN headquarters for the first time.
  • U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the gathering that he doesn’t consider Israeli-Palestinian peace an “impossible dream” and that Washington remains committed to peace talks.
  • katyshannon on 01 Oct 15
     
    Abbas says Palestine is no longer bound by agreements with Israel
  • horowitzza on 03 Oct 15
     
    This man, Abbas, is an anti-semite, and has made it very clear that he does not want peace: "Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah," and "The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours and they (the Jews) have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." 'I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land' "I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and the birthplace of Jesus Christ peace be upon him, to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people…" He did not even reference the Jewish connection to Israel "In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli-civilian or soldier-in our lands." It is very difficult to believe anything he said in his speech in this article. This kind of article is the propaganda that is spreading anti Israel and anti-semitic views throughout the world.
jlessner

America's Stacked Deck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...americas-stacked-deck.html

politics history US crisis policy

shared by jlessner on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor kid, according to Robert Putnam of Harvard University.
  • Forbes’s wealthiest 100 are worth as much as all 42 million African-Americans, the report says.
  • So it’s healthy for American voters to be demanding change. But when societies face economic pain, they sometimes turn to reforms, and other times to scapegoats (like refugees this year
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  • The rise of inequality has complex roots, and some aren’t easily solved. For example, the empowerment of women, coupled with the tendency of people to marry those like themselves, means that high-earning men increasingly pair with high-earning women to form super-high-earning families.
  • It seems to me to make more sense to target solutions than scapegoats, but sense is often in short supply in politics.
  • So American voters are right to feel angry. Yet the challenge is not just to diagnose the problem but also to prescribe the right fixes and achieve them in this political environment.
  • So may the insurrection gain ground but be channeled not by punishing scapegoats, but by pursuing reforms that make the system work better for ordinary Americans.
Javier E

The Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...413140

suicide culture teen pressure high school silicon valley

shared by Javier E on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.
  • They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average
  • In the past couple of years, other best sellers have sounded a similar note. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor who contributes to this magazine, argues in Excellent Sheep that elite education “manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.”
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  • One of the two major causes of distress, Luthar found, was the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits.”
  • From their answers, Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success.
  • Middle-class kids, she told me, generally do not live with the expectation that they should go to Stanford or earn $200,000 a year. “If I’ve never been to the moon,” she said of middle-class families, “why would I expect my kids to go there?” The yardstick for the children of the meritocratic elite is different, and it can intimidate as much as it can empower.
  • The second major cause of distress that Luthar identified was perhaps more surprising: Affluent kids felt remarkably isolated from their parents.
  • The kids in the affluent communities she studied felt their parents to be no more available to them, either emotionally or physically, than the kids in severe poverty did.
  • Some of the measures Luthar used were objective: Did the family eat dinner together, or hang out in the evenings? Here, she discovered that some busy parents would leave adolescents alone in the afternoon and evening and often weren’t home at all during those hours
  • Children had the sense that their parents monitored their activities and cared deeply about how they were spending their time, but that didn’t translate into feeling close. Many children felt they were being prodded toward very specific goals and behaviors by parental cues, some subtle, some less so.
  • a feeling of closeness to parents was inversely linked to household income, meaning that the most-affluent kids felt the most alienated.
  • The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania warns of the dangers of insisting that admission to an elite college is necessary for a successful life.
  • But it turns out that this combination can be just as hard on a child’s well-being.
  • Since Levine wrote The Price of Privilege, she’s watched the stress in the Bay Area and in affluent communities all over the country become more pervasive and more acute.
  • Now, she reports, the teenagers have no sense of agency. They still complain bitterly about all the same things, but they feel they have no choice.
  • Many have also fallen prey to what Levine calls a “mass delusion” that there is but one path to a successful life, and that it is very narrow
  • Adolescents no longer typically identify parents or peers as the greatest source of their stress, Levine says. They point to school. But that itself may suggest a submission of sorts—the unquestioned adoption of parental norms.
  • In March, after spending two days among Palo Alto’s parents and civic leaders, Luthar came to see the community, still in shock over the suicides, as hovering somewhere between fear and denial.
  • The meeting she attended with select parents, scholars, mental-health professionals, and community leaders was academically rigorous and yielded many important insights. But it was “eerie” in its almost complete lack of feeling
  • “There are a lot of very hard truths that are just not being spoken.”
  • Gunn is more than 40 percent Asian, and some non-Asian parents, particularly ones who’d grown up in town when the Asian population was smaller, felt the shift was poisoning the culture of the entire school.
  • Her first semester, Chiu got an F on a geometry test, which “totally traumatized me.” Her relationship with her parents started to fray, “because it just took too much energy to speak in a polite tone of voice.” She began to dread swim practice and even Girl Scouts and band, “but I didn’t want to be a quitter.” She remembers wishing that someone had broken up with her, or that she was anorexic, or that she had some reason to explain to her parents why she felt so sad. “I also felt like I was already saying that I was too stressed, and nobody—neither my parents nor my teachers—seemed to care or take me seriously.
  • well-educated parents are quick to distance themselves from the Tiger Mom. We might admire her children’s accomplishments, but we tend to believe these can be coaxed out of a child through applause, not scolding. In fact, this particular combination of lavish praise and insistence on achievement defines our era of protective, meritocratic parenting
  • Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.
  • Providing praise and love when a child performs especially well can look like healthy parenting, he says, because the parents are giving the child more of a good thing. But if praise comes only when a child succeeds, the child is likely to develop a sense that his or her parents’ affection depends upon good grades, or touchdowns, or mastery of a religious text, or whatever the parents’ priorities might be.
  • The aim of healthy parenting, Assor says, should not be to shower children only with praise and trophies, or to encourage self-esteem based on no real achievements. It should be to disentangle love from the project of parental or pedagogical guidance
  • Giving specific, positive feedback about something a child has tried hard at, or critical yet constructive feedback when a child fails, is perfectly appropriate. “But being warm and nice is a different matter,” he says. “We want to be nice and warm also when our kids do not achieve and when they do not try hard to achieve.”
  • The hope is that, secure in love, a child can experiment more freely and begin to find his or her own voice.
  • With the help of therapists and time, Chiu could better explain what she had experienced—depression, the dangers of not sleeping enough. She learned that her idea that she could escape by manufacturing a mental-health crisis was itself a sign of a mental-health crisis.
  • Not atypically for people who come to consider suicide, she’d lost her ability to think clearly or solve problems, and ended up trapped in a tunnel ruminating about escape, until self-destruction became the only light she could see.
  • Almost by definition, suicide points to underlying psychological vulnerability. The thinking behind it is often obsessive and then impulsive; a kid can be ruminating about the train for a long time and then one night something ordinary—a botched quiz, a breakup—leads him or her to the tracks.
  • the closer I got to the heart of this story, the less I felt I understood that link. Some details neatly fit the narrative that academic pressure has caused lethal amounts of stress in Palo Alto—Taylor Chiu’s experience, for example. Will Dickens, who died in 2009, had a learning disability, and his mother, Janet Dixon-Dickens, told me he never forgot it at Gunn. Cameron Lee, on the other hand, wasn’t obviously oppressed by schoolwork, and neither was J.P. Blanchard, or Sonya Raymakers, a girl who died in June 2009, soon after being accepted into her dream program at New York University.
  • In these days of assumed meritocracy, where children can be turned into anything, we admire them as displays of remarkable engineering, to be tweaked and fine-tuned into bilingual perfection. What we’ve lost, perhaps, is a sense that there may be things about them we can’t know or understand, and that that mysterious quality, separate from us, is what we should marvel at.
  • Admitting we don’t entirely know why teenagers kill themselves isn’t an invitation to do nothing to prevent it from happening. It’s just a call for humility, a short pause to acknowledge that a sense of absolute certainty about what children should do or be or how they should operate is part of what landed us here.
sarahbalick

