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Javier E

The Civil War and Emancipation destroyed their wealth, but Southern elites recovered in... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...d-their-wealth-after-civil-war

inequality wealth redistribution networks elite success South confederacy Jim Crow history

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Emancipation should have laid waste to the Southern aristocracy. The economy was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, and almost half the Confederacy’s wealth was invested in owning humans. Once people could no longer be treated as chattel, that wealth evaporated.
  • But less than two decades after the Civil War, Southern slave-owning dynasties were back on top of the economic ladder, according to an ambitious new analysis
  • by 1880, the sons of slave owners were better off than the sons of nearby Southern whites who started with equal wealth but were not as invested in enslaved people.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The sons of formerly enslaved people never caught up, of course. By 1880 more than 90 percent of them were still in the South, and most still worked as farm laborers, tenant farmers or sharecroppers. In the 120 years that followed, they consistently saw lower pay and less upward mobility than similar white men
  • folks at the 90th percentile were about 14 times as wealthy as a typical white household
  • By applying such methods to counties across the Confederacy, they estimated wealth and slave ownership for about 300,000 households and captured broad trends that might otherwise be invisible.
  • Boustan says she first conceived of the project when she was a naive, newlywed graduate student
  • Along the way, she helped create a branch of economic history designed to answer huge, historical questions. With collaborators such as Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky, she uses advanced analytical techniques to uncover people and trends in the wild and woolly data sets of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These linked data sets are historian’s version of the databases big tech companies use today to track and target users.
  • To follow families across generations and data sets, Boustan, Eriksson and Ager used first names, last names, ages and birthplaces. They’re not much on their own, but together such data points contain a surprising amount of information
  • Consider records of slave ownership and wealth: They come from different data sets, and 20,000 of the records are clear matches. But those matches allowed the economists to estimate slave ownership in the larger population. One of the most effective data points for doing so was surnames.
  • The average number of enslaved people recorded as the property of men with the last name Higgins in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1860, was, for example, a strong predictor of the number of people enslaved by any Higgins household in that county. In many cases, it’s a perfect match.
  • Even after the enslaved people on whom their wealth was built were freed, Southern elites passed their advantages to their children through personal networks and social capital.
  • How does the loss of wealth effect elite dynasties?
  • it’s rare to find a wealth disruption that’s swift and deep enough to allow for large-scale analysis.
  • In 1870, at the height of Reconstruction, former slave-owning families had about 15 percent less wealth than equivalent families who owned fewer people. But by 1880, the sons of slave owners were back atop the Southern socioeconomic hierarchy.
  • The typical American white family had 10 times as much wealth as the typical black one as of 2016
  • It probably wasn’t just white privilege or that these wealthy lineages thrived based solely on their intelligence, talent or entrepreneurial instinct
  • These white families seem to have drawn upon exceptional social connections, the economists find
  • Most notably, they married up
  • sons of slave owners tended to marry women from families with even more prewar wealth — probably at least in part because of their father-in-law’s network and influence.
  • they were also more likely to make the leap into white-collar jobs, a move that other researchers have shown is often greased by a family’s political and social networks
  • The success of slave owners’ sons after emancipation hints that reducing wealth inequality isn’t just a matter of redistributing wealth, Boustan said. It’s a matter of reducing other barriers as well, such as elite personal and professional networks and other intangible privileges.
Javier E

Opinion | What Does Tucker Carlson Know That the Republican Party Doesn't? - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...son-republicans-democrats.html

capitalism nativism free market ideology culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • In addition to the discrete conservative factions Cass and Carlson represent, there is another dissident wing of conservatism, represented by the Niskanen Center, which attempts to appeal to moderates and centrists of both parties.
  • indsey, in contrast to Cass, is far more critical of the contemporary right than of the left.Over the course of the 21st century, the conservative movement, and with it the Republican Party, has fallen ever more deeply under the sway of an illiberal and nihilistic populism — illiberal in its crude exploitation of religious, racial, and cultural divisions; nihilistic in its blithe indifference to governance and the established norms and institutions of representative self-government. This malignant development made possible the nomination and election of Donald Trump, whose two years in power have only accelerated conservatism’s and the GOP’s descent into the intellectual and moral gutter.
  • Wilkinson explains:The project of fashioning an ethnoreligious American identity has always been in conflict with a dominant and defining American impulse: to get rich. The United States has always been a distinctly commercial republic with expansionary, imperial impulses. High demand for workers and settlers led early on to a variegated population that encouraged the idea, largely traceable to Tom Paine, that American national identity is civic and ideological rather than racial and ethnic.
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  • godless capitalism that Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, described in “How Godless Capitalism Made America Multicultural” — a problem that Wilkinson correctly points out affects “all wealthy, liberal-democratic countries.”
  • It is our goal to make the case for a principled center-right in American politics today that is distinctly different from either movement conservatism or its degenerate, populist offshoot.
  • Assimilation is an issue not because it isn’t happening, but because it is. The issue is that the post-1968 immigrants and their progeny are here at all. And their successful assimilation means that American culture, and American national identity, has already been updated and transformed.
  • Swift and dramatic cultural changes can leave us with the baffled feeling that the soil in which we laid down roots has somehow become foreign. Older people who have largely lost the capacity to easily assimilate to a new culture can feel that the rug has been pulled out from under them.
  • The result, according to Wilkinson, to whom I will give the last word, is thatrapid cultural change can make a truly common national identity hard to come by, if not impossible. It’s not clear to me how important it is to have one. But it does seem that a badly bifurcated cultural self-understanding can have very dramatic and potentially dangerous political consequences
Javier E

What the Fall of the Roman Republic Can Teach Us About America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-j-watts-mortal-republic.html

