Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged sea

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
6More

Opinion | Tell Me the One About the Presidential Candidate Who Ran for Mayor - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...polis-yang-giuliani-cuomo.html politics Culture US
shared by cartergramiak on 19 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Gail Collins: Bret, my city (and yours — if you work here you at least have rooting rights) tends to switch back and forth between regular party Democrats and feisty independents. De Blasio, a deep, dull Democrat, was preceded by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, who were very, very different versions of the political outsider.
  • Gail: And New York has had some. But except for Nelson Rockefeller our gubernatorial Republicans weren’t very exciting. Have we ever discussed the George Pataki years? No? At least with Andrew G. we’d have a Republican who knows how to putt …
  • Bret: Hemlock or cyanide? Devoured by a saltwater crocodile versus bitten by a venomous sea snake? A year of solitary confinement in a supermax prison or an all-expenses paid trip to Cancún in the company of Ted Cruz? I’m trying to think of equivalently horrible alternatives.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • If it’s time for a new outsider, it does sort of seem that Andrew Yang ought to fit the bill. Yet he’s run a rather strange campaign — lots of interesting ideas but often the kind you hear from a guy who’s on a six-month internship at City Hall before being posted someplace else.
  • But we’ve had more than 45 mass shootings in the United States just since the Atlanta killings last month. Many of which we haven’t even heard of because there were more injuries than deaths.
  • Bret: It may be my congenital contrarianism, Gail, but after spending the better part of the pandemic feeling optimistic about the future, I’ve now sunk into deep fatalism. Cases are edging up again, driven by the new virus variants, and the steep decline in Covid deaths since January also seems to have bottomed out at an average rate of around 700 a day, which is just horrific.
33More

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

neilpostman.org psychology social media technology language bias postman Culture
shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • here are some Big Ideas that have stuck out to me:
  • The medium is the message. Borrowing from McLuhan, he explained that every medium — TV, radio, typography, oral transmission — changes and biases the message itself
  • The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Video tends to bias towards the “peek-a-book world”: trivial content that vanishes in seconds, constantly flickering images, yet the viewer has a hard time turning away no matter the subject… because the medium is just so darn entertaining
  • Education ≠ entertainment
  • School is about asking questions; TV is about passive consumption. School is about the development of language; TV demands attention to images.
  • TV is always fun and entertaining; serious education is not.
  • by equating education with entertainment children would never learn the rigorous of serious schooling.
  • Subjects should be taught as history. “Every teacher,” Postman said, “must be a history teacher.” Every subject has a fascinating history.
  • To teach a subject without the history of how it happened “is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product,” he said. “It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.
  • To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots
  • Fear Huxley’s future, not Orwell’s. Everyone is worried about Big Brother… but we should really fear ourselves. We live in a society where we can spend hours on devices entertaining ourselves.
  • We can amuse ourselves to death.
  • How we talk is how we think. “Any significant change in our ways of talking can lead to a change in point of view.”
  • The words we use convey meaning and if you can convince others to use your words, perspectives can shift.
  • Technology is a doubled-edged sword. Technology giveth and taketh away.
  • The printing press allowed us to codify and pass down knowledge reliability but in exchange we gave up our memories.
  • Mobile phones gave us constant communication but now we’re always distracted and never alone.
  • What should I read first?
  • You should start with Amusing Ourselves to Death:
  • The foreword is brilliant. It’s short, here’s an excerpt:
  • We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
  • But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
  • Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.
  • But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
  • What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books
  • Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism
  • Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
  • Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture
  • As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
  • In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
  • In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
8More