COP21: Obama praises Paris climate change agreement - CNN.com - 0 views

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

obama paris climate change

shared by sarahbalick on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • , the agreement would set an ambitious goal of halting average warming at no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures -- and of striving for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible.
  • "This didn't save the planet," Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said of the agreement. "But it may have saved the chance of saving the planet."
  • If this [the Paris Agreement] is adopted as this currently stands then countries have united around a historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis."
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  • Scientists and policy experts say that would require the world to move off fossil fuels between about 2050 and the end of the century. To reach the more ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius goal, some researchers say the world will need to reach zero net carbon emissions sometime between about 2030 and 2050.
  • That level of warming is measured as the average temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.
  • Failure to set a cap could result in superdroughts, deadlier heat waves, mass extinctions of plants and animals, megafloods and rising seas that could wipe some island countries off the map. The only way to reach the goal, scientists say, is to eliminate fossil fuels.
  • The entire agreement enters into force once 55 countries (who must account for 55% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions) have ratified it.
  • The agreement calls for developed countries to raise at least $100 billion annually in order to assist developing countries.
  • China and the United States, respectively, account for about 24% and 14% of total greenhouse gas emissions
  • That means if the world's biggest polluters don't sign off on the agreement, enacting it could prove challenging.
  • Rather, it sets up a bottom-up system in which each country sets its own goal -- which the agreement calls a "nationally determined contribution" -- and then must explain how it plans to reach that objective. Those pledges must be increased over time, and starting in 2018 each country will have to submit new plans every five years.
  • Many countries actually submitted their new plans before COP21 started last month -- but those pledges aren't enough to keep warming below the 2 degrees target
  • Another issue, according to observers, was whether there would be reparations paid to countries that will see irreparable damage from climate change but have done almost nothing to cause it.
  • The agreement doesn't mandate exactly how much each country must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
  • resident Barack Obama praised a landmark climate change agreement approved Saturday in Paris, saying it could be "a turning point for the world."
  • "The Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis,"
  • "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
  • "I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world," Obama said, calling the agreement "the best chance we have to save the one planet that we've got."
  • The accord achieved one major goal. It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures and strives for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) if possible.
alexdeltufo

Paris attacks | Andrew J. Bacevich: A war the West cannot win - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless,” he vowed.
  • Greater Middle East and periodically spilling into the outside world.
  • The Soviet Union spent all of the 1980s attempting to pacify Afghanistan and succeeded only in killing a million or so Afghans while creating an incubator for Islamic radicalism.
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  • By the time US troops withdrew in 2011, something like 200,000 Iraqis had died, most of the them civilians.
  • Collectively they find themselves locked in a protracted conflict with Islamic radicalism, with ISIS but one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon
  • few Americans retain any appetite for undertaking further large-scale hostilities in the Islamic world.
  • Their reluctance to do so is understandable and appropriate.
  • Yet that qualifies as a theoretical possibility at best. Years of fighting in Afghanistan exhausted the Soviet Union and contributed directly to its subsequent collapse. Years of fighting in Iraq used up whatever “Let’s roll!”
  • Our arsenals are bigger, our weapons more sophisticated, our generals better educated in the art of war, our fighters better trained at waging it.
  • Even where armed intervention has achieved a semblance of tactical success — the ousting of some unsavory dictator, for example — it has yielded neither reconciliation nor willing submission nor even sullen compliance.
  • In proposing to pour yet more fuel on that fire, Hollande demonstrates a crippling absence of imagination,
  • It’s past time for the West, and above all for the United States as the West’s primary military power, to consider trying something different.
  • Instead of attempting to impose its will on the Greater Middle East, it should erect barriers to protect itself from the violence emanating from that quarter.
  • Such an approach posits that, confronted with the responsibility to do so, the peoples of the Greater Middle East will prove better equipped to solve their problems than are policy makers back in Washington, London, or Paris.
  • It rests on this core principle: Do no (further) harm.
  • The rest of us would do well to see it as a moment to reexamine the assumptions that have enmeshed the West in a war that it cannot win and should not perpetuate.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Andrew J. Bacevich 
maddieireland334

Donald Trump Is Not a Fascist - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...424449