trump crisis culture politics US rome decline republic

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • At its inception, “the republic provided a legal and political structure that channeled the individual energies of Romans in ways that benefited the entire Roman commonwealth.”
  • But over the following centuries, that foundation slowly weakened, and then rapidly collapsed.
  • Since the founding fathers explicitly modeled the United States on the Roman Republic, a study that investigates the circumstances of its demise promises to hold considerable relevance for our own times
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  • As Watts puts the point, the principal purpose of his book is to allow “readers to better appreciate the serious problems that result both from politicians who breach a republic’s political norms and from citizens who choose not to punish them for doing so.
  • In Watts’s telling of the Roman Republic’s agonizing death, slow-moving structural transformations gradually sowed the seeds of demise.
  • As the population exploded and the economy became ever more sophisticated, the growing share of poor citizens started to demand redress. But since the institutions of the republic were dominated by patricians who had much to lose from measures like land reform, they never fully addressed the grievances of ordinary Romans.
  • With popular rage against increasingly dysfunctional institutions swelling, ambitious patricians, determined to outflank their competitors, began to build a fervent base of support by making outsize promises. It was these populares — populists like Tiberius Gracchus and his younger brother Gaius — who, in their bid for power, first broke some of the republic’s most longstanding norms.
  • The transformation of Rome’s army compounded the challenge of growing inequality. In the early days of the republic, soldiers thought of their participation in military service as a civic duty. Commanders hoped to win great honors and perhaps to attain higher office
  • But by the late second century B.C., the army had essentially been privatized. Commanders knew that the plunder of new lands could garner them vast riches. Their soldiers signed up for the ride in the hope of gaining a generous allotment of land on which to start a farm.
  • It took a long time for these tensions to build. But once they reached a critical point, Rome’s descent into chaos and dysfunction was astonishingly swift.
  • During the century and a half between the days of Pyrrhus and the rise of Tiberius Gracchus, there had not been a single outbreak of large-scale political violence. Then Tiberius pushed through land reforms in defiance of the Senate’s veto. In the ensuing fracas, he and hundreds of his followers were murdered. The taboo on naked power politics had been broken, never to recover
  • “Within a generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war.”
  • If we are to avoid the fate that ultimately befell Rome, Watts cautions, it is “vital for all of us to understand how Rome’s republic worked, what it achieved and why, after nearly five centuries, its citizens ultimately turned away from it and toward the autocracy of Augustus.”
  • the sheer repetitiveness of the calamities that befell Rome only serves to underline the book’s most urgent message.
  • Like the original populist, Trump was propelled to power by the all-too-real failures of a political system that is unable to curb growing inequality or to mobilize its most eminent citizens around a shared conception of the common good.
  • And like Gracchus, Trump believes that, because he is acting in the name of the dispossessed, he is perfectly justified in shredding the Republic’s traditions.
  • Far from single-handedly destroying our political system, he is the transitional figure whose election demonstrates the extent to which the failings of our democracy are finally starting to take their toll
  • The bad news is that the coming decades are unlikely to afford us many moments of calm and tranquillity.
  • If the central analogy that animates “Mortal Republic” is correct, the current challenge to America’s political system is likely to persist long after its present occupant has left the White House.
Javier E

Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583258

white supremacy history culture racism nazi eugenics genocide

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.
  • History, though, tells a different story.
  • King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.
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  • The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
  • What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
  • Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
  • Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him
  • Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide
  • “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
  • When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.
  • In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”
  • In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”
  • Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.
  • In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
  • it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers
  • The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.
  • In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
  • The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.
  • Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that
  • Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
  • President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
  • Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
  • On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
  • A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
  • He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe
  • When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
  • Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
  • In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
  • Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
  • t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”
  • Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
  • What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,
  • “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”
  • Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.
  • Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
  • In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
  • it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.
  • The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
  • two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
  • Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
  • the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
  • The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it
  • historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name
  • Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.
  • The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
  • That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.
  • The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
  • The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.
oliviaodon

U.S. and China swap hard-line lists of demands at trade talks in Beijing - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-b966-bfb0da2dad62_story.html

china US economics

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • BEIJING — Two days of inconclusive U.S.-China talks ended here Friday amid signs that the Trump administration is demanding dramatic concessions that challenge core elements of China’s economic system and its ambitions for future development.
  • unclear where the two sides had found common ground
  • Chinese negotiators presented their own hard-line terms for a reshaped trade relationship, demanding the United States drop a complaint over China’s licensing terms for foreign patent holders and immediately designate China a market economy, which would give it easier treatment under routine U.S. trade enforcement actions.
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  • The dueling negotiating menus represented “maximalist” positions that may make eventual agreement more difficult,
  • The meetings marked an attempt by the Trump administration to leverage changes from China without sparking a potentially disastrous trade war, after threatening to impose tariffs on up to $150 billion in Chinese imports.
  • The talks ended with no details on next steps. But some analysts predicted tough bargaining in the weeks to come.
  • The Trump administration is making very strong demands upfront, which is likely to offend the Chinese
  • The United States wants China to take swift action to reduce the $375 billion deficit in goods trade by $200 billion by the end of 2020.
  • China’s Commerce Ministry said it made “solemn representations” to the U.S. delegation over the ZTE case during the talks. 
g-dragon

Tibet and China: Early History - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/tibet-and-china-history-195217