Opinion: Don't Help China By Hyping Risk Of War Over Taiwan : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...hyping-risk-of-war-over-taiwan opinion china war taiwan politics
shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • China's actions no doubt have earned scrutiny. In recent years, Beijing has grown impatiently aggressive in pursuit of its ambitions. China has drawn blood along the contested Indian border, threatened Vietnam, expanded its military presence in the South China Sea, increased the tempo of its operations near the Senkaku Islands and trampled Hong Kong's autonomy — to say nothing of the atrocities it is perpetrating against its own citizens in Xinjiang and elsewhere.
  • As troubling as the trend-lines of Chinese behavior are, it would be a mistake to infer that they represent a prelude to an unalterable catastrophe. China's top priority now and in the foreseeable future is to deter Taiwan independence rather than compel unification. Beijing remains confident in its capacity to achieve this near-term objective, even as it sets the groundwork for its long-term goal of unification. Indeed, based on polling on attitudes regarding defense, we believe the people of Taiwan already are sober to the risks of pursuing independence.
  • Every Chinese leader since Mao Zedong has projected determination to unify Taiwan with the mainland. Xi is no different. And Xi, now 67, will not likely be around to see if Taiwan is unified with the mainland by the putative deadline, the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 2049.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Beijing has its own incentives to avoid war. Foremost among them is that any attempt to take Taiwan by force would very likely invite a military conflict with the United States. Such a conflict would be difficult to limit from escalating or spreading beyond the Taiwan Strait.
  • China has targeted Taiwan economically, sought to induce a brain drain of Taiwan's top engineers to the mainland, isolated Taiwan on the world stage, fomented social divisions inside Taiwan, launched cyberattacks and undertaken displays of military force.
  • Beijing's goal is to constantly remind Taiwan's people of its growing power, induce pessimism about Taiwan's future, deepen splits within the island's political system and show that outside powers are impotent to counter its flexes.
  • If American policy makers want to help Taiwan, they will need to go beyond focusing on the military threat.
  • Some of the work necessarily will be security-focused, but that is the start, not the end, of what needs to be done. Beijing will object, of course. But a focus on economic and diplomatic initiatives lies well within the United States' one-China policy, as successive administrations have defined it.
6More

X-Press Pearl Fire Could Mean Environmental Disaster For Sri Lanka : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ll-of-chemicals-starts-sinking disaster sri lanka environmental crisis
shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A cargo ship carrying chemicals and plastic pellets has been burning off the coast of Sri Lanka for nearly two weeks. Now, efforts to tow the ship to deeper waters have failed – and the boat's sinking looks increasingly likely.
  • The ship, the X-Press Pearl, was carrying 1,486 containers. Eighty-one of those were dangerous goods containers, including 25 tons of nitric acid. At least one container has leaked nitric acid.
  • Pattiaratchi said that among the ship's dangerous goods were 78 metric tons of plastic called nurdles — the raw material used to make virtually all kinds of plastic products.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The oil fueling the ship is another serious cause for concern. The vessel was carrying nearly 350 tons of fuel oil, and salvage teams have prepared for the event of an oil spill.
  • "These have been released to ocean and are found on beaches to the south of Colombo — as time goes they will keep moving southwards as our model predictions show. They will also go into river systems such as Kelani, lagoons (Negombo) and also into Port city. They are transported by the wind and currents — will remain at the surface until beached and will persist in the marine environment for ever as they are not biodegradable,"
  • "The ship has dealt a death blow to our lives," Joshua Anthony, head of a region fishing union, told Reuters. "We can't go into the sea which means we can't make a living."
15More

Farmers Are Feeling The Pain As Drought Spreads In The Northwest : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ought-spreads-in-the-northwest
shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Nicole Berg's stunted wheat field is so short and sparse she doesn't think the combine can even reach the wheat without, as she puts it, eating rocks.
  • Berg is a dryland wheat farmer in the sweeping Horse Heaven Hills of southeastern Washington state. She shows off one head of half-turned golden wheat amid a sea of them. Besides being too short, the plant's kernels didn't fill out properly.
  • "See how the wheat head is curled like that?"
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "And then you break into it, you might have some berries down here, but this will be empty. There is no wheat inside the wheat head."
  • Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.
  • On her ranch, Berg says she's also worried about 1,000 acres of native grass seeds she has to plant this year into dry soil for a government conservation program. She says with all the Western wildfires in recent years, the wild grass and forage seeds have become expensive. She hates to plant them in shallow, bone-dry soil only to lose the crop if there's not sufficient rain.
  • The Berg's aren't the only ones suffering. The region is parched from near the Canadian border clear to the edge of Nevada, with triple digit temps on the way making it worse.
  • Earlier this year, Oregon declared drought zones for eight counties, and six more have requested it since. Now the drought is rapidly expanding into usually cooler and wetter western Oregon, according to Ryan Andrews, a hydrologist for the state's Water Resources Department. He says the thirsty ground will absorb whatever rain comes, meaning streams and rivers will get little water.
  • Jeff Marti, a drought expert for Washington's Department of Ecology, says it hasn't been this dry since the 1920s.
  • "It's the story of the irrigation haves and the have nots," he says. "Meaning those folks who get their water from rivers or storage, are probably going to be fine for their irrigation needs. But the dryland users and the folks that have cattle that depend on forage on the rangelands may be more challenged."
  • Looking ahead, Marti says the warming climate may mean more rain for the Northwest, but also much less snowpack that melts sooner. That could stress water supplies even more.
  • A bit west of Alderdale, Washington, cattle rancher Gary Hess is also having a hard time with the drought. His grass-fattened mother cows bawl at their calves, wanting them to stay close and away from the cattle dog. But he only has enough irrigated pasture for a small part of his herd, the rest are on dryland range. So Hess recently sold 70 mother cows with calves at their sides to another operator in Wyoming. They had many more good calves in them, and he hated to see them go. But he has no dryland grass to keep them.
  • "When you have to sell younger cows, that's a disappointment," Hess says as he tears up a bit. "With the kind of weather we've had the last couple of years, and the drought and the lack of feed and lack of water, we just finally had to cut back."
  • This spring it's also been windy here, further drying out the landscape like a blow dryer. Hess is thinking he'll have to sell more cows soon just to survive. He says it's hard to lose animals and bloodlines that he's worked so hard to build up. He figures it could take him up to a decade to build his herd back up without going into debt.
  • Most ranchers say they don't have time to dwell on the trucked-off cattle or lost crops. They're busy applying for federal disaster aid. And they're also keeping an eye out for wildfires that are always top-of-mind in the dry, hot summer, but expected to be worse because of this year's terrible drought.
8More