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “The brand of fascism was invented and exported by Italians,” Vittorio Foa, a Resistance hero and the father of Italy’s Republican Constitution, used to quip.
  • Using the label not only belittles past tragedies and obscures future dangers, but also indicts his supporters, who have real grievances that mainstream politicians ignore at their peril. America should tackle the demons Trump unleashes in 2016, not tar him by association with ideas and tactics he doesn’t even know about.
  • Italy’s fascists capitalized on similar themes in a different era of global uncertainty; in their case, it was the unemployment, veterans’ resentments, unions’ strikes, and political violence that beset the country following World War I.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • But Trump is, fundamentally, a blustering political opportunist courting votes in a democratic system; he has not called for the violent overthrow of the system itself
  • Nearly 30 years after Il Duce Mussolini, Italy’s dictator from 1922 to 1945, was executed by a partisan firing squad, his ideas were still wreaking havoc across the country; the 1970s were years of clashes between neofascist and communist terrorists that we in Italy called the Anni di Piombo, or years of lead.
  • In October of that year, on a day when I was on duty selling the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, I watched nervously as a squadraccia, a gang of fascist thugs, paraded across the street from me in full arms, heavy bats in hand, chains wrapped around their chests, black helmets on their heads, brass knuckles shining.
  • This was the menace at the heart of fascism, defined by the display of organized violence and terrorism to win political power, and the ultimate imposition of a totalitarian system hostile to capitalism and individual freedom.
  • Dad had often reminisced about growing up under Il Duce, calmly noting that “In school they taught us that ‘Il Duce’ will soon trash America and those Negroes.’ And I believed them.” It was a Sicilian barber, just returned to Italy after spending much of his life as a steelworker in Pittsburgh, who changed his mind. “I have seen America, worked in America,” the barber told my father. “America is too strong for us.”
  • Trump, too, is benefitting from voter discontent. Polls show that many Trump supporters come from the white middle- and working-class, a group whose status and salaries have stagnated for decades; these voters are evidently looking for a leader ready to dignify, if not solve, their problems.
  • From Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Mussolini’s speeches on the Palazzo Venezia balcony, fascists told the crowd openly what their goals were and kept a nefarious, disciplined pace to realize them. Mussolini boasted about reducing Italy’s Parliament “to a fascist barrack,” “stopping any antifascist brain from thinking,” and “creating a new Roman Empire.”
  • Trump has no clear plan of any kind. He is not about to dissolve the Democratic Party and banish the Clintons, Obama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jimmy Fallon to exile on Randall’s Island.
  • Men and women left in the cold by globalization and rising inequality, scared of immigrants often lumped together with foreign terrorists in the media and the popular imagination: This is not the base for the new Western World Fascist Party, but it is a powder keg powerful enough to inflame societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
  • It will not destroy Western democracies, but it may poison them. Witch-hunts, racism, repression, and state surveillance may plague a democracy without morphing it into a fascist dictatorship.
  • As Western democracies continue to face the crises of wars and terrorism abroad, and growing inequality and cultural and political unrest at home, it would be a tragedy to go through them so bitterly divided.
maddieireland334

Why This Progressive Is Really Excited About Hillary | Jan Schakowsky - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...rogressive-is-r_b_8998288.html

Progressive Clinton Election US

shared by maddieireland334 on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • According to conventional punditry, I'm supposed to be lacking enthusiasm, nearly slapping my face to stay awake. But instead I can hardly wait to gather some friends and head to Iowa like I did in the bitter cold of 2008 for Barack Obama.
  • When asked why I, a long time progressive activist who has worked closely with Bernie Sanders in the Congress, am so strongly supporting Hillary, my answer is simple. I really, really want a pro-woman woman to be the most powerful person in the world.
  • We are living in a time when the politics are as anti-woman as I have seen in decades.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Worse, though, are the Republican candidates competing for who can be the most against a woman exercising her Constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. And the Winners are...Marco Rubio who thinks there should be no exceptions to a ban on abortions, not even in cases when the pregnancy results from rape or would threaten the life of the woman, while Ben Carson and Ted Cruz agree that a victim of rape or incest can't have an abortion -- or maybe even the morning after pill.
  • In their budget, House Republicans voted almost unanimously to eliminate the federal program that funds family planning -- a remarkable position for people against abortion
  • I've tried to explain to my Republican colleagues that you can significantly reduce abortions by guaranteeing access to effective contraceptives, but they don't seem to grasp the connection.
  • I am thrilled to think that my President will be a smart woman who has been a tireless advocate for women and children her entire adult life, a person who has experienced pregnancy, who has had her period, and who declared in front of the whole world in Beijing in 1995 that "Women's rights are human rights."
  • A woman in the White House won't solve all these problems, you say, and you're right. But I guarantee you women's concerns will move up on the national agenda from day one of a Hillary Clinton Administration.
  • I am really sick of the attacks on women -- on our health care choices, on our pay checks, on our ability to raise healthy children, on our hopes for a secure retirement.
  • That's why I am going to do everything I can as a member of Congress, a mother, and a proud grandmother like Hillary Clinton, to make her President of the United States. My heart beats a little faster just thinking about it. You can say I'm excited.
johnsonma23