tibet china history complicated

shared by g-dragon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.
  • Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.
  • The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.
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  • Tibet and China signed a peace treaty in 821 or 822, which delineated the border between the two empires. The Tibetan Empire would concentrate on its Central Asian holdings for the next several decades, before splitting into several small, fractious kingdoms.
  • Canny politicians, the Tibetans befriended Genghis Khan just as the Mongol leader was conquering the known world in the early 13th century. As a result, though the Tibetans paid tribute to the Mongols after the Hordes had conquered China, they were allowed much greater autonomy than the other Mongol-conquered lands.
  • Over time, Tibet came to be considered one of the thirteen provinces of the Mongolian-ruled nation of Yuan China.
  • The Tibetans transmitted their Buddhist faith to the eastern Mongols; Kublai Khan himself studied Tibetan beliefs with the great teacher Drogon Chogyal Phagpa.
  • When the Mongols' Yuan Empire fell in 1368 to the ethnic-Han Chinese Ming, Tibet reasserted its independence and refused to pay tribute to the new Emperor.
  • After their lifetimes, the two men were called the First and Second Dalai Lamas. Their sect, the Gelug or "Yellow Hats," became the dominant form of Tibetan Buddhism.
  • The Third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso (1543-1588), was the first to be so named during his life. He was responsible for converting the Mongols to Gelug Tibetan Buddhism, and it was the Mongol ruler Altan Khan who probably gave the title “Dalai Lama” to Sonam Gyatso.
  • The Fourth Dalai Lama, Yonten Gyatso (1589-1616), was a Mongolian prince and the grandson of Altan Khan.
  • During the 1630s, China was embroiled in power struggles between the Mongols, Han Chinese of the fading Ming Dynasty, and the Manchu people of north-eastern China (Manchuria). The Manchus would eventually defeat the Han in 1644, and establish China's final imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912).
  • The Dalai Lama made a state visit to the Qing Dynasty's second Emperor, Shunzhi, in 1653. The two leaders greeted one another as equals; the Dalai Lama did not kowtow. Each man bestowed honors and titles upon the other, and the Dalai Lama was recognized as the spiritual authority of the Qing Empire.
  • In 1788, the Regent of Nepal sent Gurkha forces to invade Tibet.The Qing Emperor responded in strength, and the Nepalese retreated.The Gurkhas returned three years later, plundering and destroying some famous Tibetan monasteries. The Chinese sent a force of 17,000 which, along with Tibetan troops, drove the Gurkhas out of Tibet and south to within 20 miles of Kathmandu.
  • China took advantage of this period of instability in Tibet to seize the regions of Amdo and Kham, making them into the Chinese province of Qinghai in 1724.
  • Three years later, the Chinese and Tibetans signed a treaty that laid out the boundary line between the two nations. It would remain in force until 1910.
  • The Imperial Army then defeated the rebels, but the Emperor recognized that he would have to rule through the Dalai Lama rather than directly. Day-to-day decisions would be made on the local level.
  • The Simla Convention granted China secular control over "Inner Tibet," (also known as Qinghai Province) while recognizing the autonomy of "Outer Tibet" under the Dalai Lama's rule. Both China and Britain promised to "respect the territorial integrity of [Tibet], and abstain from interference in the administration of Outer Tibet."
  • Despite this sort of assistance from the Chinese Empire, the people of Tibet chafed under increasingly meddlesome Qing rule.
  • when the Eighth Dalai Lama died, and 1895, when the Thirteenth Dalai
  • none of the incumbent incarnations of the Dalai Lama lived to see their nineteenth birthdays
  • If the Chinese found a certain incarnation too hard to control, they would poison him. If the Tibetans thought an incarnation was controlled by the Chinese, then they would poison him themselves.
  • Throughout this period, Russia and Britain were engaged in the "Great Game," a struggle for influence and control in Central Asia.
  • Russia pushed south of its borders, seeking access to warm-water sea ports and a buffer zone between Russia proper and the advancing British. The British pushed northward from India, trying to expand their empire and protect the Raj, the "Crown Jewel of the British Empire," from the expansionist Russians.
  • Tibet was an important playing piece in this game.
  • the British in India concluded a trade and border treaty with Beijing concerning the boundary between Sikkim and Tibet.However, the Tibetans flatly rejected the treaty terms.
  • The British invaded Tibet in 1903 with 10,000 men, and took Lhasa the following year. Thereupon, they concluded another treaty with the Tibetans, as well as Chinese, Nepalese and Bhutanese representatives, which gave the British themselves some control over Tibet’s affairs.
  • The 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, fled the country in 1904 at the urging of his Russian disciple, Agvan Dorzhiev. He went first to Mongolia, then made his way to Beijing.
  • According to Tibet, the "priest/patron" relationship established at this time between the Dalai Lama and Qing China continued throughout the Qing Era, but it had no bearing on Tibet's status as an independent nation. China, naturally, disagrees.
  • He returned to Lhasa in 1909, disappointed by Chinese policies towards Tibet. China sent a force of 6,000 troops into Tibet, and the Dalai Lama fled to Darjeeling, India later that same year.
  • China's new revolutionary government issued a formal apology to the Dalai Lama for the Qing Dynasty's insults, and offered to reinstate him. Thubten Gyatso refused, stating that he had no interest in the Chinese offer.
  • He then issued a proclamation that was distributed across Tibet, rejecting Chinese control and stating that "We are a small, religious, and independent nation."The Dalai Lama took control of Tibet's internal and external governance in 1913, negotiating directly with foreign powers, and reforming Tibet's judicial, penal, and educational systems.
  • Representatives of Great Britain, China, and Tibet met in 1914 to negotiate a treaty marking out the boundary lines between India and its northern neighbors.
  • The Chinese declared that the Dalai Lama had been deposed as soon as he left Tibet, and claimed full sovereignty over not only Tibet but also Nepal and Bhutan. The Dalai Lama went to Beijing to discuss the situation with the Emperor Guangxu, but he flatly refused to kowtow to the Emperor.
  • China walked out of the conference without signing the treaty after Britain laid claim to the Tawang area of southern Tibet, which is now part of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Tibet and Britain both signed the treaty.
  • As a result, China has never agreed to India's rights in northern Arunachal Pradesh (Tawang), and the two nations went to war over the area in 1962. The boundary dispute still has not been resolved.
  • China also claims sovereignty over all of Tibet, while the Tibetan government-in-exile points to the Chinese failure to sign the Simla Convention as proof that both Inner and Outer Tibet legally remain under the Dalai Lama's jurisdiction.
  • Soon, China would be too distracted to concern itself with the issue of Tibet.
  • China would see near-continuous civil war up to the Communist victory in 1949, and this era of conflict was exacerbated by the Japanese Occupation and World War II. Under such circumstances, the Chinese showed little interest in Tibet.The 13th Dalai Lama ruled independent Tibet in peace until his death in 1933.
  • Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, was taken to Lhasa in 1937 to begin training for his duties as the leader of Tibet. He would remain there until 1959, when the Chinese forced him into exile in India.
  • In 1950, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of the newly-formed People's Republic of China invaded Tibet. With stability reestablished in Beijing for the first time in decades, Mao Zedong sought to assert China's right to rule over Tibet as well.
  • The PLA inflicted a swift and total defeat on Tibet's small army, and China drafted the "Seventeen Point Agreement" incorporating Tibet as an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China.Representatives of the Dalai Lama's government signed the agreement under protest, and the Tibetans repudiated the agreement nine years later.
  • On March 1, 1959, the Dalai Lama received an odd invitation to attend a theater performance at PLA headquarters near Lhasa.
  • The guards immediately publicized this rather ham-handed attempted abduction, and the following day an estimated crowd of 300,000 Tibetans surrounded Potala Palace to protect their leader.
  • Tibetan troops were able to secure a route for the Dalai Lama to escape into India on March 17. Actual fighting began on March 19, and lasted only two days before the Tibetan troops were defeated.
  • An estimated 800 artillery shells had pummeled Norbulingka, and Lhasa's three largest monasteries were essentially leveled. The Chinese rounded up thousands of monks, executing many of them. Monasteries and temples all over Lhasa were ransacked.
  • In the days after the 1959 Uprising, the Chinese government revoked most aspects of Tibet's autonomy, and initiated resettlement and land distribution across the country. The Dalai Lama has remained in exile ever since.
  • China's central government, in a bid to dilute the Tibetan population and provide jobs for Han Chinese, initiated a "Western China Development Program" in 1978.As many as 300,000 Han now live in Tibet, 2/3 of them in the capital city. The Tibetan population of Lhasa, in contrast, is only 100,000.Ethnic Chinese hold the vast majority of government posts.
  • On May 1, 1998, the Chinese officials at Drapchi Prison in Tibet ordered hundreds of prisoners, both criminals and political detainees, to participate in a Chinese flag-raising ceremony.Some of the prisoners began to shout anti-Chinese and pro-Dalai Lama slogans, and prison guards fired shots into the air before returning all the prisoners to their cells.
  • The prisoners were then severely beaten with belt buckles, rifle butts, and plastic batons, and some were put into solitary confinement for months at a time, according to one young nun who was released from the prison a year later.
  • Three days later, the prison administration decided to hold the flag-raising ceremony again.Once more, some of the prisoners began to shout slogans.Prison official reacted with even more brutality, and five nuns, three monks, and one male criminal were killed by the guards. One man was shot; the rest were beaten to death.
  • On March 10, 2008, Tibetans marked the 49th anniversary of the 1959 uprising by peacefully protesting for the release of imprisoned monks and nuns. Chinese police then broke up the protest with tear gas and gunfire.The protest resumed for several more days, finally turning into a riot. Tibetan anger was fueled by reports that imprisoned monks and nuns were being mistreated or killed in prison as a reaction to the street demonstrations.
  • China immediately cut off access to Tibet for foreign media and tourists.
  • The unrest came at a sensitive time for China, which was gearing up for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.The situation in Tibet caused increased international scrutiny of Beijing's entire human rights record, leading some foreign leaders to boycott the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Olympic torch-bearers around the world were met by thousands of human rights protestors.
  • Tibet and China have had a long relationship, fraught with difficulty and change.At times, the two nations have worked closely together. At other times, they have been at war.
  • Today, the nation of Tibet does not exist; not one foreign government officially recognizes the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Javier E

