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Klete Keller, Former Olympic Swimmer, Charged Over Capitol Attack : Insurrection At The... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...er-charged-over-capitol-attack
shared by anonymous on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Klete Keller, the Olympic gold medalist swimmer, is facing federal charges for his alleged role in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week.
  • Keller faces three criminal counts, according to court documents filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia: obstructing law enforcement, knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
  • It was not immediately clear if Keller, who resides in Colorado, has been taken into custody.
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  • Keller, 38, was part of U.S. Olympic teams in 2000, 2004 and 2008. He is perhaps best known for holding off Australia's Ian Thorpe while swimming the anchor leg of the 4x200 freestyle at the 2004 Athens games to help his team win by 0.13 seconds.
  • Investigators also noted Keller's striking height. He stands at 6 feet and 6 inches.
  • According to court documents, he was wearing a blue jacket with "USA" on the back and a "red and white Olympic patch on the front left side."
  • Investigators said conservative news site Townhall Media posted a video of a crowd at the Capitol. Then, outlets such as SwimSwam, which follows competitive swimming, said it appeared Keller was in the video, according to the charging documents.
  • Federal authorities said they confirmed his identification by comparing screen shots of Keller with his driver's license with his image from Colorado's Department of Motor Vehicles.
  • USA Swimming, the U.S. governing body of competitive swimming, said in a statement to its membership Wednesday that "while we respect private individuals' and groups' rights to peacefully protest, we strongly condemned the unlawful actions taken by those at the Capitol last week."
  • "Mr. Keller's actions in no way represent the values or mission of USA Swimming. And while once a swimmer at the highest levels of our sport — representing the country and democracy he so willfully attacked — Mr. Keller has not been a member of this organization since 2008."
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Swiss Muslim girls must swim with boys, court rules - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by maxwellokolo on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 12 Jan 17
     
    Aziz Osmanoglu and Sehabat Kocabas, who also are Turkish nationals, refused for religious reasons to send their two daughters to swimming lessons at their school in Basel, Switzerland. The parents, who have been pressing this case for nearly a decade, argued that sending their children to swimming lessons with boys contravened Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights -- the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
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Polar Bears Are Starving Because of Global Warming, Melting Sea Ice, Study Shows - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...study-beaufort-sea-environment global warming ice bears crisis
shared by mimiterranova on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Because of melting sea ice, it is likely that more polar bears will soon starve, warns a new study that discovered the large carnivores need to eat 60 percent more than anyone had realized.
  • Polar bears rely almost exclusively on a calorie-loaded diet of seals. To minimize their energy consumption the bears still-hunt, waiting for hours by seals’ cone-shaped breathing holes in the sea ice. When a seal surfaces to breathe the bear stands on its hind legs and smacks it on the head with both of its front paws to stun it. Then the bear bites it on the neck and drags it onto the ice.
  • Climate change is heating up the Arctic faster than anywhere else, and sea ice is shrinking 14 percent per decade. Even today, in the middle of the bitter cold Arctic winter, satellites show there is about 770,000 square miles less sea ice than the 1981 to 2010 median (That's an area larger than Alaska and California combined). In the late spring, the ice is breaking up sooner and forming later in the fall, forcing bears to burn huge amounts of energy walking or swimming long distances to get to any remaining ice. Or they stay on land longer, spending the summer and, increasingly, the fall fasting, living off their fat from the seals they caught in the spring.
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  • The data showed the bears were active about 35 percent of the time and resting for the remainder, yet they burned through 12,325 calories a day, much of it from their body reserves. That’s about 60 percent more than previous studies had estimated. The videos revealed that four of the females weren’t able to catch a single seal. Measurements showed those animals lost 10 percent or more of their body mass.
  • More swimming could lead to smaller bears, reduced reproduction rates, and even increased risk of death
  • The farther the bears have to travel to get on the ice to hunt the more weight they lose. Eventually they start losing muscle, hurting their chances of hunting success, which can lead to a downward spiral. Bears are also doing a lot more swimming as the sea ice declines, said Derocher.
  • “As the sea ice melts earlier and earlier, polar bears are forced to swim more and more, to reach seal populations,”
  • Polar bears are considered endangered in the U.S. and are listed as “vulnerable” by the IUCN, because their sea ice habitat is under threat from climate change.
  • There’s no doubt that as the sea ice declines more and more bears are going to starve to death, said Amstrup. “I don’t know if that poor bear in that video was starving. I do know that the only solution for the long-term survival of the polar bear is to address climate change.”
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This photo triggered China's Cultural Revolution - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch politics history culture mao china communism
shared by bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20
     
    In the 1960's Mao Zedong's influence and health were on the decline in Communist China; many thought he was in very ill health or possibly even dead and his approval was low, which sparked a media campaign thanks to the Yangtze River. The Chinese people were still trying to recover from the Great Leap Forward and the millions of deaths it brought before it's ending. Meanwhile, the SU was going through a period of DeStalinization after the death of Stalin, something Mao did not want after his own death. Mao swam in the Yangtze again to show his health, but it also symbolized the beginning of another huge government campaign, similar to his swim before the implementation of the Great Leap Forward. This time his swim signaled the Cultural Revolution, a campaign to purge government officials not dedicated to Maoism and spark zeal for Mao in the Chinese youth. The Red Gaurd of the Maoist youth went out destroying what they called "the four olds" and rewriting history under Mao. The Cultural Revolution was just as chaotic as Mao's previous campaigns and resulted in countless deaths, but it got Mao what he wanted, respect after his death as opposed to the scrubbing Stalin's history received. His swim symbolized more than his physical strength, it symbolized a revitalization in the Chinese Communist government and his last revolution.