Hundreds of Thousands of Cruise Fans Volunteer to Be First to Sail Again - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cruise-lines-covid.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Since March of last year, cruise ships carrying more than 250 people have been prohibited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from sailing in U.S. waters.
  • On May 25, Royal Caribbean became the first cruise line to receive approval from the C.D.C. to conduct simulated voyages, which are planned for its Freedom of the Seas ship starting from PortMiami in Florida in late June.
  • Several major cruise companies have already announced Alaska sailings starting in late July, which will require all passengers to prove that they are vaccinated. But in Florida, the cruise lines’ biggest U.S. departure point, recently enacted state law bans businesses from requiring proof of immunizations from people seeking to use their services.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • On MSC European cruises, all guests receive antigen tests when they board and if they test positive, they are given an additional PCR test. Non-vaccinated guests boarding its cruises in Britain must also present proof of a PCR test taken 48 hours before they embark.
  • Florida officials have said they will not exempt the cruise lines. If cruise companies decide to sail with a mix of vaccinated and non-vaccinated passengers, they will have to carry out simulation cruises with volunteers to test health and safety protocols.
  • The simulated voyages must be between two to seven days in length with at least one overnight stay, according to C.D.C. guidelines. They are required to test embarkation and disembarkation procedures, medical evacuations, onboard activities such as meal service and entertainment, re
  • Passengers are also tested mid-cruise after three or four days and are required to wear contact tracing bracelets so that they can be tracked down if someone they have come into contact with tests positive.
  • Cruise ships, she said, “have always been a cesspool for viruses, like planes, and I think there were risks at the height of the pandemic, but now with vaccines and health and safety measures I think they are ready to go again.”
10More

The Brutality Cascade - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oks-the-brutality-cascade.html competition rules norms decline
shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • In certain sorts of competitions, the most brutal player gets to set the rules. Everybody else feels pressure to imitate, whether they want to or not.
  • brutality cascades
  • Brutality cascades are very hard to get out of. You can declare war and simply try to crush the people you think are despoiling the competition. Or you can try what might be called friendship circles. In this approach, you first establish the norms of legitimacy that should govern the competition. You create a Geneva Convention of domestic political conduct or global cyberespionage. Then you organize as broad a coalition as possible to agree to uphold these norms.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In a brutality cascade the Chinese don’t become more like us as the competition continues. We become more like them. And that is indeed what’s happening
  • But China’s cybermercantilists regard deceit as a natural tool of warfare. Cyberattacks make perfect sense. Your competitors have worked hard to acquire intellectual property. Your system is more closed so innovation is not your competitive advantage. It is quicker and cheaper to steal. They will hate you for it, but who cares? They were going to hate you anyway. C’est la guerre.
  • But along comes China, an economic superpower with a more mercantilist mind-set. Many Chinese, at least in the military-industrial complex, see global economics as a form of warfare, a struggle for national dominance.
  • take a case in world affairs. The United States is a traditional capitalist nation that has championed an open-seas economic doctrine. We think everybody benefits if global economics is like a conversation, with maximum openness, mutual trust and free exchange.
  • The political world is rife with brutality cascades
  • Pretty soon the global economy looks less like Monopoly and more like a game of Risk, with a Chinese military-industrial complex on one part of the board and the Western military-industrial complex on another part.
  • Finally, you isolate the remaining violators and deliver a message: If you join our friendship circle and abide by our norms, the benefits will be overwhelming, but if you stay outside, the costs will be devastating.
14More