The Avalon Project : Hossbach Memorandum - 0 views

avalon.law.yale.edu/...hossbach.asp

germany hossbach history WWII

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 18 - Cached
  • The question for Germany ran: where could she achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost.
  • German policy had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the center of Europe was a thorn in the flesh
  • Germany's problem could only be solved by means of force and this was never without attendant risk.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • If one accepts as the basis of the following exposition the resort to force with its attendant risks, then there remain still to be answered the questions "when" and "how." In this matter there were three cases [Falle] to be dealt with:
  • Case 1: Period 1943-1945. After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be expected.
  • Our relative strength would decrease in relation to the rearmament which would by then have been carried out by the rest of the world. If we did not act by 1943-45' any year could, in consequence of a lack of reserves, produce the food crisis, to cope with which the necessary foreign exchange was not available, and this must be regarded as a "waning point of the regime." Besides, the world was expecting our attack and was increasing its counter-measures from year to year. It was while the rest of the world was still preparing its defenses [sich abriegele] that we were obliged to take the offensive.
  • The necessity for action before 1943-45 would arise in cases 2 and 3.
  • Case 2: If internal strife in France should develop into such a domestic crisis as to absorb the French Army completely and render it incapable of use for war against Germany, then the time for action against the Czechs had come.
  • For the improvement of our politico-military position our first objective, in the event of our being embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West.
  • Actually, the Fuehrer believed that almost certainly Britain, and probably France as well, had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the fact that this question could be cleared up in due course by Germany. Difficulties connected with the Empire, and the prospect of being once more entangled in a protracted European war, were decisive considerations for Britain against participation in a war against Germany. Britain's attitude would certainly not be without influence on that of France. An attack by France without British support, and with the prospect of the offensive being brought to a standstill on our western fortifications, was hardly probable.
  • The incorporation of these two States with Germany meant, from the politico-military point of view, a substantial advantage because it would mean shorter and better frontiers, the freeing of forces for other purposes, and the possibility of creating new units up to a level of about 12 divisions, that is, 1 new division per million inhabitants.
  • Italy was not expected to object to the elimination of the Czechs, but it was impossible at the moment to estimate what her attitude on the Austrian question would be; that depended essentially upon whether the Duce were still alive
  • The degree of surprise and the swiftness of our action were decisive factors for Poland's attitude. Poland -with Russia at her rear will have little inclination to engage in war against a victorious Germany.
  • In the light of past experience, the Fuehrer did not see any early end to the hostilities in Spain
  • from the German point of view; rather were we interested in a continuance of the war and in the keeping up of the tension in the Mediterranean.
  • As our interest lay more in the prolongation of the war in Spain, it must be the immediate aim of our policy to strengthen Italy's rear with a view to her remaining in the Balearics.
  • If Germany made use of this war to settle the Czech and Austrian questions, it was to be assumed that Britain -herself at war with Italy- would decide not to act against Germany. Without British support, a warlike action by France against Germany was not to be expected.
runlai_jiang

Trump Bucks Republican Orthodoxy on Guns - Washington Wire - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...capital-journal-guns-thursd

gun control

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ
  • He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.
  • he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • he continued to seek a legislative response to the deaths of 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school two weeks ago
  • His comments came the same day&nbsp;Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods–two of the country’s biggest gun sellers–said they both would no longer sell guns to anyone under 21 years old.
  • with Democrats saying they doubted the president’s words would yield immediate results, and several key Republicans saying they remained opposed to the Manchin-Toomey legislation that the president said he favored.&nbsp;
  • Mr. Trump has staked out positions on controversial issues in the past, only to surprise some lawmakers with an apparent change of heart later.
  • &nbsp;For more than 20 years, federal law has effectively halted the government’s ability to research gun violence. Now,&nbsp; a bipartisan group of lawmakers&nbsp;is taking another look at the restrictions…C
  • Hope Hicks, the longtime Trump confidant and White House communications director, is resigning. Ms. Hicks, 29 years old, told the president in recent weeks that she wanted to leave the White House to explore outside opportunities, Rebecca Ballhaus and Peter Nicholas report.
  • The bipartisan legislation would relax dozens of rules for small to medium-size banks, shaking up the banking sector with policy changes that could encourage deal-making and make it easier for banks to exp
  • several banks for information about their relationships with Jared Kushner and his finances, Emily Glazer, Erica Orden a
  • News of federal inquiries concerning Kushner Cos. has emerged in recent months, including by prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and by the Securities and Exchange Commission report
  • The Pentagon is pushing to make the F-35 combat jet cheaper and will take over some repair work to prevent the world’s most expensive military program from becoming unaffordable.
  • runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18
     
    Trump promised to restrict gun purchase but the reliability is still a question mark
manhefnawi

Europe in the Caribbean, Part I: The Age of Catholic Kings | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...bean-part-i-age-catholic-kings