North Korea: How to get serious with it (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

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

korea opinion US

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • How to get serious with North Korea
  • (CNN)North Korea's nuclear test last week follows a well-worn pattern that spans over a quarter century: Resort to periodic provocations, wait out the flurry of condemnations
  • All the while as Pyongyang advances its nuclear and missile technolog
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The record of the past quarter-century of nuclear diplomacy vis-à-vis Pyongyang is distinguished by blame, denial, and fantasy masquerading as policy.
  • The only way to change this equation is to persuade Pyongyang that its regime preservation is dependent on reform and disarmament.
  • Today, China will yet again make token gestures like signing on to U.N. Security Council resolutions while repeatedly violating those resolutions and actually increasing trade with Pyongyang
  • Second, delegitimize Kim's rule in the eyes of his people and the world by engaging them through broadcasting and other information operations directed at the North Korean people
  • Such tactics proved lucrative during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, when the U.S. appeased Pyongyang with some $1.3 billion in effectively unconditional aid. Instead, we must show Pyongyang that time is not on its side.
  • Pyongyang's first long-range missile test on August 31, 1998, led to the Clinton administration's reengagement of the North
  • First, block the Kim Jong Un regime's offshore hard currency reserves and income with financial sanction
  • But all Beijing has done so far is demonstrate a disingenuous pattern of diplomatic ambidexterity.
  • China will not solve the North Korea problem for the United States until China sees the Kim regime as a financial liability
  • A regime that systematically brutalizes its own people, deliberately starves its population and remains unaccountable to its people or the norms of civilization will feel little moral restraint about making war on its neighbors or arming terrorists.
  • Recent U.N. reports confirm that North Korea continues to rely on the dollar, and its access to the dollar system, to move its streams of hard currency, much of it derived from proliferation and illicit activities, in and out of its vast offshore deposits.
  • sanctions against North Korea have failed to achieve their objectives.
  • The Treasury Department has blocked the assets of Sudanese officials for human rights violations, of Iranian entities for censorship, of the leaders of Belarus and Zimbabwe for undermining democratic processes or institutions, and of Russian officials and financiers for aggression against a neighboring country
  • It has imposed comprehensive anti-money laundering restrictions on Iran and Myanmar, but not North Korea, the only state in the world known to counterfeit U.S. currency.
  • Until Washington applies sufficient financial pressure to threaten the survival of the regime in Pyongyang, it will lack sufficient leverage for diplomacy to work. T
  • The North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which this Tuesday passed the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly, would codify this strategy and require the administration to keep this pressure in place until it verifies North Korea's disarmament and humanitarian reforms.
nolan_delaney

Migrant men and European women | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...pect-values-such-tolerance-and

european immigration Syrian Crisis assimilation cultural imperialsim

shared by nolan_delaney on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • But Europe never joined. The task of absorbing the migrants has been left to Germany and Sweden
  • so far identified are mostly Moroccan or Algerian, not Syrian. There really is a cultural gulf between rich, liberal, secular
  • Europe and some of the countries from which recent migrants come
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • More than 90% of Tunisians and Moroccans believe that a wife should always obey her husband. Only 14% of Iraqi Muslims and 22% of Jordanians think a woman should be allowed to initiate a divorce
  • When it comes to assimilating new arrivals, Europe could learn a thing or two from America, which has a better record in this regard. It is not “culturally imperialist” to teach migrants that they must respect both the law and local norms such as tolerance and sexual equality. And it is essential to make it as easy as possible for them to work. This serves an economic purpose: young foreign workers more than pay their way and can help solve the problem of an ageing Europe. It also serves a cultural one: immigrants who work assimilate far more quickly than those who are forced to sit around in ghettos. In the long run most children of migrants will adopt core European values, but the short run matters too.
  • nolan_delaney on 18 Jan 16
     
    Opinion article about the assimilation of immigrants in Europe and the dilemma reflected by the situation that occurred in cologne.  The article mentions "cultural imperialism", and the authors opinions of the term would make for very interesting debates.
Javier E