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After two months in office, Kamala Harris is still living out of suitcases -- and she's... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It has been more than two months since Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president of the United States, a historic moment for the country, as Harris is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold the second highest office in the land. Yet, Harris -- along with her husband, Georgetown Law professor Douglas Emhoff -- is still, ostensibly, living out of suitcases, unable to move into the private residence reserved for the vice president because it's still undergoing renovations.
  • It's unclear why the renovations are taking so long, said one administration official, but it's a situation that has left Harris increasingly and understandably bothered, according to several people who spoke to CNN about her situation. "She is getting frustrated," said another administration official, noting with each passing day the desire to move in to her designated house -- a stately, turreted mansion two-and-a-half miles from the White House -- grows more intense.
  • CNN has looked at various government contracts, awarded for myriad issues at the vice president's residence over the last few years, many of which detail intensive foundational work. From recently wrapped projects on a retention pond to a replaced tank system for $164,000 from last September, repairs and upkeep appear constant. There's also an ongoing $3.8 million contract for "plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors," according to the contract on the United States government spending website.
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  • The contracts, while substantial, aren't overtly egregious in terms of cost and expectation, considering the home is 9,000-plus square feet and was built in 1893. Tax records from 2018 indicate $119,000 in expenses were used to provide updates and improvements in and around the grounds of the residence, for example. However, the current contracts do not address specifically why the vice president is still not living there, which is leading to growing questions -- and agitation -- about the pace of the work.
  • Harris has recently been spotted at her future home, popping in for an hour-long visit three weeks ago, per CNN. Two administration staff with knowledge of the ongoing updates told CNN that Harris -- who likes to cook -- requested work be done on the kitchen.
  • It is not unusual for there to be at least a couple of weeks between residents, so the Naval staff who operate the home can refresh, said Elizabeth Haenle, who served as vice president residence manager and social secretary for former Vice President Dick Cheney. "From time to time, the Navy will ask the vice president and their respective families to delay moving in so that they have time for maintenance and upgrades that are not easy to perform once the vice president takes up residence," Haenle said.
  • Shortly after inauguration, a Harris aide told CNN the vice president wouldn't be immediately moving in, citing the need for some repairs to the home "that are more easily conducted with the home unoccupied." A move-in date was still to be determined at the time. Another administration official told CNN some of the work included renovating the home's chimneys -- there are seven working fireplaces -- as well as other updates.
  • Although Blair House provides comfortable, even luxurious, accommodations, Harris and Emhoff's current surroundings lack the creature comforts of a home. Antiques and museum-quality pieces of American history deck each of the 100-plus rooms, which include a gym and a private hair salon. And although the professional, full-time staff of more than a dozen provide amenities as accommodating as a luxury hotel, Blair House does not offer the laid-back vibe Harris and Emhoff are said to prefer when they are home. The couple enjoy a more casual, West Coast informality, with frequent visits from family and large Sunday suppers, the former California senator has said.
  • The main bedroom suite at Blair House was redecorated by celebrity interior designer Thomas Pheasant, brought on in 2012 to make updates to overall décor, and includes a massive, canopied bed draped in luxe fabrics and furnishings that are more reminiscent of Mount Vernon than a California modern mood. Her condo in Washington, DC, which she moved out of to live at Blair House, was inside a sleek, eco-chic, minimalist building in the city's West End neighborhood.
  • When the second couple does finally move into One Observatory Circle, where the vice president's residence is located on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, they will find a home quite unlike their city condo or Blair House, but also very different from the White House. There are far fewer formalities, fewer staff and more freedom.
  • The dozens of acres that make up the grounds of the Naval Observatory offer privacy and the ability to move about with more leisure than can the President and first lady at the White House. Biden last month at a CNN Town Hall referred to the White House as a "gilded cage," and lamented not having the same accoutrements at his disposal as when he lived at the vice president's residence for eight years.
  • It was former Vice President Dan Quayle who had the heated pool installed, and it became Biden's treasured refuge. While vice president, Biden would throw raucous summer pool parties for staff and their families, bringing out water cannons and partaking in drenching shoot-outs with the children who attended. In 2017, shortly after moving in, then-second lady Karen Pence shared in an interview Biden's parting words to her just after her husband, Mike Pence, was sworn in: "That's the thing that Joe Biden said to us as he got into the limo and left the Capitol on Inauguration Day — he said, 'You're gonna love the pool.'"
  • Harris, who early in her vice presidency was spotted running up and down the steps at the Lincoln Memorial for her workout, Secret Service agents nearby, will have the outdoor space to jog, swim and workout at her new home -- without the public spotting her and posting videos on social media. Harris has said she works out every morning, and swimming can sometimes be a part of her routine -- another reason the vice presidential pool is a perk.
  • Should she wish to add her personal signature to the residence or its grounds -- such as Quayle did with the pool or George H.W. Bush did with an outdoor horseshoe pit or the Bidens did with a garden where the names of all the home's occupants, pets included, are engraved -- updates and tweaks can circumvent the elaborate process of approvals that any changes at the White House must go through.
  • However, as with the White House, a separate foundation has been established to cover most updates with government-provided funds. Also like the White House, the vice president has at her disposal roomfuls of historic furnishings and decorative arts from which to choose from as part of a private collection reserved for the President and vice president to make their temporary homes feel homey and to their personal tastes. Karen Pence once said she left the residence rooms set up in much the same way as the Biden's had it before them, since the Pences liked the layout and saw no reason to upend it.