Opinion | The Cold War pitfalls that Biden's China policy should avoid - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...dens-china-policy-should-avoid cold war china policy biden Politics history
shared by Javier E on 04 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden argues that his ambitious domestic agenda — totaling some $6 trillion — is necessary to keep up with our primary geopolitical rival. As he told Congress last week: “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.”
  • In so doing, Biden harked back to the Cold War, when national security was often used as a justification for initiatives that had little to do with the Pentagon.
  • the competition with China today can pay major dividends if properly managed
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • But the dark side of the Cold War should serve as a warning of how such competition, if it runs amok, can threaten our liberties and our lives.
  • He rescinded the visas of 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers supposedly linked to the Chinese military.
  • He called covid-19 “kung flu,” helping to increase anti-Asian animus and hate crimes.
  • He launched a trade war with China that hurt our economy.
  • President Donald Trump often seemed determined to emulate the worst excesses of the Cold War by feeding anti-Chinese hysteria.
  • He launched prosecutions of researchers who were accused of covert links with China.
  • He expelled Chinese journalists. He imposed visa restrictions on the Chinese Communist Party’s 92 million members (most of them ordinary bureaucrats) and their relatives.
  • He closed down the Peace Corps and Fulbright programs in China.
  • Most of these Trumpian initiatives — from the shuttered Peace Corps to the costly tariffs — remain in place.
  • While reducing unnecessary friction, Biden should do far more than Trump to highlight Chinese human rights abuses, just as Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union.
  • Biden also needs to counter Chinese military aggression in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait while maintaining open lines of communication with Beijing to avert a war that neither country wants.
15More

Opinion | The Political Weapon Biden Didn't Deploy - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...apon-biden-didnt-deploy-475488
shared by edencottone on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Perhaps the most surprising element of President Joe Biden’s first presidential speech on Thursday night was what it did not include.
  • The lion’s share of his talk was a detailed account of the effort to contain and control the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from a passing reference to the “denial” and “silence” of his unnamed predecessor, politics was not on the agenda.
  • The selling of his Rescue Plan is expected to begin any time, but Biden clearly decided it could wait a day or two.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Yet there is no doubt that the political implications of his plan have the potential to be nothing less than radical.
  • It was 11 years ago, almost to the day, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare, “we have to pass the bill so that you can know what’s in it.” That notion, which seemed borrowed from the Queen of Hearts’ absurdist “Sentence first! Verdict afterwards!” approach in Alice in Wonderland, turns out to have been even more applicable to this week’s American Rescue Act.
  • And there’s an $86 billion commitment to protect the pensions of a million retirees whose multi-employer plans were in danger of insolvency—without even a pretense that this is linked to the Covid pandemic. It’s the kind of bailout you might expect in a nation where organized labor is a significant share of the workforce. Now, in a United States where unions represent barely 6 percent of the private sector labor force, that protection is law.
  • what it represents is the possibility that the Democratic Party has found a tool to reconnect it to a working and middle class whose loyalty has been threatened for well over half a century.
  • The fraying of the New Deal coalition was very much on the mind of Robert F. Kennedy, whose presidential campaign was based on holding it together. In his last weeks, he began talking about an issue he believed had broad appeal: specifically, how many of the wealthiest Americans avoided paying a fair share of taxes. By the end of 1968, divisions over the war in Vietnam, deadly riots in the cities and upheaval on college campuses reduced the Democratic share of the presidential vote from 60 percent in 1964 to 43 percent; Richard Nixon and George Wallace divided the rest.
  • All through the 1980s, Democrats and their intellectual allies tried to grapple with the fact that voters seemed to prefer Democratic policies (on health care, education, taxes), but voted, at least at the presidential level for Republicans. (I have a vivid memory of House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt assuring a group of journalists that once the American people saw his party’s proposals for lower drug prices and access to college, they would return to the fold.)
  • And it took an emerging demographic sea change that yielded an increasingly nonwhite electorate, and a more liberal cohort of college-educated whites, to outweigh (at least in popular vote terms), the increasingly Republican tilt of less-educated whites and to put Barack Obama in the White House.
  • While both were reelected, those midterm failures had severe consequences that endure; in particular, 2010 produced a GOP takeover at the state level that now threatens severe voting limits across the country.
  • It is an unapologetic assertion of the power of government to redress a set of grievances without any assertion of identity politics; while the stark facts of the pandemic mean that it has hit with special force in Black and brown communities, the remedial power of government is directed to the victims defined by circumstance, not color.
  • This is a possibility that Republicans simply may not have imagined, given their midterm successes in running against the initiatives of the past two Democratic presidents, and inflicting on Clinton and Obama successive political catastrophes.
  • More broadly, it appears to contain provisions that leapfrog a dilemma that has plagued Democratic social programs in the past: When they are perceived as helping one class of voters, they meet with a powerful backlash, (often one infused by racial resentment). When a program reaches broadly—Social Security, Medicare and, increasingly, the Affordable Care Act—it becomes politically potent.
  • But what does seem clear is that, unlike past measures that required huge congressional majorities, a radical change in the social fabric of the United States has become a reality—and with it, an opportunity for the Democratic Party no one could have imagined 50 days ago.
5More

Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suez-canal-blocked-ship.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
  • And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.
  • The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But if the ship’s extraction takes longer, it could pose a substantial risk for an already-overwhelmed industry. Global trade has been disrupted as locked-down American consumers ordered vast quantities of factory goods from Asia, yielding a monthslong shortage of shipping containers, the metal boxes that carry parts and finished products around the globe.The blockage of the Suez Canal will affect the movement of things like exercise bikes and printers built in Chinese factories destined for American households, and soybeans grown on American farms and shipped to food processors in Southeast Asia.
  • ut first comes the technical quagmire of freeing the Ever Given. Pictures from the canal showed the container-laden ship sitting sideways at such an angle that the name of the company that operates it, Evergreen, was clearly visible from the ship behind it.“Ship in front of us ran aground while going through the canal and is now stuck sideways,” an Instagram user who gave her name as Julianne Cona, a ship’s engineer onboard another vessel, posted alongside a photo of the stricken ship on Tuesday evening. “Looks like we might be here for a little bit…”
17More

White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-vaccine-evangelicals.html US vaccination religion
shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.
  • Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”
  • Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white churches.
  • “If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.
  • There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.
  • Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination.
  • Dr. Simone Gold, a prominent Covid-19 skeptic who was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, told an evangelical congregation in Florida that they were in danger of being “coerced into taking an experimental biological agent.”
  • Some evangelicals believe that any Covid restrictions — including mask mandates and restrictions on in-person church worship — constitute oppression.
  • “Fear is the motivating power behind all of this, and fear is the opposite of who God is,” said Teresa Beukers, who travels throughout California in a motor home. “I violently oppose fear.”
  • “Go ahead and throw us in the lions’ den, go ahead and throw us in the furnace,” she said, referring to two biblical stories in which God’s people miraculously survive persecution after refusing to submit to temporal powers.
  • The vaccines do not include fetal tissue, and no additional abortions are required to manufacture them. Still, the kernel of a connection has metastasized online into false rumors about human remains or fetal DNA being an ingredient in the vaccines.
  • White evangelicals who do not plan to get vaccinated sometimes say they see no need, because they do not feel at risk. Rates of Covid-19 death have been about twice as high for Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans as for white Americans.
  • There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci are not going to be able to persuade evangelicals, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School who is leading an outreach project to educate evangelicals about the vaccine.
  • Mr. Rainey helped his own Southern Baptist congregation get ahead of false information by publicly interviewing medical experts — a retired colonel specializing in infectious disease, a church member who is a Walter Reed logistics management analyst, and a church elder who is a nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
  • “It is necessary for pastors to instruct their people that we don’t always have to be adversaries with the culture around us,” he said. “We believe Jesus died for those people, so why in the world would we see them as adversaries?”
9More

Opinion: Why China's space program could overtake NASA - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html US China NASA Space Program
shared by yehbru on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • the country is paying close attention to what innovative US companies like SpaceX are doing as well. To get ahead in space, communism is learning from capitalism.
  • A year after this test, China's main space contractor revealed plans to develop the ability to reuse its Long March 8 booster, which is powered by kerosene fuel, the same type of power that fuels SpaceX rockets. By 2025, Chinese officials said, this rocket would be capable of landing on a sea platform like SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster.
  • A growing number of semi-private Chinese companies have also announced plans to develop reusable rockets.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Government-launched enterprises in both Russia and Europe also recently revealed plans to develop reusable rockets that are similar both in appearance and function to the Falcon 9 booster.
  • But what makes the Chinese efforts to emulate SpaceX particularly notable is the country's expansive ambitions in space and its vast resources to back up these long-term goals.
  • Earlier this month, the Chinese government signed an agreement with Russia to work together to build a Moon base. China has also begun planning to launch crewed missions to Mars and deploy a massive space-based, commercial-scale solar power plant by 2050.
  • As China advances in space, NASA has spent more than $20 billion building a large rocket, the Space Launch System, that could soon be obsolete. And flying this single-use rocket is so expensive that, in combination with its Artemis program, NASA could exceed its congressional funds by more than 43%.
  • Increasingly, the US' main advantage over China lies in its burgeoning commercial space industry, led by SpaceX. If America wants to compete, it should unleash the full potential of SpaceX and other commercial space companies that seek to go further in space, faster and for less money.
  • While SpaceX became a transformational space company, the US and China have been locked in an increasingly intense battle for influence and economic resources on Earth.
8More