Opinion | I'm for Affirmative Action. Can You Change My Mind? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-can-you-change-my-mind.html

affirmative action racism college admissions

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true
  • In context, it’s clear that Chief Justice Roberts means “The way to stop discrimination against any given race is to stop discriminating against all races.”
  • over the past 50 years, the idea that race should not matter in judgments of merit has become widely accepted among Americans. Affirmative action, however, denies this: When the purpose is sufficiently worthy, it’s right to prefer minority over majority applicants (and even to prefer some minorities over other minorities, such as Asian-Americans).
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • it does seem plausible: If you think it’s wrong to discriminate against minority applicants, shouldn’t you also think it’s wrong to discriminate against majority (white) applicants? If so, you shouldn’t support affirmative action, since it allows admitting minorities rather than whites precisely because of their race.
  • The last step, then, in the defense of affirmation action in college admissions is an appeal to the moral demand to compensate for the damage done to by minorities by a long history of racial discrimination. Sotomayor elaborates: “Race matters in part because of the long history of racial minorities being denied access to the political process. … Race also matters because of persistent racial inequality in society — inequality that cannot be ignored and that has produced stark socioeconomic disparities …. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”
  • The straightforward answer is the underrepresentation of minorities in elite colleges and universities, where the percentage of minorities is far below their percentage of the population. So, for example, blacks make up 15 percent of the college-age population but only 6 percent of those enrolled at the top 100 private and public schools. There’s little hope of improvement without further action, since the figures have scarcely changed since 1980
  • The underrepresentation does not seem due to admissions committees’ prejudices, conscious or unconscious, that blind them to the objective credentials of minority applicants. Those rejected have lower test scores and less impressive academic and extracurricular achievements.
  • Some argue that these standard criteria are themselves unfair and that other factors, such as strength of character, are at least as important. Writing at The Washington Post, the Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and the venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith suggest that it may be “more about grit than GPAs.” But judgment about moral and emotional qualities can be highly subjective, and there’s no reason to think that over all, minority students are superior in these qualities.
  • Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests an answer in her response to Chief Justice Roberts’s famous comment: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.
  • So the question becomes, what purpose justifies preferring minority applicants? What problem do we need affirmative action to solve?
  • he connection would have to lie, as Sotomayor suggests, in the present-day residues, the stubborn structural effects of centuries of mistreatment, gradually diminishing but still an undeserved burden.
  • The burden shows up in both economic and social terms. The wealth (total value of home, savings, investments, etc.) of middle-class white families is about four times that of middle-class black families. This gives white families a decided edge in their ability to survive financial setbacks and resources to provide a better education for their children
  • Similarly, due to restrictive real estate practices, wealthier blacks still often live in poorer neighborhoods than comparable whites do, reducing educational and cultural opportunities
  • There are also psychological effects: Black children live in a world where their very appearance presents them as “others,” often objects of either uneasy suspicion or patronizing sympathy.
  • So it’s hard to deny that blacks as a whole face a distinctive set of disadvantages that are primarily due to the still effective legacy of slavery.
  • But why think affirmative action will be an appropriate remedy?
  • Chief Justice Roberts and others suggest that simply knowing that they are at an elite school in large part because of their race will increase minority students’ alienation and self-doubt. To this, one common response is that athletes and legacy admissions don’t seem bothered by such concerns. But they at least can see their admission as due to their own or their families’ distinctive achievements.
  • why shouldn’t black students be proud to see themselves as very talented people who are a vanguard in one small effort to undo the evils of their history? And shouldn’t they expect that their children and grandchildren will move further and further toward a world where that history will eventually become truly past?
Javier E

Netherlands PM uses Britain's Brexit 'chaos' as cautionary tale | World news | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rexit-chaos-as-cautionary-tale