  • Harris is known to derive satisfaction from cooking, and she's no doubt hungering for the personal space to do that. She once said in an interview with New York Magazine's "The Cut," "If I'm cooking, I feel like I'm in control of my life." Harris and Emhoff are fond of their nights in, and enjoy sharing time in the kitchen and good food. The couple, separately and together, are frequent patrons of Stachowski's Market, a butcher shop and mini-gourmet provisions store located on a quaint corner in Georgetown.
  • For at-home entertaining, the residence offers "a wrap-around veranda that faces away from the busy streets of Northwest Washington," notes Haenle. "It is a special place and makes for great Sunday afternoon family gatherings," while still being formal enough to welcome heads of state.
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Pink Dolphins in Hong Kong Find Respite Thanks to the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hong-kongs-pink-dolphins.html hong kong dolphins
shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The most popular reward for hiking to the top of Fu Shan, a hill near Hong Kong’s westernmost point, is a selfie backed by the setting sun, the gleaming new bridge across the Pearl River or a flight landing at the nearby airport.But for those who look more closely, there is the chance of a rarer prize: a glimpse of Chinese white dolphins swimming among fishing boats and cargo ships in the milky jade water.
  • The species, also known as the pink dolphin for the flush coloration it gets while swimming actively in warm waters, is found through much of coastal south China and Southeast Asia.
  • The marine mammals have maintained a precarious existence in the Pearl River Delta, which has the world’s second-highest volume of freight shipments, several cities with populations in the millions and an unrelenting pace of development in and along its waters.
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  • But the number of dolphins in Hong Kong have declined as much as 80 percent over the past 15 years, according to a report by 15 conservation groups and regional universities, as pollution, marine traffic and large-scale land reclamation projects have made the environment increasingly hostile.
  • The construction of a new runway for Hong Kong’s international airport and a bridge that links the city with the western side of the Pearl River has also disrupted areas that were once prime dolphin habitat but now rarely see the animals.
  • “If we identify individuals, we can follow their life history — where they like to hang around, whether they have calves,” he said. “This is important, because one of the worries is reproductive rate of dolphins is quite low. To keep the population healthy, we want to see calves. But that’s not happening in Hong Kong.”
  • “All vessel traffic is an issue, but high-speed ferries are a particular issue,” said Laurence McCook, the head of oceans conservation for the WWF-Hong Kong. “They move so fast there’s a risk of vessel strike, but they also just physically disturb the dolphins because the dolphins run away from them.”
  • “People want to hear this news about the benefit of the pandemic for wildlife, but it’s not true for dolphins,” said Vincent Ho, the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society.
  • “Every time we have a project like the bridge,” Mr. Ho said, “they set up a marine park as some kind of compensation. But we think it’s too late.”
  • “What we have documented fairly clearly is that dolphins are moving back out into the ferry zone,” Mr. McCook said. “That actually is their most prime habitat under current circumstances.”
  • Conservation groups say they hope the benefits of the ferry suspension will encourage regional governments and ferry companies to reconsider routes across the Pearl River. By traveling somewhat farther south, they could bypass key areas of dolphin habitat along Lantau, Hong Kong’s largest island.
  • “Rerouting the ferries is not a magic cure-all,” Mr. McCook said. “But we think that can help us catalyze other actions and demonstrate it’s not a fait accompli that we lose the dolphins.”
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Bill Marler fought E.coli. Now he wants tougher salmonella regulations. - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9541-9107303481a4_story.html regulation food politics
shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • He courted the media to get the E. coli bacteria on the agenda of policymakers — and played a key role in getting the U.S. Department of Agriculture to outlaw the most virulent strains of the pathogen in meat.
  • On Sunday, Marler filed a petition with the USDA — just as he did regarding E. coli a decade ago — asking it to agree with his legal, scientific and moral arguments to ban dozens of salmonella strains from meat.
  • The USDA’s data shows that about 1 in every 10 chicken breasts, drumsticks or wings that consumers purchase is probably contaminated with salmonella, which largely comes from fecal matter getting on meat during slaughter.
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  • “When I tell people that chicken manufacturers can knowingly and legally sell something that can kill you, they don’t believe me,” Marler said in an interview. People are equally surprised, he said, to learn that the federal government “stamps meat ‘USDA certified,’ all along knowing that it could be contaminated with cow or chicken” feces
  • If the USDA approves the petition, the department would have far-reaching power to recall or seize meat for a variety of salmonella strains. It could also pull its inspectors from wayward meat plants, effectively shutting them down, a move that could cost big operations millions of dollars a day
  • “With E. coli, it was a wake-up call for an industry that wasn’t paying attention to that pathogen. The industry is not asleep at the wheel with salmonella,” said Mark Dopp, a vice president of the North American Meat Institute, a trade association. “We are doing everything we can think of. Declaring something to be an adulterant isn’t going to make us swim faster or harder. We are swimming as fast and hard as we can.’’
  • “He fought that fight and surprisingly won,” said Al Maxwell, an Atlanta-based lawyer who represents food industry clients and has gone up against Marler in hundreds of food poisoning cases. “The meat industry said the sky was going to fall if the government declared the pathogens as adulterants, but that didn’t happen. Meat got safer.”
  • The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that salmonella bacteria causes about 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths in the United States every year.
  • CDC data shows that when salmonella outbreaks are linked to meat, chicken causes the most illnesses, followed by pork and then beef.
  • Marler contends that chicken, pork and beef start out as sterile and that salmonella does not naturally occur on meat. Humans and processing equipment, he said, spread the contamination during slaughter.