Florida manatee with 'Trump' etched on back prompts investigation - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-55631498
shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • US wildlife authorities have launched an investigation after a manatee was discovered with the word 'Trump' scraped on its back.
  • The marine mammal was spotted on Sunday in Florida's Homosassa River, with the US president's surname on its body.
  • Officials told AP news agency that the animal does not appear to be seriously injured, and the word was scraped onto algae growing on its skin.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Manatees, nicknamed "sea cows," are protected under US law, and anyone found guilty of harassing them faces up to a year in prison and a $50,000 (£37,000) fine.Images of the animal was first shared by the Citrus County Chronical, a local newspaper, and have been widely shared on social media.
  • The Centre for Biological Diversity, a conservation charity, is also offering a $5,000 for information leading to the conviction of those responsible.
  • "It's clear that whoever harmed this defenceless, gentle giant is capable of doing grave violence and needs to be apprehended immediately," she added.The manatee is a large, slow-moving mammal which has become an unofficial mascot for Florida. There are around 6,300 currently in the state, according to the USFWS.
  • their numbers have fallen in recent years due to habitat loss, algae blooms and strikes by fast-moving boats.They are also vulnerable to attacks by humans while they congregate in the shallow water of local rivers and canals.
  • 637 manatees died in 2020, 90 of which were victims of boat collisions. Another 15 were killed by other interactions with humans.
9More

Opinion | Georgia Senate Race Is Proof: The South Is Really Changing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ia-senate-democrats-south.html opinion georgia senate south Politics US
shared by zoegainer on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It’s impossible not to notice how many members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election were white Southerners — more than half the legislators who professed to believe Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen are people who represent the American South.
  • “Violence is abhorrent and I strongly condemn today’s attacks on our Capitol,” tweeted Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, who had just spent two months running for re-election while simultaneously joining the president in insisting that the election was rigged.
  • With such elected “leaders” representing this region — and with the insurrectionists parading through our nation’s Capitol carrying Confederate battle flags and other symbols of white supremacy — it’s not surprising that so many people outside the South seem to believe that the voters who support Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Loeffler, not even to mention Donald Trump, are the only people who live here.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This is not a story of 21st century carpetbaggers moving to the South to take advantage of our cheap cost of living and then blowing up our longstanding election patterns, an argument I’ve heard from more than one conservative Southerner.
  • I hope you’ll remember them, and all the passionate liberal activists here, too, the next time you see a sea of red on an election map. I hope you’ll remember them the next time a Southern statehouse passes another law that constrains the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. citizens or guts public education or makes it harder to choose an abortion but easier to buy a gun. I hope you’ll look beyond the headlines to what is also happening here, often at great risk to those who are making it happen. Because Georgia is the clearest proof yet that this is not our grandfather’s Southland anymore. And it will never be again.
  • But Republicans still hold the power in almost all Southern state legislatures (Virginia’s is the exception, and only since 2019), and they will continue to do everything possible to make it harder for Democrats to vote.
  • But the New Georgia Project, the mighty voter-outreach organization that Ms. Abrams and her colleagues have built to register new voters and persuade long disenfranchised Black and brown voters not to give up on the democratic process, has analogues across the South. These efforts may be less visible than Ms. Abrams’s, and some of them are still embryonic, but they are growing.
  • Urban and suburban voters, and the residents of college towns, are more apt to be progressive, and that’s true whether they’re homegrown or new residents. Every red state in the region has them.
  • “These actions at the US Capitol by protestors are truly despicable and unacceptable,” tweeted Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee. “I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. We are a nation of laws.”
5More

Xiaomi, CNOOC, Comac: Chinese companies slapped with new US restrictions - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html china trump US Politics economics
shared by zoegainer on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration is inflicting even more damage on Chinese businesses — including smartphone maker Xiaomi — with just days to go before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
  • The US Defense Department on Thursday added nine Chinese firms, including Xiaomi, to a list of companies the agency claims are owned or controlled by China's military. Businesses on the list are subject to harsh restrictions, including a ban on American investment.
  • The Defense Department said in a statement that it is "determined to highlight and counter" the relationship between China's military and firms that "appear to be civilian entities" but which support the military with advanced technology and expertise.Read MoreBeijing on Friday blasted the new restrictions as an abuse of power by the United States.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "CNOOC acts as a bully for the People's Liberation Army to intimidate China's neighbors," said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a statement, referring to the country's military. His agency claimed that CNOOC has been harassing and threatening offshore oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea by other countries, such as Vietnam.Xiaomi denied it was owned or controlled by the Chinese military in a stock exchange filing. "The company confirms that it is not owned, controlled or affiliated with the Chinese military, and is not a 'Communist Chinese Military Company' defined under the [National Defense Authorization Act]," it said in the statement.
  • Before Thursday, the Pentagon had already added 35 Chinese companies to its military list, including chipmaker SMIC and tech firm Huawei. The Commerce Department has also imposed restrictions on many companies.
5More