netherlands uk moderation brexit compromise history crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • In a full-page advert in the Algemeen Dagblad, Rutte said he saw the Netherlands, “a country that isn’t perfect but where we do make progress”, as a “precious possession” that belonged to everyone but “was brittle … and can easily break”
  • He compared the country to “a fragile vase” held by its 17 million “ordinary and exceptional” citizens who “do not only want a good life for themselves and those around them, but also want to contribute to the happiness of others”.
  • Making sure the vase stays in one piece often requires “compromises … in which difficult problems are solved in a sensible way,” he said: “I almost never get my way. I water down my demands because I have a responsibility to keep that vase intact.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • People who refuse to compromise and work together are “gripping the vase so tightly that it breaks”, Rutte, who has been prime minister since 2010, continued. There were examples of societies that have collectively “dropped the vase”, he said. “Look at Britain. There, the country’s politicians and people have forgotten what they have achieved together. And now they are caught up in chaos,” Rutte wrote.
  • Analysts have calculated a no-deal Brexit would knock 4.25% off Dutch GDP.
  • “If anyone in the Netherlands thinks Nexit is a good idea,” he said, “just look at England and see the enormous damage it does.”
  • he compared those stirring up division in the Netherlands to “screaming sideline football dads”. There were plenty in politics, he said, “shouting stuff into microphones because they know there will never be a majority for it, so they need never be responsible for the consequences”.
Javier E

Opinion | The Racism Inside Fire Departments - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...m-inside-fire-departments.html

racism fire hiring

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Despite a rich history of black firefighting heroes that goes back to the beginnings of a professionalized service in the early 19th century, firefighting in this country is stained by a tradition of exclusion. Post-segregation, discrimination was reinforced through deep-rooted nepotism and cronyism. For those whose great-grandfather, grandfather and father weren’t firefighters — and especially for applicants with the wrong color, gender or sexuality — training and testing became an impermeable barrier. Notoriously, white male recruits received special mentoring and reduced scrutiny by those in charge of hiring.
  • problems are system-deep. To begin to solve them, local fire department leaders must step up their efforts to support and enforce inclusivity. We should prioritize hiring fire chiefs who are fully committed to dismantling nepotism and tackling those professional traditions that degrade opportunity. We need an impartial, standardized and professional process for testing at entry level and on promotional exams to inoculate against the effects of bias and favoritism. Fire departments must enforce workplace rules already in place.
Javier E

Opinion | It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...technology-gig-economy.html

work technology job insecurity flexibility social context

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes.
  • This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and other shortcomings of the gig economy. For it reminds us that far from being an unavoidable consequence of technological progress, the nature of work always remains a matter of social choice. It is not a result of an algorithm; it is a collection of decisions by corporations and policymakers
  • In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people’s relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home.
  • The same goes for today’s digital revolution. While often described as a second machine age, our current historical moment is better understood as a second industrious revolution. It has been underway for at least 40 years, encompassing the collapse, since the 1970s, of the relatively secure wage-work economy of the postwar era — and the rise of post-industrialism and the service economy.
  • Over these four decades we have seen an increase in the use of day laborers, office temps, management consultants, contract assemblers, adjunct professors, Blackwater mercenaries and every other kind of worker filing an I.R.S. form 1099. These jobs span the income ranks, but they share what all work seems to have in common in the post-1970s economy: They are temporary and insecure
  • In the last 10 years, 94 percent of net new jobs have appeared outside of traditional employment. Already approximately one-third of workers, and half of young workers, participate in this alternative world of work, either as a primary or a supplementary source of income.
  • services like Uber and online freelance markets like TaskRabbit were created to take advantage of an already independent work force; they are not creating it. Their technology is solving the business and consumer problems of an already insecure work world. Uber is a symptom, not a cause.
  • Today’s smartphone app is an easy way to hire a temp, but is it really that much easier than picking up a phone was in 1950?
  • shortly after World War II, a Milwaukee man named Elmer Winter founded Manpower, the first major temp agency, to supply emergency secretaries. But by the end of the ’50s, Winter had concluded that the future growth of Manpower was in replacing entire work forces
  • persuading companies to abandon how they operated was easier said than done, even though Winter could readily demonstrate that it would be cheaper. Few companies took him up on his offer. Higher profits were possible, but not as important, in the lingering wake of the Great Depression, as the moral compact between employer and employee
  • Big corporations had always had their critics, but no one before the ’70s would have thought that smaller companies would be better run than large ones. Large companies had resources, economies of scale, professional managers, lots of options. Yet terms like “small” and “efficient” and “flexible” would come to seem like synonyms. And with the rise of the lean corporation, work forces became expendable and jobs more precarious.
  • for the vast majority of workers, the “freedom” of the gig economy is just the freedom to be afraid. It is the severing of obligations between businesses and employees. It is the collapse of the protections that the people of the United States, in our laws and our customs, once fought hard to enshrine.
  • We can’t turn back the clock, but neither is job insecurity inevitable. Just as the postwar period managed to make industrialization benefit industrial workers, we need to create new norms, institutions and policies that make digitization benefit today’s workers. Pundits have offered many paths forward — “portable” benefits, universal basic income, worker reclassification — but regardless of the option, the important thing to remember is that we do have a choice.
Javier E