  • KatieRose McCullough, a food scientist with the meat institute, said unlike E. coli, salmonella can be part of the animal’s flesh — in the lymph nodes — which filter and collect potentially harmful pathogens to keep animals healthy. “You can’t remove all of it; that’s impossible,” she said.
  • But Marler argues that making restaurant chefs and consumers fully responsible for killing the bacteria is foolhardy. In his petition, Marler repeatedly cited research that shows how rare it is for people to follow USDA safety instructions. “You can’t put this burden on the consumer — it doesn’t work,”
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YouTuber who tried to soak up a pool with 100,000 paper towels criticized for wasting 1... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by nrashkind on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • This time it's Tyler Oliveira, and he's facing backlash over a video titled, "Can 1,000,000 Paper Towels Absorb A Swimming Pool?"
  • Just as the title suggests, the video shows Oliveira, who has more than 590,000 subscribers, attempting to soak up a swimming pool with an enormous amount of paper towels.
  • The backlash came quickly. "Talk about pollution and waste," one viewer commented. "Terrible video idea, waste of resources! For what? A couple of views, think about the environment !!" another viewer said.
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  • The water had lowered just an inch, if that.
  • After a few hours of this, he realized his plan wasn't working.
  • Days after the video was posted, Oliveira apologized
  • "To be honest, this video was a really bad idea," he told his viewers. "I was caught up in the idea of making a banger and I didn't really consider the net consequence on the world around me... I deserve the criticism on this one!"
  • Oliveira said he donated $1,000 to the Australian Red Cross organization and asked his viewers to donate as well. He noted that all proceeds will go to the emergency teams that are fighting the "bushfires we're currently seeing across NSW."
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The GOP Is a Propaganda Party - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/the-gop-is-a-propaganda-party gop propaganda party trump fox news politics
shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the relationship between what’s loosely defined as “conservative media” and the GOP.
  • For a long time, most influential right-leaning media figures were content to swim alongside the GOP, flowing along in the same general direction. Until Donald Trump came along. Then they saw an opportunity to burrow deep inside the GOP and wield real power.
  • It worked. So well that the GOP, as an institution, no longer controls its tongue and its craven media parasites are the only thing keeping it alive.
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  • beyond and before Fox, the media—news, talk, and entertainment—always have been and always will be Trump’s source of political strength. That will only become more true after he leaves office. He will continue to seek out ratings, somewhere, as sustenance for relevance and survival.
  • It’s the Fox News primetime lineup, the large galaxy of radio and digital outlets clamoring to place their personalities and stories on Fox News, and their vast array of fringy lower-tier knockoffs.
  • All day, every day, these talkers, writers, producers, and editors set the party agenda. They act as the Republican party’s “war room.” They give favored politicians airtime to solicit donations from their viewers. They go negative on their political enemies. Their stars even headline campaign events to rev up the base and get out the vote.
  • The ones who are good at it get paid far more by the likes of the Murdoch and the Mercer families to carry out the political agenda than any mere senator or congressman. These talkers, not the elected officials stuck grubbing around shaking hands and campaigning in the streets, are the party’s real leaders.
  • Donald Trump is almost an afterthought in this context
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  • Long before he announced his candidacy in 2015, Fox primed the GOP base for a candidate like him; the network gave him more airtime than other candidates, including a longstanding call-in segment on Fox & Friends; no one blinked an eye when Fox head Roger Ailes, who had a quarter-century friendship with Trump, began advising the Trump campaign
  • “Who are the actual leaders of the GOP?” Who truly influences Republican voters?
  • Knowing this dynamic within the GOP, it’s no wonder that (to name just one ambitious pol) Sen. Ted Cruz has adopted the posture of an online Twitter troll instead of the constitutional scholar-turned-statesman of the biggest, most Republican state in the union.
  • The demands of leading and governing in the public interest have never meshed well with the demands of winning and keeping office, but they have never before been so contradictory.
  • Propaganda Party rules dictate that “owning the libz” and generating likes, retweets, and reactions online are the key to success. In the absence of any policy platform, a new party operating philosophy has emerged among politicians and media figures alike: present Trump-friendly figures in the best light possible and depict anyone who stands in their way as some variation of a socialist, child-eating, Satan worshipper.
  • Plenty of deep-pocketed investors are down for it; they’re looking to fund more media that will do exactly this.
  • Ben Smith found a healthy appetite among media investors eager to “convert Mr. Trump’s political profile into cash”:
  • it’s a much better bang for their buck than funding candidates or ads. It sure beats abiding by pesky campaign finance rules, too.
  • The prospect that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might enforce rules to bar politicians from dumping disinformation online is probably the biggest threat to their political model.
  • people like Ruddy and the talk radio personalities and the Fox primetime hosts have only one primary function now: Keep Trump’s GOP alive, no matter what. They feed themselves and feed the political machine at once. And, without them, the GOP in its current form will wither and die.
  • The propaganda is the party and the party is propaganda. Sink or swim.
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If 'permacrisis' is the word of 2022, what does 2023 have in store for our me... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ord-of-2022-2023-mental-health crisis history effects mental health health
shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage
  • The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years
  • Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.
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  • During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face
  • Waking up each morning to hear about the latest crisis is dispiriting for some, but throughout history it has been a bracing experience for others. In 1857, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter that “the crisis will make me feel as good as a swim in the ocean”. A hundred years later, John F Kennedy (wrongly) pointed out that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, “one representing danger, and the other, opportunity”. More recently, Elon Musk has argued “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”.