Trump's 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-1776-commission-report.html US history trump
shared by saberal on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Trump formed the 18-member commission — which includes no professional historians but a number of conservative activists, politicians and intellectuals — in the heat of his re-election campaign in September, as he cast himself as a defender of traditional American heritage against “radical” liberals.
  • The commission’s report charges, in terms quickly derided by many mainstream historians, that Americans are being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery in its history.
  • “Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds,” the report says.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “The biggest tell in the 1776 report is that it lists ‘Progressivism’ along with ‘Slavery’ and ‘Fascism’ in its list of ‘challenges to America’s principles,’” Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University, wrote on Twitter. “Time to rewrite my lectures to say that ending child labor and regulating meatpacking = Hitlerism.”
  • Some of the strongest criticism was for the report’s treatment of slavery, which the report suggests was an unfortunate reality throughout the world that was swept away in America by the forces unleashed by the American Revolution, which is described as marking “a dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities.”
8More

Moscow Court Rejects Navalny's Bid To Leave Jail : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...cts-navalnys-bid-to-leave-jail Politics russia Navalny
shared by carolinehayter on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Alexei Navalny will remain in jail through at least Feb. 15, as a Moscow regional court rejected the Russian opposition leader's appeal of his detention. Navalny was arrested shortly after returning home from Germany, where he was treated for a near-fatal poisoning – an attack he blames on President Vladimir Putin's government.
  • Navalny's detention provoked widespread protests in Russia, which in turn have resulted in thousands of arrests. Navalny and his supporters have been able to spread their calls for demonstrations through TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, despite regulators' attempts to stifle that information. More protests are planned for this weekend.
  • As The Moscow Times reports, "Two days before his probation in a 2014 fraud case expired on Dec. 30, Russia's prison service threatened to convert Navalny's suspended sentence to a real prison term for failing to appear before probation officers while he was in Berlin."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Navalny rose to fame for his investigations that exposed corruption, and for political mobilization against Putin's regime. He recently reprised that role, releasing a bombshell video that accuses Putin of using a slush fund to build a palace on the Black Sea. That report has now been viewed nearly 100 million times on YouTube.
  • With Navalny now ordered to remain in jail, a court will weigh imposing a prison sentence on Feb. 2 stemming from the earlier case, according to state-run media.
  • Navalny says his fraud conviction was retribution for his activism. Election officials have also cited the mark on his record as justification to reject his attempt to run against Putin for the presidency.
  • When Navalny was in Germany, he spent weeks in a medically induced coma as doctors sought to help his body recover from a variant of Novichok, a lethal Soviet-era nerve agent.
  • "There has been a lot of speculation lately that the convict Navalny was unable to show up at the inspectorate as he was in a coma," said Yelena Korobkova, a department head at the FSIN. "However, he had systematically violated the terms of his probationary period even before his hospitalization," she said, accusing Navalny of missing other dates in the first half of 2020.
3More

He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence in Greece. - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...greece-migrants.html turkey greece refugees politics immigration
shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Alexandros Konstantinou, of the Greek Council for Refugees, said that convicting refugees as smugglers was part of a broader strategy to deter more arrivals.
  • Other measures included the criminalization of illegal entry in 2020, applied to migrants at the Greek-Turkish land border, which led to dozens receiving prison terms instead of going to reception centers for identification, and a recent decision by Greece to designate Turkey as a safe country for asylum seekers. That move was aimed at pressuring Turkey to take back migrants currently in Greece and make it harder for migrants to apply for asylum there.
  • A root of the problem is Greece’s strained relationship with Turkey, which early last year stopped enforcing an agreement struck with Brussels in 2016 to halt the flow of migrants, and take back those who manage to cross into Greece illegally that do not qualify for E.U. protection, some observers say.
11More