Spain England France Caribbean

shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • remote but wealth-providing islands on the other side of the Atlantic was always lively and inquisitive
  • The islands may be said to have European status not only because from the age of Queen Elizabeth to that of Napoleon they were involved in quite as many wars, rivalries and conflicts as were the great powers of the Old World themselves. The Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and, for a brief moment
  • Unlike the Spaniards, the British understood from the beginning the importance of a numerous and agile merchant navy
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Las Casas insisted that the Indians, no less than any other of God’s creatures, were capable of receiving the Faith under instruction; and it was this part of his doctrine that aroused the strongest controversy of all, for the Spanish settlers in 1511
  • We came here to serve God and the King, and also to get rich
  • The story opens with Spain. It was during the reign of King Charles I of Spain, who is better known in history as the Emperor Charles V, that the South American Empire was added to the Crown of Spain, which in the person of Charles already included his Burgundian and Netherland inheritance
  • in government circles and even at the Courts of Charles V and Philip II
  • Like Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, under whose encouragement Colombus had established the island spring-board from which the South American possessions had been conquered under Charles V, belonged in several respects to what is commonly called the ‘New Monarchies’, a somewhat simplified term for the Crown striving to establish its own power at the expense of the feudal overlords
  • The Catholic Kings therefore welcomed any and every move that was likely to curb the power of the land-owning classes overseas
  • Habsburg Spain, in fact, was culturally and socially the oddest mixture
  • The Spaniards exercised not the slightest measure of control over these swift and elusive marauders who, over large stretches of the outer islands, had things all their own way until the French and British arrived
  • The King of France declared that his countrymen would never acquiesce in being ‘disturbed in their navigation of the seas, nor will they consent to be deprived of the sea or the sky’
  • both France and England challenged Spain’s monopoly in the Indies without at first going to war with her for that reason in Europe. Sir John Hawkins sailed to the Indies three times between 1562 and 1568
  • in the end the Spanish monopoly, though being patently far from inviolate and getting more than a little frayed at the fringes, remained intact while the Habsburgs occupied the throne of Spain until the end of the seventeenth century
  • We might finish this chapter of Spanish supremacy in the West Indies with a glance at the most serious challenge yet thrown out to Spain in Elizabethan times.
  • For both, as later for Nelson, all oceans of the world were one, a way of thinking that led to Drake’s great voyage of circumnavigation of 1577-80, while it caused Menéndez, in the last year of his life, to lay before Philip II the bold plan of making one of the Scilly islands a Spanish base to deal with the menace of foreign privateering by the French and English in the Caribbean
  • The sixteenth century ended with England and France’s failure to cut the life-line between Spain and the Indies that ran through the Caribbean and enabled Spain to take events like the defeat of her Armadas in European waters in her stride
  • The Spaniards were apt to call both French and English enemies Corsarios luteranos, Protestant corsairs, but as in Europe Anglo-French relations under Henry VIII were anything but friendly
  • It was only when England and France were ready again to resume their offensive against the Caribbean and each other that Spain fell from the rank of an Imperial power to the sorry role of a professional ally of the stronger battalions and navies
manhefnawi

Charles XIV John | king of Sweden and Norway | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Charles-XIV-John

Sweden Bernadotte Napoleon Gustave IV

shared by manhefnawi on 17 May 18 - No Cached
  • original name Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
  • French Revolutionary general and marshal of France (1804), who was elected crown prince of Sweden (1810), becoming regent and then king of Sweden and Norway (1818–44).
  • formed Swedish alliances with Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig (1813)
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • he enlisted in the French army
  • supporter of the Revolution
  • Bernadotte first met Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 in Italy. Their relationship, at first friendly, was soon embittered by rivalries and misunderstandings
  • In November 1799 Bernadotte refused to assist Bonaparte’s coup d’état that ended the Directory but neither did he defend it
  • When, on May 18, 1804, Napoleon proclaimed the empire, Bernadotte declared full loyalty to him and, in May, was named marshal of the empire
  • he was invited to become crown prince of Sweden. In 1809 a palace revolution had overthrown King Gustav IV of Sweden and had put the aged, childless, and sickly Charles XIII on the throne. The Danish prince Christian August had been elected crown prince but died suddenly in 1810, and the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice.
  • Bernadotte was elected Swedish crown prince. On October 20 he accepted Lutheranism and landed in Sweden; he was adopted as son by Charles XIII and took the name of Charles John (Karl Johan). The Crown Prince at once assumed control of the government and acted officially as regent during the illnesses of Charles XIII. Napoleon now tried to prevent any reorientation of Swedish foreign policy and moreover sent an immediate demand that Sweden declare war on Great Britain
  • he respected his military ability, his skillful and humane administration of Hanover and the Hanseatic towns, and his charitable treatment of Swedish prisoners in Germany
  • Charles John was anxious to achieve something for Sweden that would prove his worth to the Swedes and establish his dynasty in power. He could, as many Swedes wished, have regained Finland from Russia, either by conquest or by negotiation
  • the conquest of Norway from Denmark, based on a Swedish alliance with Napoleon’s enemies. An alliance was signed with Russia in April 1812, with Great Britain in March 1813—with the British granting a subsidy for the proposed conquest of Norway—and with Prussia in April 1813. Urged by the allies, however, Charles John agreed to take part in the great campaign against Napoleon and to postpone his war with Denmark. The Crown Prince landed his troops at Stralsund, Ger., in May 1813 and soon took command of the allied army of the north
  • conserve his forces for the war with Denmark, and the Prussians bore the brunt of the fighting
  • After the decisive Battle of Leipzig (October 1813), Napoleon’s first great defeat, Charles John succeeded in defeating the Danes in a swift campaign and forced King Frederick VI of Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel (January 1814), which transferred Norway to the Swedish crown. Charles John now had dreams of becoming king or “protector” of France, but he had become alienated from the French people, and the victorious allies would not tolerate another soldier in charge of French affairs
  • Charles John conducted an efficient and almost bloodless campaign, and in August the Norwegians signed the Convention of Moss, whereby they accepted Charles XIII as king
  • At the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), Austria and the French Bourbons were hostile to the upstart prince, and the son of the deposed Gustav was a potential pretender to the throne. But, thanks to Russian and British support, the status of the new dynasty was undisturbed
  • Upon the death of Charles XIII on Feb. 5, 1818, Charles John became king of Sweden and Norway, and the former republican and revolutionary general became a conservative ruler.
  • His foreign policy inaugurated a long and favourable period of peace, based on good relations with Russia and Great Britain
millerco

Trump Responds to Fury Over 'Roseanne,' but Not Her Racist Remarks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...roseanne-barr-trump.html

US trump History politics apology roseanne

shared by millerco on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • It was not the racist comment that made the president angry. It was the apology from ABC.
  • Wading into a public outcry over remarks by the comedian Roseanne Barr, President Trump did not condemn the Twitter post about a black former aide to President Barack Obama that led to the swift cancellation of Ms. Barr’s ABC sitcom.
  • Instead, he expressed his own grievances on Wednesday and Thursday with what the network’s on-air personalities have said about him, and insisted he was the one who deserved an apology.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The president, referring to himself in the third person, complained on Twitter that Mr. Iger had “never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.”
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: The Limits of My Conservatism - 0 views