  • Victor H Mair, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that in fact the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī, refers to a perilous situation in which you should be particularly cautious
  • “Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of elements meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society,” he writes. “It lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit.” Revolutionaries, billionaires and politicians may relish the chance to profit from a crisis, but most people world prefer not to have a crisis at all.
  • A 2019 study which involved observing participants using bricks, found that those who had been threatened before the task tended to come up with more harmful uses of the bricks (such as using them as weapons) than people who did not feel threatened
  • The first world war sparked the growth of modernism in painting and literature. The second fuelled innovations in science and technology. The economic crises of the 1970s and 80s are supposed to have inspired the spread of punk and the creation of hip-hop
  • psychologists have also found that when we are threatened by a crisis, we become more rigid and locked into our beliefs. The creativity researcher Dean Simonton has spent his career looking at breakthroughs in music, philosophy, science and literature. He has found that during periods of crisis, we actually tend to become less creative.
  • When he looked at 5,000 creative individuals over 127 generations in European history, he found that significant creative breakthroughs were less likely during periods of political crisis and instability.
  • psychologists have found that it is what they call “malevolent creativity” that flourishes when we feel threatened by crisis.
  • These are innovations that tend to be harmful – such as new weapons, torture devices and ingenious scams.
  • A common folk theory is that times of great crisis also lead to great bursts of creativity.
  • Students presented with information about a threatening situation tended to become increasingly wary of outsiders, and even begin to adopt positions such as an unwillingness to support LGBT people afterwards.
  • during moments of crisis – when change is really needed – we tend to become less able to change.
  • When we suffer significant traumatic events, we tend to have worse wellbeing and life outcomes.
  • , other studies have shown that in moderate doses, crises can help to build our sense of resilience.
  • we tend to be more resilient if a crisis is shared with others. As Bruce Daisley, the ex-Twitter vice-president, notes: “True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we’re united with those around us in a shared endeavour.”
  • Crises are like many things in life – only good in moderation, and best shared with others
  • The challenge our leaders face during times of overwhelming crisis is to avoid letting us plunge into the bracing ocean of change alone, to see if we sink or swim. Nor should they tell us things are fine, encouraging us to hide our heads in the san
  • during moments of significant crisis, the best leaders are able to create some sense of certainty and a shared fate amid the seas of change.
  • This means people won’t feel an overwhelming sense of threat. It also means people do not feel alone. When we feel some certainty and common identity, we are more likely to be able to summon the creativity, ingenuity and energy needed to change things.
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The Hidden Scars All Refugees Carry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-scars-all-refugees-carry.html refugee immigration exile American dream
shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Many people have characterized my novel, “The Sympathizer,” as an immigrant story, and me as an immigrant. No. My novel is a war story and I am not an immigrant. I am a refugee who, like many others, has never ceased being a refugee in some corner of my mind
  • Immigrants are more reassuring than refugees because there is an endpoint to their story; however they arrive, whether they are documented or not, their desires for a new life can be absorbed into the American dream or into the European narrative of civilization.
  • 60 million such stateless people exist, 1 in every 122 people alive today. If they formed their own country, it would be the world’s 24th largest — bigger than South Africa, Spain, Iraq or Canada.
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  • By contrast, refugees are the zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or swim toward our borders in endless waves.
  • Today, when many Americans think of Vietnamese-Americans as a success story, we forget that the majority of Americans in 1975 did not want to accept Vietnamese refugees
  • For a country that prides itself on the American dream, refugees are simply un-American, despite the fact that some of the original English settlers of this country, the Puritans, were religious refugees.
  • For people like my parents and the Syrians today, their voyages across land and sea are far more perilous than the ones undertaken by astronauts or Christopher Columbus. To those watching news reports, the refugees may be threatening or pitiful, but in reality, they are nothing less than heroic
  • It is understandable that some do not want to speak of their scars and might want to pretend that they are not refugees. It is more glamorous to be an exile, more comprehensible to be an immigrant, more desirable to be an expatriate. The need to belong can change refugees themselves both consciously and unconsciously, as has happened to me and others
  • it is precisely because I do not look like a refugee that I have to proclaim being one, even when those of us who were refugees would rather forget that there was a time when the world thought us to be less than human.
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How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ur-cultural-echo-chambers.html echo chamber culture TV history
shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MTV and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of TV” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming.
  • It’s not just TV, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice.
  • offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality.
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  • What’s less discussed is the polarization of culture, and the new echo chambers within which we hear about and experience today’s cultural hits
  • There’s just about nothing as popular today as old sitcoms were; the only bits of shared culture that come close are periodic sporting events, viral videos, memes and occasional paroxysms of political outrage (see Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech and the aftermath).
  • we’re returning to the cultural era that predated radio and TV, an era in which entertainment was fragmented and bespoke, and satisfying a niche was a greater economic imperative than entertaining the mainstream.
  • “We’re back to normal, in a way, because before there was broadcasting, there wasn’t much of a shared culture,
  • Because it featured little choice, TV offered something else: the raw material for a shared culture. Television was the thing just about everyone else was watching at the same time as you. In its enforced similitude, it became a kind of social glue, stitching together a new national identity across a vast, growing and otherwise diverse nation.
  • “For most of the history of civilization, there was nothing like TV. It was a really odd moment in history to have so many people watching the same thing at the same time.”
  • As the broadcast era morphed into one of cable and then streaming, TV was transformed from a wasteland into a bubbling sea of creativity. But it has become a sea in which everyone swims in smaller schools.