America just won the world's hardest math contest. Again. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8ffb-5de6d5e49ada_story.html

immigration math contest

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • We typically think of immigrants as working as manual laborers in construction, plumbing, hospitality and agriculture.
  • But this is not the whole story. Immigrants are high achievers in some of the most challenging vocations, such as mathematics, physics and computer science — all necessary for a technologically reliant society. Each of these fields requires immense dedication and hard work. Mathematics is perhaps the most mentally taxing of these disciplines.
  • By welcoming and giving opportunities to the Lins, Singhs, Steins, Huangs, Hossains, McArthurs, Onahs, Garcias and Rudenkos of the world — who are eager to learn the difficult math, solve the difficult physics problems and write the difficult code — America renews itself and makes itself “great again,
Javier E

Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It's unfor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...al-negligence-its-unforgivable

global warming negligence criminal denial

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • humans are not yet beyond saving themselves from the worst ravages of global warming. There’s fight in us yet, even if it’s a bit shapeless.
  • The problem – and it’s an existential threat both profound and perverse – is that those who lead us and have power over our shared destiny are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence
  • Worse than that, their policies, language, patronal obligations and acts of bad faith are poisoning us, training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Business as usual is robbing people of hope, white-anting the promise of change
  • The message implicit in our governments’ refusal to act is that we should all just suck it up – as in “climate change is bullshit, and even if it’s not there’s nothing you can do about it”
  • It’s a licence for nihilism, a ticket to hell in a handbasket
  • the cohort responsible for this mixture of denial and fatalism is far removed from the daily experience of the ordinary citizen, especially the youngest and poorest of us. They have become a threat to our shared future and we must hold them to account, immediately and without reservation.
  • I’ve noticed a bruised attitude of beleaguerment in individuals and within groups that’s increasingly hard to ignore, a mounting grimness in the faces and language of people barely holding on in the face of steady, cumulative and unrelenting losses
  • some are clinging to the last tendrils of hope, others are falling into despair. And that worries me.
  • It’s expressed as grief, and the most palpable, widespread and immediate expression of it is now brewing over climate change. Beneath that grief there’s rage.
  • I worry that this widely-shared grief and unfocussed rage may become the signal human disposition of our time, that the Anthropocene will be marked by fury and hopelessness
  • Younger people in particular have begun to feel abandoned by their leaders and elders. They suspect they’ll be left without food or ammunition to stage a fighting retreat in which every battle is a defeat foreseen and every bit of territory was surrendered in advance by politicians and CEOs who deserted them long ago to hide in their privileged bunkers and silos
  • the reason humanity survived the cold war is because world leaders paid attention. They took emergent crises seriously. And in each instance of utmost danger, arguments of ideology and nationalism eventually fell away before the sacred importance of life itself
  • the four great capacities of humanity to solve a crisis – ingenuity, discipline, courage and sacrifice – these seem to be reserved for more important enterprises
  • Our governments and corporations are ensnared in a feedback loop of “common sense” and mutual self-preservation that’s little more than a bespoke form of nihilism. Ideology, prestige, assets and territory are now tacitly understood to be worth more than all life, human or otherwise
  • We can no longer wait patiently for our leaders to catch up. We cannot allow ourselves to be trained to accept hopelessness. Not by business, nor by governments. Both have subjected us to a steady diet of loss and depletion. It’s sapped us and left us mourning a future we can see fading before it even arrives
  • There’s no good reason to submit to this. No sane purpose in putting up with it. Because grief will paralyse us, and despair renders doom inevitable. We can afford neither.
  • we’ll need to get our house in order – and fast. That means calling bullshit on what’s been happening in our name for the past 15 years.
  • Life. It’s worth the fight. But, by God, after decades of appeasement, defeatism and denialism, it’s going to take a fight. Time’s short. So, let’s give our grief and fury some shape and purpose and reclaim our future together. Enough cowardice. Enough bullshit. Time for action.
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