nymag.com/...limits-of-my-conservatism.html

conservatism reactionary gender leftist indoctrination immigration

shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • I had a very pleasant dinner with Michael Anton, the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while
  • Anton is something of an intellectual pariah — a Washington Post columnist wrote last year that “there is little reason to ever listen” to him — but he’s a pariah in part because he’s a reactionary with a first-class mind
  • He reminds me why I’m a conservative, why the distinction between a reactionary and a conservative is an important one in this particular moment, and how the left unwittingly is becoming reactionism’s most potent enabler
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • one core divide on the right: between those who see the social, cultural, and demographic changes of the last few decades as requiring an assault and reversal, and those who seek to reform its excesses, manage its unintended consequences, but otherwise live with it. Anton is a reactionary; I’m a conservative
  • there is a place where conservatives and reactionaries find common cause — and that is when the change occurring is drastic, ideological, imposed by an elite, and without any limiting principle.
  • On immigration, for example, has the demographic transformation of the U.S. been too swift, too revolutionary, and too indifferent to human nature and history?
  • Or is it simply a new, if challenging, turn in a long, American story of waves of immigrants creating a country that’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope?
  • If you answer “yes” to the first, you’re a reactionary. If “yes” to the second, you’re a liberal. If you say yes to both, you’re a conservative.
  • If you say it’s outrageous and racist even to consider these questions, you’re a card-carrying member of the left.
  • In a new essay, Anton explains his view of the world: “What happens when transformative efforts bump up against permanent and natural limits? Nature tends to bump back
  • But what are “permanent and natural limits” to transformation? Here are a couple: humanity’s deep-seated tribalism and the natural differences between men and women
  • — but you will never eradicate these deeper realities.
  • That kind of left-radicalism will generate an equal and opposite kind of right-reactionism. And that’s especially true if you define the resisters as bigots and deplorables, and refuse to ever see that they might have a smidgen of a point.
  • I’d say that by any reasonable standards in history or the contemporary world, America is a miracle of multiracial and multicultural harmony. There’s more to do and accomplish, but the standard should be what’s doable within the framework of human nature, not perfection
  • More to the point, the attempt to eradicate rather than ameliorate these things requires extraordinary intervention in people’s lives, empowers government way beyond its optimal boundaries, and generates intense backlash.
  • if you decide to change the ethnic composition of an entire country in just a few decades, you will get a backlash from the previous majority ethnicity; and if you insist that there are no differences between men and women, you are going to generate male and female resistance.
  • The left is correct that Americans are racist and sexist; but so are all humans
  • This is not to say that some of the resisters are not bigots, just that no human society has been without bigotry, and that many others who are resistant to drastic change are just uncomfortable, or nostalgic, or afraid, or lost
  • I’m a multicultural conservative. But when assaulted by the slur of “white supremacist” because I don’t buy Marcuse, my reactionism perks up. The smugness, self-righteousness, and dogmatism of the current left is a Miracle-Gro of reactionism.
  • Subject young white boys to critical race and gender theory, tell them that women can have penises, that genetics are irrelevant in understanding human behavior, that borders are racist, or that men are inherently toxic, and you will get a bunch of Jordan Peterson fans by their 20s. Actually, scratch that future tense — they’re here and growing in number.
  • Many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn’t, because it can’t, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked.
  • n the end, the alienated and despised see no reason not to gravitate to ever-more extreme positions. They support people and ideas simply because they piss off their indoctrinators. And, in the end, they reelect Trump.
  • None of this is necessary. You can be in favor of women’s equality without buying into the toxicity of men; you can support legal immigration if the government gets serious about stopping illegal immigration; you can be inclusive of trans people without abolishing the bimodality of human sex and gender; you can support criminal-justice reform without believing — as the New York Times now apparently does — that America is an inherently racist invention,
  • Leftists have to decide at some point: Do they want to push more conservatives into Michael Anton’s reactionary camp or more reactionaries into the conservative one? And begin to ponder their own role in bringing this extreme reactionism into the mainstream.
Javier E

A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein's Money, Do It in Secret - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lessig-epstein-ito-mit.html

philanthropy moral reputation corruption culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Mr. Lessig signed a letter in support of Mr. Ito, and then published a 3,500-word essay on the subject. He argued that in an ideal world, no institution should take money from people like Mr. Epstein, but that in reality, much of the money that props up universities and other elite institutions comes from troubling sources.
  • Mr. Lessig suggested that donors to places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could be organized in four buckets, ranging from “people like Tom Hanks or Taylor Swift — people who are wealthy and whose wealth comes from nothing but doing good” — to “entities and people whose wealth comes from clearly wrongful or harmful or immoral behavior.”
  • Mr. Lessig, who noted that he was a childhood victim of sexual abuse, also argued that the act of veiling Mr. Epstein’s contributions was good, because it avoided “whitewashing” his reputation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Everyone seems to treat it as if the anonymity and secrecy around Epstein’s gift are a measure of some kind of moral failing,” Mr. Lessig wrote. “I see it as exactly the opposite.”
Javier E

Germany's green energy shift is more fizzle than sizzle - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.eu/...ift-is-more-fizzle-than-sizzle

germany energy policy

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • High power prices, continued coal dependency and a “poor CO2 emissions record” mean Germany is falling behind other countries in shifting away from fossil fuels, according to McKinsey’s new global Energy Transition Index
  • In Europe, 11 countries including Sweden, Austria, Denmark, the U.K. and France do better in cutting coal dependency and greening their energy systems.
  • The European Commission’s latest country assessment, published earlier this month, found that Germany is at “considerable risk” of missing its national energy efficiency target of 20 percent by 2020. For now, it is still expected to meet its 2020 renewable energy target of 18 percent,
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • enewable power last year surged to 36 percent of the country's electricity use, according to the Agora Energiewende think tank. But while renewables grew in the power sector, they didn't make major strides in transport or heating, so they account for just over 13 percent of energy use.
  • Souring opinions on diesel engines further weigh on emissions. Diesel cars emit less greenhouse gases than those powered by gasoline, which is why the country's politicians and car industry saw diesel as a panacea to deal with global warming.
  • For years Germany was one of the world's energy transformation leaders. It was German cash that helped finance the technology revolution that has turned solar and wind into viable technologies that now generate increasingly cheap power
  • An average four-person household has to pay more than double for power in 2017 compared to 2000,"
  • The powerful German business lobby BDI is also unhappy, saying in a recent&nbsp;report&nbsp;that&nbsp;high electricity costs, delays in boosting the energy efficiency of buildings, and a “lack of vision” on transport are "worrying German industry.”
  • Greenhouse gas emissions in Germany have stagnated for three years in a row, rather than falling. That's largely to do with rising pollution caused by transportation, as well as a failure to reduce emissions in the buildings sector as energy consumption went up thanks to the economic recovery.
  • Germany is also set to fall short of its national climate target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020. The new coalition government effectively abandoned that goal, instead focusing on meeting its 2030 target of reducing emissions by 55 percent. Germany is also expected to miss its emissions reduction target for sectors such as transport and buildings.
  • But the Dieselgate scandal hammered the reputation of diesel cars, and there is growing concern about the smog that diesel generates. As cities consider banning older diesel cars, sales have fallen off a cliff. The share of diesel-fueled passenger cars in Germany was 39 percent last year, down from about 46 percent in 2016,&nbsp;
  • "Germany missed bringing electric cars on to roads,
  • "In order to have an energy transition, you have to&nbsp;build up renewable energies, but then you also have to reduce coal, step-by-step,” Kemfert said. "That happened too late in Germany.
  • A lot of Germany's renewable power, especially&nbsp;powerful offshore wind, is generated in the north of the country. The difficulty is getting that electricity to industrial regions in the south like Bavaria.
  • For years Germany annoyed neighbors like the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland by sending surges of electricity through their networks. They've now taken short-term measures to reduce the disruptions until the necessary transmission links are built.
  • domestic opposition is making it difficult for Germany to build its own north-south and other new interconnectors.&nbsp;The project has faced delays as people battle the idea of ugly high-voltage power lines besmirching pretty landscapes. Now much of the interconnector is due to run underground, ramping up costs.
  • Volkswagen's recent pledge to spend&nbsp;€20 billion on battery contracts and to begin making electric cars at 16 sites worldwide shows the car industry is taking steps to shift its business model&nbsp;— which could help secure a&nbsp;long-term drop in Germany's transport emissions.
  • Proponents of a swift coal exit, however, shouldn't hold their breath. Altmaier also said that ending coal power won't "happen suddenly and abruptly, but step-by-step over several decades."
brookegoodman