  • Only around 12 percent of television households, or about 14 million to 15 million people, regularly tuned into “NCIS” and “The Big Bang Theory,” the two most popular network shows of the 2015-16 season, according to Nielsen. Before 2000, those ratings would not even have qualified them as Top 10 shows
  • HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is the biggest prestige drama on cable, but its record-breaking finale drew only around nine million viewers
  • Netflix’s biggest original drama last year, “Stranger Things,” was seen by about 14 million adults in the month after it first aired. “Fuller House,” Netflix’s reboot of the broadcast sitcom “Full House,” attracted an audience of nearly 16 million. (These numbers are for the entire season, not for single episodes.)
  • For perspective, during much of the 1980s, a broadcast show that attracted 14 million to 16 million would have been in danger of cancellation.
  • As people pull back from broadcast and cable TV and jump deeper into streaming, we’re bound to see more shows with smaller audiences.
  • It’s possible we’re not at the end of the story. Some youngsters might argue that the internet has produced its own kind of culture, one that will become a fount of shared references for years to come. What if “Chewbacca Mom” and the blue and black/white and gold dress that broke the internet one day become part of our library of globally recognized references
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Megyn Kelly: 'Fox was not without sin' in 2016 campaign coverage - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-sin-in-2016-campaign-coverage intimidation journalism demagogue press right free speech trump
shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • EWB: Well, that’s the point, I mean, I think that’s a very honest response. But you were going to be the story anyway: Why not do an Oct. 15 release date and give voters more information for a critical decision, than Nov. 15 and not give those voters that critical information? I still don’t understand.
  • KELLY: You have to understand that this isn’t just “Megyn Kelly, journalist, stumbles upon a news story.” This is “Megyn Kelly, human being, woman, mother, wife, finds herself in the middle of a news story in which her safety was in danger, her children’s safety was in danger,” and I have actual responsibilities to the people who live in my home to make sure I didn’t do anything to make our situation worse, and I took those very seriously. I did not want to do anything that would chum up those shark waters I was already swimming in. And while I thought it was important to make a historical record of what Donald Trump had done — just as a matter of First Amendment issues and presidential politics, whether he won or not I thought it was important — I didn’t feel it was necessary to endanger my own safety or my children’s safety to do that
  • KELLY: I know, Erik, but be realistic. I have a 7-, 5- and 3-year-old. We lived under armed guard for a year. We still have an armed guard. Why would I do something that might fan those flames within a month of a presidential election? How do you think that would have gone for me and my family?
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  • . I didn’t want to be part of this election at all. And to go out there and say, “I was under death threat for the entire year.” Listen, I’d said enough that people knew that. But I didn’t have to get into the specifics of my security guards and the number of death threats and the people showing up at my home. That just wasn’t necessary
  • this is not a nightly news report on “The Kelly File.” It’s a book, I mean there’s a lot in there that — it’s not something I would report at night on Fox News, but it’s my take on a situation. And I think, again, this is something that people should know took place and you don’t need the names to know that there was corruption in the coverage of this race. That was deeply problematic.
  • . Look at Donald Trump: He loves to call out individual reporters by name, which leads to major problems in those reporters’ lives. I certainly don’t want to add to that myself.
  • you don’t get to ask me why I didn’t come forward sooner until you ask me whether there was a safe avenue for reporting at my company. Only if the answer to that question is “yes” do you get to ask me why I didn’t come forward. And I say that not for myself, Erik, because I did come forward. I say that for my fellow women at Fox News, who did not. And it’s not because they’re bad people or they enjoyed it or they asked for it or it was no big deal. It’s because in many cases they were scared — they were scared of what would happen to them. It’s very easy for some men and in some cases women to sit back and say with 20-20 hindsight, “Tsk-tsk, should have done more.” But it doesn’t account for the reality.
  • And by the way, that’s another reason why when people say now, “Would you advise young women now to come forward?” I have to stop and say, “Let’s be careful about this.” Because as much as I, Megyn Kelly, with my contract and generous salary and my life all set could look back and start lecturing 23-year-old women on how they must take a stand, it would be disingenuous. Because if there’s a 23-year-old woman or a 32-year-old woman who is in the position I was in at that time, it would be career suicide for her to do more.
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In Brock Turner's home town, we're raising kids who are never told 'no' - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-kids-who-are-never-told-no rape culture privilege responsibility
shared by Javier E on 09 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • because I live in the community that spawned Brock Turner, I have known on some level for many months that my version would never be reality.
  • Oakwood, Ohio, is about as idyllic a Midwestern community as one could imagine. The streets are tree-lined, the houses charming. The kids walk to school and go home for lunch. The schools are nationally recognized. In fact, the nickname for Oakwood is “The Dome,” so sheltered are its residents from violence, poverty and inconvenient truths. I have lived here for over 20 years.
  • Communities like this one have a dark side, though: the conflation of achievement with being “a good kid;” the pressure to succeed; the parents who shrug when the party in their basement gets out of control (or worse yet, when they host it) because “kids are gonna drink;” the tacit understanding that rules don’t necessarily apply. The cops won’t come. The axe won’t fall.
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  • For the most part, I have loved raising my kids here. But I have struggled, too. My closest friends and I have a long-standing joke about needing to remember to “lower the bar” around here — about not falling prey to the pressures to conform and compete, not buying the line that the schools or the kids here are special. Most of us understand our privilege and good fortune. Many do not.