BBC - History - World Wars: Breaking Germany's Enigma Code - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...enigma_01.shtml
shared by magnanma on 26 Oct 19 - Cached
  • Fewer people still knew that this piece of spook hardware was invented by a German (based on an idea by a Dutchman), that information about it was leaked to the French, and that it was first reconstructed by a Pole, before it was offered to Britain's codebreakers as a way of deciphering German signals traffic during World War Two
  • the Zimmermann telegram - a message from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Mexico City informing him of plans to invade the United States. On being notified of these plans, officials in Washington were understandably perturbed, and hastened to effect the entry of the US into the war.
  • Dr Arthur Scherbius had developed his 'Enigma' machine, capable of transcribing coded information, in the hope of interesting commercial companies in secure communications. In 1923 he set up his Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft (Cipher Machines Corporation) in Berlin to manufacture this product, and within three years the German navy was producing its own version, followed in 1928 by the army and in 1933 by the air force.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Despite providing some otherwise inaccessible information, it was some time before Ultra made any significant contribution to the war effort. Although, thanks to the information from the Poles, the British had learned to read parts of the Wehrmacht's signals traffic, regular decrypts only became possible in the Norwegian campaign
  • The Germans were convinced that Enigma output could not be broken, so they used the machine for all sorts of communications - on the battlefield, at sea, in the sky and, significantly, within its secret services. The British described any intelligence gained from Enigma as 'Ultra', and considered it top secret. Only a select few commanders were made aware of the full significance of Ultra, and it was mostly used only sparingly, to prevent the Germans thinking their ciphers had been broken.
  • Enigma allowed an operator to type in a message, then scramble it by means of three to five notched wheels, or rotors, which displayed different letters of the alphabet. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of these rotors in order to reconstitute the coded text.
  • A break-through came in March 1941, however, when the German trawler Krebs was captured off Norway, complete with two Enigma machines and the Naval Enigma settings list for the previous month. This allowed German Naval Enigma to be read, albeit with some delay, in April, by codebreakers at Bletchley.
  • Although he was dissuaded by his experts, the Germans redoubled their efforts to tighten Enigma's security, and the Bletchley Park codebreakers, realising what they were up against, wrote to British Prime Minster Winston Churchill complaining that they were not being given enough resources. Churchill replied with a famous 'Action This Day' memorandum: 'Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this had been done'.
  • In February 1942 the Germans hit back by introducing a new fourth wheel (multiplying the number of settings another 26 times) into their Naval Enigma machines. The resulting 'net' was known to the Germans as 'Triton' and to the British as 'Shark'. For almost a year Bletchley could make no inroads into Shark, and Allied losses in the Atlantic again increased alarmingly.
  • By D-Day in June 1944 Ultra was no longer so important. But still no one wanted the Germans to sense that Enigma was being read. When, a few days before the Normandy landings, an American task force captured a German U-boat with its Enigma keys
  • By how much did Ultra intelligence, gained from reading Enigma ciphers, shorten the war? Harry Hinsley, based at Bletchley during the war, suggests it was a significant asset.
8More

History of FIFA - The first FIFA World Cup™ - FIFA.com - 0 views

www.fifa.com/...first-fifa-world-cup.html
shared by magnanma on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The success of the Olympic Football Tournament intensified FlFA's wish for its own world championship. Questionnaires were sent to the affiliated associations, asking whether they agreed to the organisation of a tournament and under what conditions.
  • Following a remarkable proposal by the Executive Committee, the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam on 28 May 1928 decided to stage a world championship organised by FIFA. Now, the organising country had to be chosen.
  • These arguments were decisive. The FIFA Congress in Barcelona in 1929 assigned Uruguay as first host country of the FIFA World Cup ™. The other candidates had withdrawn.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Participation did not only involve a long sea journey for the Europeans; the clubs would have to renounce their best players for two months. Consequently, more and more associations broke their promise to participate and it took much manoeuvring by Rimet to ensure at least four European teams
  • The first FIFA World Cup opened at the brand-new Estadio Centenario in Montevideo on 18 July 1930. It was the beginning of a new era in world football and the inaugural event proved a remarkable success, both in a sporting and a financial sense.
  • FIFA chose Italy ahead of rival candidates Sweden to host the second FIFA World Cup and this time it took qualifying matches to arrive at the 16 finalists. Unlike in 1930 there were no groups and only knockout rounds
  • The FIFA World Cup should have taken place for the fourth time in 1942 but the outbreak of World War Two meant otherwise. Although FIFA maintained its Zurich offices throughout the conflict, it was not until 1 July 1946 in Luxembourg that the Congress met again.
  • As the only candidate, Brazil was chosen unanimously to host the next FIFA World Cup, to be staged in 1949 (and postponed to 1950 for time reasons). At the same time, Switzerland was given the option for 1954.
« First ‹ Previous 341 - 360 of 459 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page