How France missed a chance to sink Bismarck | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...germany.lukeharding

politics history

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • He was the man who famously unified Germany and ended France's domination of Europe. But new documents found in a dusty town hall reveal that the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck nearly drowned while swimming at the French seaside resort of Biarritz, an event that could have profoundly changed the course of European history.
  • The rescue of Bismarck - then Prussia's ambitious ambassador in Paris, in his mid-40s - would prove costly for France. Eight years later, in 1870, he masterminded Prussia's swift, crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war, ending French primacy in Europe. The Iron Chancellor went on to unify Germany, something that had eluded its kings and rulers since Charlemagne.
  • Bismarck recalled his time in Biarritz, where he met the French emperor Napoleon III, as the happiest of his life. "I have lost the illusion, that we can be happy again in Biarritz," he wrote later to his ailing mistress, who died in 1875 at 35.
brickol

'It's a Wreck': 3.3 Million File Unemployment Claims as Economy Comes Apart - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...virus-unemployment-claims.html

us trump economics

shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • More than three million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, sending a collective shudder throughout the economy that is unlike anything Americans have experienced.
  • Just three weeks ago, barely 200,000 people applied for jobless benefits, a historically low number. In the half-century that the government has tracked applications, the worst week ever, with 695,000 so-called initial claims, had been in 1982.
  • The numbers provided only the first hint of the economic cataclysm in progress. Even comparatively optimistic forecasters expect millions more lost jobs, and with them foreclosures, evictions and bankruptcies. Thousands of businesses have closed in response to the pandemic, and many will never reopen. Some economists say the decline in gross domestic product this year could rival the worst years of the Great Depression.
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  • Cases in the United States now exceed 80,000, the most of any nation, even China and Italy, according to a New York Times database, and more than 1,000 deaths across the country have been linked to the virus.
  • President Trump said the federal government planned to designate areas as being at high, medium or low risk for spreading the virus to guide local decisions on imposing or relaxing restrictions on movement and commerce.
  • The terrifying speed of the U.S. economic collapse from the pandemic has spurred lawmakers to action. Late Wednesday night, senators agreed on a $2 trillion aid package that would provide cash payments to nearly all Americans and would expand the unemployment system, among other changes. Final congressional approval is expected on Friday.
  • A three-day rally has lifted stocks in the S&amp;P 500 index more than 17 percent, including a rise of 6.2 percent on Thursday, though prices remain far lower than they were a month ago.
  • Some part-time and low-wage workers don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. Nor do gig workers, independent contractors and the self-employed, although the emergency aid package passed by the Senate would broaden eligibility to include many of them. Others who do qualify may not know it
  • The congressional relief package is intended to, in effect, press “pause” on the economy, allowing idled workers and shuttered businesses to keep paying their bills so that they can spring back quickly once the health crisis eases. If it works, the recovery could be relatively swift; if it doesn’t, the cascade of layoffs and business failures could stretch on far longer.
  • Low-wage workers — many of them black, like Ms. Moore-Caraway, or Hispanic — have been hit especially hard by the sudden economic reversal. Many work in the industries most affected by the outbreak, such as restaurants and travel, and few can work from home. They are also less likely to have sick leave or other paid time off, and they have less money saved to help overcome a missed paycheck.
  • Black and Hispanic workers “always bear the brunt” of economic slowdowns, said Alix Gould-Werth, a researcher at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a left-leaning think tank. “Now they’re bearing the brunt of these twin crises, the health crisis and the economic crisis.”
  • Under the congressional aid package, most families would receive $1,200 per adult and $500 per child in direct payments. The bill would also increase unemployment benefits by $600 a week and extend how long laid-off workers could receive benefits. And it would waive some requirements for receiving jobless benefits, like the requirement that recipients look for work.
  • An earlier relief bill, passed by Congress last week, provided $1 billion to help state unemployment systems that are breaking under the stress of record call volumes. Departments across the country reported huge spikes in call volumes and online applications.
nrashkind

More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-coronavirus-face-masks.html

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Experts have started to question whether masks may offer at least some protection to healthy individuals and essential workers.
  • As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, experts have started to question official guidance about whether ordinary, healthy people should protect themselves with a regular surgical mask,
  • or even a scarf.
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  • The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to state that masks don’t necessarily protect healthy individuals from getting infected as they go about their daily lives.
  • While wearing a mask may not necessarily prevent healthy people from getting sick, and it certainly doesn’t replace important measures such as hand-washing or social distancing, it may be better than nothing, Dr. Atmar said.
  • the recent surge in infections in the United States, which has put the country at the center of the epidemic, with more confirmed cases than China,
  • “The swift increase in cases to these levels in the U.S. highlights to an even greater degree the importance of implementing and adhering to public health measures,”
  • The official guidance continues to recommend that masks should be reserved for people who are already sick,
  • But studies of influenza pandemics have shown that when high-grade N95 masks are not available, surgical masks do protect people a bit more than not wearing masks at all.
  • With the current coronavirus, researchers are also finding that there are more asymptomatic cases than were known early on in the pandemic.
  • “It’s still hard to tell what percentage of people are truly asymptomatic because many go on to develop symptoms a few days later,” said Dr. Neil Fishman, the chief medical officer of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Javier E