  • There is an Oakwood in every city; there’s a Brock Turner in every Oakwood: the “nice,” clean-cut, “happy-go-lucky,” hyper-achieving kid who’s never been told “no.” There’s nothing he can’t have, do, or be, because he is special
  • it’s not hard to draw a straight line from this little ‘burb (or a hundred like it) to that dumpster at Stanford. What does being told “no” mean to that kid? If the world is his for the taking, isn’t an unconscious woman’s body? When he gets caught, why wouldn’t his first impulse be to run, make excuses — blame the Fireball, or the girl or the campus drinking culture? That is entitlement. That is unchecked privilege.
  • I find that I’m hiding from social media and avoiding conversations on this subject, lest I have to listen to someone defend him. I don’t want to hear anyone start in about the nice family or the good kid. My kids went to high school with him. I ran the community center swim team he was on
  • No, I don’t “know” Brock Turner like his friends or neighbors do. But I do know what he did, and so do we all, based on the unanimous verdict of a jury and two eyewitnesses.
  • We now also know exactly what his victim suffered, and we know that he doesn’t own any of it. Neither do his apologists.
  • I’ve wondered if all of this was the attorney’s doing — that Turner and his family were manipulated into denial because their lawyer told them there was no other alternative. But his father’s letter and his own lame “apology” make it seem clear that they truly believe that bad timing and alcohol — not Turner himself — were to blame.
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A Quiet Giant of Investing Weighs In on Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-klarman-trump-investors.html investor hedge fund trump
shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • a private letter he wrote to his investors a little over two weeks ago about investing during the age of President Trump — and offering his thoughts on the current state of the hedge fund industry — has quietly become the most sought-after reading material on Wall Street.
  • He is Seth A. Klarman, the 59-year-old value investor who runs Baupost Group, which manages some $30 billion.
  • Mr. Klarman sets forth a countervailing view to the euphoria that has buoyed the stock market since Mr. Trump took office, describing “perilously high valuations.”
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  • “Exuberant investors have focused on the potential benefits of stimulative tax cuts, while mostly ignoring the risks from America-first protectionism and the erection of new trade barriers,”
  • “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”
  • He worries, for example, that Mr. Trump’s stimulus efforts “could prove quite inflationary, which would likely shock investors.”
  • Much of Mr. Klarman’s anxiety seems to emanate from Mr. Trump’s leadership style. He described it this way: “The erratic tendencies and overconfidence in his own wisdom and judgment that Donald Trump has demonstrated to date are inconsistent with strong leadership and sound decision-making.”
  • “The big picture for investors is this: Trump is high volatility, and investors generally abhor volatility and shun uncertainty,” he wrote. “Not only is Trump shockingly unpredictable, he’s apparently deliberately so; he says it’s part of his plan.”
  • he warned, “If things go wrong, we could find ourselves at the beginning of a lengthy decline in dollar hegemony, a rapid rise in interest rates and inflation, and global angst.”
  • he issued a statement after Mr. Trump criticized a judge over his Mexican heritage, saying he planned to support Mrs. Clinton: “His words and actions over the last several days are so shockingly unacceptable in our diverse and democratic society that it is simply unthinkable that Donald Trump could become our president.”
  • “Despite my preference to stay out of the media,” he wrote, “I’ve taken the view that each of us can be bystanders, or we can be upstanders. I choose upstander.”
  • “This should give long-term value investors a distinct advantage,” he wrote. “The inherent irony of the efficient market theory is that the more people believe in it and correspondingly shun active management, the more inefficient the market is likely to become.
  • “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
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BBC News - Bank of America found liable in US mortgage fraud trial - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-24649063 america bank fraud trial economic
shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Bank of America's Countrywide Financial unit has been found liable for defrauding two US government-backed mortgage companies by a federal jury.
  • ruling is a major win for the US government, which launched the case in the wake of the financial crisis.
  • The month-long trial focused on a Countrywide programme that was internally called "Hustle" or "high-speed swim lane"
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  • That profit, however, was built on fraud, as the jury unanimously found.
  • "never hesitate to go to trial to expose fraudulent corporate conduct and to hold companies accountable, particularly when it has caused such harm to the public".
  • The US economy witnessed a big boom in its housing market in the lead up to the 2007-08 global financial crisis.
  • Since then, banks have been under pressure to resolve claims on potentially faulty mortgages. The US Department of Justice is investigating at least nine banks over their sales of mortgage-backed securities.
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The Rich Are Fighting the Superrich Over Britain's Manicured Lawns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-britains-manicured-lawns.html rich billionaire wealth London conflict
shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Writ small, social researchers say, the tussle could foretell a future in which an ever-smaller upper crust will command financial heights far beyond the dreams of lesser mortals, even those who qualify, like many of the folks in Highgate, as pretty well off themselves.
  • These days, equality campaigners say, 80 immensely rich people have amassed the same wealth as the poorer half of the world’s entire population.
  • Among the most talked about is a 25-bedroom house called Witanhurst, said to be the second-biggest residential property in London, after Buckingham Palace, a vast pile with vistas over the 800-acre Hampstead Heath.
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  • According to news reports, the buyer paid some $75 million for it and resolved to spend the same again on enhancements, including basement excavations for features including a 70-foot swimming pool and a garage for 25 cars. Once the renovations are complete, the house will command a resale value of $450 million.
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The Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...413140 suicide culture teen pressure high school silicon valley
shared by Javier E on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.
  • They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average
  • The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania warns of the dangers of insisting that admission to an elite college is necessary for a successful life.
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  • One of the two major causes of distress, Luthar found, was the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits.”
  • From their answers, Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success.
  • Middle-class kids, she told me, generally do not live with the expectation that they should go to Stanford or earn $200,000 a year. “If I’ve never been to the moon,” she said of middle-class families, “why would I expect my kids to go there?” The yardstick for the children of the meritocratic elite is different, and it can intimidate as much as it can empower.