U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html

intelligence reports us pandemic crisis trump politics policy

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
  • they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.
  • Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it
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  • But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.
  • Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration
  • “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.”
  • The warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies increased in volume toward the end of January and into early February, said officials familiar with the reports. By then, a majority of the intelligence reporting included in daily briefing papers and digests from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA was about covid-19, said officials who have read the reports.
  • The surge in warnings coincided with a move by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) to sell dozens of stocks worth between $628,033 and $1.72&nbsp;million.
  • A key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine whether foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of an outbreak or take steps to hide a public health crisis
  • At the State Department, personnel had been nervously tracking early reports about the virus. One official noted that it was discussed at a meeting in the third week of January, around the time that cable traffic showed that U.S. diplomats in Wuhan were being brought home on chartered planes — a sign that the public health risk was significant
  • Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president.
  • Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market
  • On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials to pay more attention to the virus
  • Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, argued that the administration needed to take the virus seriously or it could cost the president his reelection, and that dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.
  • Trump was dismissive because he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.
  • By early February, Grogan and others worried that there weren’t enough tests to determine the rate of infection, according to people who spoke directly to Grogan
  • But Trump resisted and continued to assure Americans that the coronavirus would never run rampant as it had in other countries.“I think it’s going to work out fine,” Trump said on Feb. 19. “I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.”
  • “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted five days later. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
  • But earlier that month, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services delivered a starkly different message to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a classified briefing that four U.S. officials said covered the coronavirus and its global health implications. The House Intelligence Committee received a similar briefing.
  • Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response — who was joined by intelligence officials, including from the CIA — told committee members that the virus posed a “serious” threat, one of those officials said.
  • he said that to get ahead of the virus and blunt its effects, Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives, the official said. “It was very alarming.”
  • Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China, despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.
  • Some of Trump’s advisers told him that Beijing was not providing accurate numbers
  • Rather than press China to be more forthcoming, Trump publicly praised its response.
  • “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
  • Trump on Feb. 3 banned foreigners who had been in China in the previous 14 days from entering the United States, a step he often credits for helping to protect Americans against the virus. He has also said publicly that the Chinese weren’t honest about the effects of the virus. But that travel ban wasn’t accompanied by additional significant steps to prepare
  • As the first cases of infection were confirmed in the United States, Trump continued to insist that the risk to Americans was small.“I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine,” he said on Feb. 10
Javier E

The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-america-future.html

pandemic response strategies US

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • More than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history shared their thoughts on the future during in-depth interviews. When can we emerge from our homes? How long, realistically, before we have a treatment or vaccine? How will we keep the virus at bay
  • The path forward depends on factors that are certainly difficult but doable, they said: a carefully staggered approach to reopening, widespread testing and surveillance, a treatment that works, adequate resources for health care providers — and eventually an effective vaccine.
  • The scenario that Mr. Trump has been unrolling at his daily press briefings — that the lockdowns will end soon, that a protective pill is almost at hand, that football stadiums and restaurants will soon be full — is a fantasy, most experts said.
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  • They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.
  • Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.
  • Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.
  • More Americans may die than the White House admits.
  • The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000.
  • The institute’s projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.
  • Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.
  • Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.
  • A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.
  • China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.
  • The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.
  • In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos.
  • Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.
  • China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were.
  • The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.
  • The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.
  • it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.
  • Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.
  • The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.
  • Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance
  • On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.
  • Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.
  • In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.
  • Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.
  • On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns.
  • China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’s incubation period.
  • Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.
  • Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control
  • But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.
  • Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.
  • Immunity will become a societal advantage.
  • Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.
  • “It will be a frightening schism,” Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”
  • Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense
  • Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them.
  • As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection
  • My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,”
  • It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.
  • The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.
  • Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.
  • once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.
  • To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.
  • “If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,”
  • In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.
  • There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears.
  • Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards
  • Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.
  • In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.
  • The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.
  • China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.
  • There will not be a vaccine soon.
  • any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.
  • the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.
  • for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.
  • A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.
  • It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.
  • Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.
  • “Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.
  • The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.
  • if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.
  • “People have to start thinking big,” Dr. Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”
  • Treatments are likely to arrive first.
  • The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.
  • as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.
  • Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.
  • Goodbye, ‘America First.’
  • A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.
  • And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.
  • This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted.
  • “If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,”
  • If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said.“What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”
  • Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.
  • In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.
  • He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.
  • In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.
  • If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change
Javier E

The U.K.'s Coronavirus 'Herd Immunity' Debacle - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608065

uk immunity

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Herd immunity is typically generated through vaccination, and while it could arise through widespread infection, “you don’t rely on the very deadly infectious agent to create an immune population,” says Akiko Iwasaki, a virologist at the Yale School of Medicine. And that seemed like the goal.
  • Vallance and others certainly made it sound like the government was deliberately aiming for 60 percent of the populace to fall ill. Keep calm and carry on … and get COVID-19.
  • He says that the actual goal is the same as that of other countries: flatten the curve by staggering the onset of infections. As a consequence, the nation may achieve herd immunity; it’s a side effect, not an aim.
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  • “The messaging has been really confusing, and I think that was really unfortunate,” says Petra Klepac, who is also an infectious-disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “It’s been a case of how not to communicate during an outbreak,”
  • critics of the U.K. strategy argue that swift, decisive action matters more than future hypotheticals do. The country’s current caseload puts it only a few weeks behind Italy, where more than 24,000 cases have so overburdened hospitals that doctors must now make awful decisions about whom to treat.
  • First, we don’t know how long immunity against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, lasts. When people are infected with OC43 and HKU1—two other coronaviruses that regularly circulate among humans and cause common colds—they stay immune for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the first SARS virus (from 2003) holds for much longer. No one knows whether SARS-CoV-2 will hew to either of these extremes, and according to one recent study, its behavior could mean anything from annual outbreaks to a decades-long quiet spell.
  • making a decent long-term strategy is hard when there are still two big unknowns that substantially affect how the pandemic will progress
  • a more granular analysis across Chinese provinces showed that the virus can still easily spread in humid areas, and a third modeling study concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 can proliferate at any time of year.” The bottom line: There’s a very wide range of possible futures.
  • South Korea, by contrast, seems to have brought COVID-19 to heel through a combination of social-distancing measures and extensive testing. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have been similarly successful.
  • In a similar letter, more than 500 behavioral scientists called on the government to disclose the evidence behind its contention that the public will experience “behavioral fatigue” if restrictions are put in place too early.
  • Without strong guidance, British institutions and citizens have begun making their own decisions, going well over what the government recommends. Universities haven’t been told to close, but many have, sending students home, moving classes and exams online, and postponing graduations. Many care homes will not be admitting visitors. Soccer leagues have been suspended. The Queen has canceled public engagements. The Scottish government is planning to close schools and expand testing.
  • “We really need people to engage and to sustain individual control measures, like social distancing, for months at a time,” Klepac adds. “We’re in this for the long term and we need everyone to do their part. It is a very big ask.
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