  • The second major cause of distress that Luthar identified was perhaps more surprising: Affluent kids felt remarkably isolated from their parents.
  • The kids in the affluent communities she studied felt their parents to be no more available to them, either emotionally or physically, than the kids in severe poverty did.
  • Some of the measures Luthar used were objective: Did the family eat dinner together, or hang out in the evenings? Here, she discovered that some busy parents would leave adolescents alone in the afternoon and evening and often weren’t home at all during those hours
  • Children had the sense that their parents monitored their activities and cared deeply about how they were spending their time, but that didn’t translate into feeling close. Many children felt they were being prodded toward very specific goals and behaviors by parental cues, some subtle, some less so.
  • a feeling of closeness to parents was inversely linked to household income, meaning that the most-affluent kids felt the most alienated.
  • In the past couple of years, other best sellers have sounded a similar note. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor who contributes to this magazine, argues in Excellent Sheep that elite education “manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.”
  • But it turns out that this combination can be just as hard on a child’s well-being.
  • Since Levine wrote The Price of Privilege, she’s watched the stress in the Bay Area and in affluent communities all over the country become more pervasive and more acute.
  • Now, she reports, the teenagers have no sense of agency. They still complain bitterly about all the same things, but they feel they have no choice.
  • Many have also fallen prey to what Levine calls a “mass delusion” that there is but one path to a successful life, and that it is very narrow
  • Adolescents no longer typically identify parents or peers as the greatest source of their stress, Levine says. They point to school. But that itself may suggest a submission of sorts—the unquestioned adoption of parental norms.
  • Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.
  • The meeting she attended with select parents, scholars, mental-health professionals, and community leaders was academically rigorous and yielded many important insights. But it was “eerie” in its almost complete lack of feeling
  • “There are a lot of very hard truths that are just not being spoken.”
  • Gunn is more than 40 percent Asian, and some non-Asian parents, particularly ones who’d grown up in town when the Asian population was smaller, felt the shift was poisoning the culture of the entire school.
  • Her first semester, Chiu got an F on a geometry test, which “totally traumatized me.” Her relationship with her parents started to fray, “because it just took too much energy to speak in a polite tone of voice.” She began to dread swim practice and even Girl Scouts and band, “but I didn’t want to be a quitter.” She remembers wishing that someone had broken up with her, or that she was anorexic, or that she had some reason to explain to her parents why she felt so sad. “I also felt like I was already saying that I was too stressed, and nobody—neither my parents nor my teachers—seemed to care or take me seriously.
  • well-educated parents are quick to distance themselves from the Tiger Mom. We might admire her children’s accomplishments, but we tend to believe these can be coaxed out of a child through applause, not scolding. In fact, this particular combination of lavish praise and insistence on achievement defines our era of protective, meritocratic parenting
  • In March, after spending two days among Palo Alto’s parents and civic leaders, Luthar came to see the community, still in shock over the suicides, as hovering somewhere between fear and denial.
  • Providing praise and love when a child performs especially well can look like healthy parenting, he says, because the parents are giving the child more of a good thing. But if praise comes only when a child succeeds, the child is likely to develop a sense that his or her parents’ affection depends upon good grades, or touchdowns, or mastery of a religious text, or whatever the parents’ priorities might be.
  • The aim of healthy parenting, Assor says, should not be to shower children only with praise and trophies, or to encourage self-esteem based on no real achievements. It should be to disentangle love from the project of parental or pedagogical guidance
  • Giving specific, positive feedback about something a child has tried hard at, or critical yet constructive feedback when a child fails, is perfectly appropriate. “But being warm and nice is a different matter,” he says. “We want to be nice and warm also when our kids do not achieve and when they do not try hard to achieve.”
  • The hope is that, secure in love, a child can experiment more freely and begin to find his or her own voice.
  • With the help of therapists and time, Chiu could better explain what she had experienced—depression, the dangers of not sleeping enough. She learned that her idea that she could escape by manufacturing a mental-health crisis was itself a sign of a mental-health crisis.
  • Not atypically for people who come to consider suicide, she’d lost her ability to think clearly or solve problems, and ended up trapped in a tunnel ruminating about escape, until self-destruction became the only light she could see.
  • Almost by definition, suicide points to underlying psychological vulnerability. The thinking behind it is often obsessive and then impulsive; a kid can be ruminating about the train for a long time and then one night something ordinary—a botched quiz, a breakup—leads him or her to the tracks.
  • the closer I got to the heart of this story, the less I felt I understood that link. Some details neatly fit the narrative that academic pressure has caused lethal amounts of stress in Palo Alto—Taylor Chiu’s experience, for example. Will Dickens, who died in 2009, had a learning disability, and his mother, Janet Dixon-Dickens, told me he never forgot it at Gunn. Cameron Lee, on the other hand, wasn’t obviously oppressed by schoolwork, and neither was J.P. Blanchard, or Sonya Raymakers, a girl who died in June 2009, soon after being accepted into her dream program at New York University.
  • In these days of assumed meritocracy, where children can be turned into anything, we admire them as displays of remarkable engineering, to be tweaked and fine-tuned into bilingual perfection. What we’ve lost, perhaps, is a sense that there may be things about them we can’t know or understand, and that that mysterious quality, separate from us, is what we should marvel at.
  • Admitting we don’t entirely know why teenagers kill themselves isn’t an invitation to do nothing to prevent it from happening. It’s just a call for humility, a short pause to acknowledge that a sense of absolute certainty about what children should do or be or how they should operate is part of what landed us here.
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